Guest booking pipeline for podcast pitching

The idea

Podcast tours work — authors, consultants, and founders reliably convert niche-show audiences into readers and leads — but the booking motion is miserable: scrape listicles of top shows, guess at contact emails, paste half-personalized pitches from a spreadsheet, forget to follow up. PR agencies charge $3-5k/mo to run exactly this process with interns.

PROSP proves the systematized-outreach subscription works when it targets a specific get-in-front-of-an-audience job. Podcast guesting is a better substrate than LinkedIn: the data source is public RSS — searchable, scrapable, with contact emails embedded in the feed itself — and outreach is plain email, so there is no platform ban risk hanging over the product or the customer. The wedge is pitch quality from real episode data: referencing what the host actually aired last week is the difference between a booking and spam.

Who pays

Authors, consultants, coaches, and founders pay $39-99/mo — trivial against the $3-5k/mo agency anchor for the same motion. Small PR shops are the second segment, paying per client workspace and churning less. Distribution: content targeting how to get booked on podcasts, communities where authors plan launches, and podcast-host newsletters.

MVP scope

• Show search over Podcast Index with cadence, recency, and size signals
• Contact extraction from RSS owner fields with website fallback
• Claude-drafted pitches grounded in the show’s five most recent episodes
• Pipeline board with stages, Gmail/Outlook sending, reply sync, and one approved follow-up
• Stats on pitches, replies, and bookings
• Skip for v1: listener-count verification, booking calendar integration, media kit hosting, done-for-you sending, YouTube channel outreach

Build GuestPipe, a podcast guest-booking pipeline. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Podcast Index API for show discovery, Claude API for pitch generation, Postgres.

Core flow: user defines a guest profile (expertise, book or product, three talking points, past appearances). Search pulls shows from Podcast Index by category and keyword, enriched with episode cadence, most recent episode date, and an estimated-size band derived from review counts and chart presence. Contact discovery parses each RSS feed's owner email and itunes:owner fields, falling back to the show website's contact page. User adds shows to a pipeline with stages: researching, pitched, follow-up, conversation, booked, aired.

Pitch generation: Claude fetches titles and descriptions of the show's last five episodes and drafts a pitch referencing a specific recent episode, connecting it to one talking point, with two suggested segment ideas. Sends go through the user's own Gmail/Outlook via OAuth so replies land in their inbox; opens and replies sync back to the pipeline, and no-reply-in-7-days queues one follow-up for approval.

Pages: search, pipeline board, show detail with episode history and pitch drafts, sequences, stats (pitches, reply rate, bookings), settings/billing.

Non-obvious details: dedupe shows across RSS redirects by feed GUID, since dead and duplicate feeds waste pitches; hard-cap daily sends at 15 per account to protect deliverability and force targeting quality.

Pricing: Solo $39/mo (50 pitches/mo), Pro $79/mo (200), Agency $99/mo per client workspace.