How to find podcasts that want to feature indie hackers

In March, Ana Bibikova asked her Twitter followers why they didn't pitch themselves to relevant podcasts more often. She got over 150 responses. Reasons given include:

• being unsure of where to start finding podcast opportunities
• a high rejection rate. Many people reported getting very few responses to their outreach
• the high cost of podcast booking services

Their concerns are valid. Most podcasts don't accept cold pitches. The ones that do can be very selective.

In 2021, I created a process that helped me find podcast and interview opportunities for indie hackers. I was able to discover over 150 places that are actively seeking guests.

In this post, I'm going to show you how to find relevant podcast opportunities. This will reduce the amount of time you spend on outreach and increase your chances of getting interviewed.

How do you find the opportunities?

A lot of potential podcast guests focus on discovering podcasts. They go straight from discovery to pitch. You will have a lot more success by doing additional research to seek out the podcasts that accept cold pitches.

I start my research by finding all relevant podcasts to pitch to.

There are two main ways I discover podcast opportunities:

• Look for podcasts in relevant niches
• Look at people who are frequent podcast guests. Look at what podcasts they've appeared on

Finding Niche Podcasts

My first step is looking for articles or Twitter threads that curate the top posts in a particular niche. I google variations of top podcast + niche. Examples include:

• podcasts indie hackers
• podcasts online business owners
• saas podcasts
• podcast entrepreneur

I add all of these lists to a word document - I will go through them later.

These podcasts focus on the type of business owner I am. This is awesome if your product or service targets other indie hackers or SaaS owners. Many people stop here. I recommend looking beyond your niche.

For instance, you may be a content marketer or a person working on a SaaS. However, that is only one part of your story.

• What tools are you using to create your product? Are you using them in an interesting way?
• How are you marketing your product? Do you have an interesting case study?
• Is there a part of your journey that stands out?

There are podcasts dedicated to Airtable and WordPress. There are interview sites dedicated to building in public.  Failory is interested in stories of failed startups!

Research Podcast Guests

My favourite strategy, however, is find look for Indie Hackers who frequently appear on podcasts. There are a couple of strategies I use to discover the podcasts they have been on.

Use Owltail

You can research the podcasts someone has appeared on using OwlTail. OwlTail is a tool that allows you to search all of the episodes of any podcast. They have dedicated pages for all of the podcasts they feature. They also have a dedicated page that allows you to search all podcast appearances by a specific person. Here is the page for Arvid Kahl.

The page shows you all of the podcasts that person has appeared on. I try to focus on the podcasts from the past 3 years.

This website can save you so much time. You can see most of a persons podcast appearance in the one place, instead of manually searching through all their tweets.

Look For Pages Curating Podcast Appearances

Some entrepreneurs have created dedicated pages on their website that collect all their podcast appearances. Examples include Dorie Clark and Wes Kao. This strategy isn't used that often by Indie Hackers. It is a great way to find podcasts you wouldn't normally discover.

Look For People Who Have Done Podcast Book Tours

Many authors and product creators have done successful podcast tours to promote their work. Unfortunately, these aren't as easy to search for.

I recommend looking for organic mentions of book tours. This can be people discussing their own book tour, or people commenting on another persons book tour.

Michele Hansen, author of Demploy Empathy, tweeted a link to her book tour playlist on spotify. She also sent out updates to her audience via email.

You can also look for people writing about their own podcast tour. An example is at The Introvert Entrepreneur.

Looking For Podcast Opportunities

Discovering interesting podcasts is just one part of the puzzle. The next step is looking to see whether that podcast encourages cold pitches.

Some websites got that many cold pitches that they create processes to ensure that the pitches they got were relevant. This can benefit you. These website will be more receptive to your pitch and will tell you the exact information they want as part of the pitch process.

Look For A Specific Page

My first step when visiting a podcasts website is to look for a specific page for potential guests. These pages can have a number of names. Examples include:

• Contribute
• Suggest/Submit a guest
• Get Featured
• Share Your Story

In most cases, these pages are listed in the footer or header

You can see a couple of examples below:

• Failory
• Starter Story

Sometimes, you can find a link to these pages on the main podcast page on the website. This doesn't happen as often but is still worth checking out.

You can also look for the information on the contact page.

Want to save time?

I've created a product that only includes the podcasts and websites that are actively looking for guests.

It is called Bootstrapper Press Directory and features over 140 podcast opportunities for Indie Hackers. Bootstrapper Press Directory is an Airtable database that has information on the podcast/website, their audience size and how they prefer to be pitched.

I've spent at least 50 hours doing research for this product and add new podcast opportunities as I discover them.

Check out Bootstrapper Press Directory.