Finding a Guest Shouldn't Mean Buying a Cold List

By Junaid Ahmed

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If you've ever gone looking for podcast guests, you know how the tools work. You pay for a database, you get a pile of scraped email addresses, and you start cold-pitching people who never asked to hear from you.

I never liked that. It treats a guest like a lead.

But here's the thing I kept coming back to: PodGlue already has the hosts and the guests. Both sides are on the platform. We don't need to scrape anyone, we just need to introduce them.

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So this week we shipped Find Guests.

You search the pool of guests by topic or name. What you see isn't a marketing blurb, it's evidence: their real appearance history, the topics they actually talk about, a link to their full portfolio. You can tell in a few seconds whether someone's a fit for your show.

When you want them, you send a booking request. And this is the part that matters: you never see their email or phone number. The request lands inside their PodGlue, and they decide whether to respond. No inbox to buy, no cold open to write.

The other side is just as deliberate. Guests are never silently listed. Discovery is off by default, a guest turns it on from their settings when they actually want to be found. If they haven't opted in, they don't show up, full stop.

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Say you host a show about small-business finance. You search "bookkeeping," and you see someone who's been on four finance podcasts, with the topics and episodes to prove it. You send a request. It shows up on their dashboard the next time they log in. No middleman, no scraped list, no guessing whether the email still works.

That's the whole idea behind PodGlue: the people you want to work with are already here. We'd rather connect you to them than sell you a spreadsheet of strangers.