How to start a podcast in 2024

There’s a shortcut in business that no one talks about.

It can help you to learn from people you admire for free while at the same time helping you grow your audience.

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Last year, I was able to meet with Justin Welsh, Noah Kagan, Tim Soulo, and many other inspiring entrepreneurs by using this very simple strategy: launching a podcast!

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And since most of the guests I received on my podcast shared their episodes with their audience, I was able to grow my audience by thousands of followers.

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And eventually, this helped me grow my business to $20M+ in ARR in less than 5 years.

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In this article, I want to show you the exact process I used.

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How to convince people to come on your podcast?

Well, to do so, I used this one email template 👇

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But before I explain to you in detail how you can interview all your dream celebrities on your podcast, let me share with you one mistake you must avoid at all costs:

Believe that influence is an elevator.

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Why do you need to see influence as a staircase?

Let me explain:

When people think of influence as an elevator, they believe that by pressing one button, they’re going to reach the highest sphere of influence.

The reality is that if you’re just starting in business and have no audience, you will never get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates on your podcast.

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Because influence is like a staircase.

And basically, each step is an influence stage.

The first step is basically people who don’t have a big audience yet, hence not that much influence.

As you go up the stairs, you’ll find people with more and more influence (because they have bigger audiences and businesses.)

And at the highest step of the stairs, you have the most successful people out there.

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If you expect an answer, you need to target people who are more or less at the same stage of influence as you.

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How to write a cold email to invite people on your podcast?

Now, I’m going to show you the email I used to convince a founder like Noah Kagan to come on my podcast:

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First things first, the subject line is “Special invitation.”

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Whenever you receive an email and the subject line is called, “special invitation,” you’re going to think of 2 things:

1- Why is that invitation so special?

2- What’s the invitation about?

So, the goal of the subject line is to trigger curiosity.

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Now, why does the email work so well?

Well because I used the value equation framework:

Essentially, the value people find in your offer can be determined by the dream outcome (what you offer) x the trust you build with them, divided by the effort it’ll take to achieve the dream outcome.

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What’s super important is that here you want the dream outcome to be as big as possible, the trust to be as big as possible, and the effort it takes to be as small as possible.

That way, the offer becomes even more irresistible.

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I shared the dream outcome by answering the question, “what’s in it for you?” to make it as attractive as possible.

In my email, I talk about the visibility my guest will gain 👇

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Then I made sure to build trust using the trust triangle.

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How to leverage the trust framework when writing cold emails?

Here's how I used the trust framework to write my email:

1- I created an emotional connection by showing the research I did on him and highlighting similarities between our companies.

2- I showed that I was reliable by mentioning other successful founders who were on my podcast before.

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Then, there’s the ask: I asked him to be a guest on my podcast and was really upfront about what I wanted.

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3- I demonstrated my credibility by adding even more social proof.

If you ask someone for something without being able to give them anything in return, the likehood that they’ll accept will be very low.

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And finally, I showed him that the effort it would take to reach the dream outcome was minimal (a 1-hour call with me.)

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And then, I re-iterated this process for every founder I wanted to invite to my podcast!

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Using this strategy will help you grow your audience by thousands of people, which you’ll be able to turn into customers down the line.

And if you want to learn how to turn your audience into customers, I’ve created a couple of videos on the subject 👇

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Remember: if you know how to build trust, then and only then you’ll be able to ask something from people.

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Peace, love and profit! 💰

G.