Your New Show Has No Numbers. You Can Still Get a Sponsor.

By Junaid Ahmed

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You started a show a month ago. You have a handful of episodes and a few dozen downloads each.

And you want a sponsor.

The first instinct is to open a media kit template and fill in the blanks. The blanks are mostly zeros. That is the wrong place to start.

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Start with whose world your show is inside

A new show can't sell reach. Nobody will pay for an audience you don't have yet.

What you do have is a topic, and a topic means your show sits inside someone's world. Home brewers. Dental office managers. Little League parents in one town. Some business already spends money to reach exactly those people.

So the first question isn't "what are my numbers?" It is "who is already spending money to reach the people I'm talking to?"

Start there and the list of names gets short and specific.

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Sell access and content before reach

When you can't sell reach, sell the two things you can deliver this month.

Access: a direct line to a small, well-defined audience that the sponsor can't get from a billboard.

Content: you make episodes, edit them, and cut short clips. To a small business, that is a production team they don't have to hire.

Reach comes later. It is the last thing a show earns, not the first thing it sells.

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Offer a founding-sponsor pilot

Don't ask a stranger for a year. Ask one or two for a short run, three to six months, as a founding sponsor.

They get the first spot, a lower price, and a say in what the segment looks like. You get a real result you can point to, and a name on the page.

Brands usually need to be heard more than once anyway. A short pilot gives them that without a big commitment.

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What it looked like for Billy

At Creator Camp, Billy told us about a show with roughly 100 downloads an episode.

A local business paid $10,400 for 52 weeks. That works out to $200 a recording, across 52 recordings.

He didn't pitch downloads. He asked who was already spending money to reach his listeners, looked at who sponsored the local tournaments and the Little League teams, and went to them. The sponsorship was baked into every episode, not bolted on. That sponsor renewed for six years.

A small audience wasn't the problem. Asking the wrong question was.

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What it looks like with a big brand

Justin Moore, who wrote Sponsor Magnet, did a live pitch with me on Hacks & Hobbies. I told him my dream sponsor was Canon. He opened Canon's Instagram and built the pitch while we watched.

Canon has its own podcast. So the email subject wasn't "collaboration with Canon." It was about their project: a podcast offshoot.

The email didn't open with who I am. It opened with their show and why it's good. Then a link to an episode that showed the audience already wanted more on the topic. If you don't have that episode, he said, record it first.

Then exact deliverables: 10 episodes over two months, ownership rights to the brand, short clips for their own channel. One example of similar work. A proposed time.

He was also clear that nobody signs on the first email. The pitch gets you on their radar. After that, you send something useful every few weeks, and months later they remember you.

I have several Canon cameras in my studio. I bought about 100 for the GO Box product. I had never thought of that as pitch material.

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What's next

The pattern is the same at any size. Know whose world you're in. Say exactly what you'll deliver. Keep showing up after the first no.

The part that wears people out is the tracking: who you pitched, what you promised, when to follow up. That is the part we're building into PodGlue, because it's the same relationship work podcasters already do with guests.

I'll share more as it ships.

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