find guests with an audience for your interview

the short version

the interview is the episode where you host another founder on camera. it now has a way to find who to invite.

connect your treg key, say in a line who you would like on, and press find guests. it finds founders like that, keeps the ones with an audience, reads what they have been building lately, looks up a checked work email and writes the invite. you edit it and send it from your own email.

why guests, and why ones with an audience

the hardest part of building in public is the start, when nobody is watching. episode three goes out to silence, and silence is the most common reason a series stops.

an interview changes that sum. when you host another founder, the episode belongs to both of you, and they share it. their audience is founders too, so the people who find you through them are exactly the people your series is for. one good guest can bring more viewers in an hour than a month of posting on your own.

that only works if the guest has people to share it with. so the finder looks for founders with a following: over two thousand on their own profile. below that it keeps them on the list, passed over with the reason, in case you know better.

the second thing it looks for is a story. a guest is worth an hour of camera when they have done something lately: launched, fixed, grown, got something wrong and said so. it reads their recent posts for that, and passes over people whose posts are all reposts, hiring ads or advice for strangers.

what you get for each person

• their name, what they do and where, and how many people follow them
• one sentence on what of theirs it read and why they would suit your show
• what you would ask them about, in a few words
• their work email, where one can be found and checked as deliverable
• the invite, written in your voice, ready to edit

the invite is short on purpose. a line on what of theirs you read, that you host your show and talk to founders about what they are building, about forty-five minutes from their browser with nothing to download, that they get the episode to share, and a question: would you be up for it?

there is no link in it. the link for the interview itself is made when they say yes, for the episode they are in, the same way it always has been. an invite with a link in it reads like a mailing, and the first message to a stranger should read like a person.

your key, your credit, your email

the search runs on your own treg key. treg is a catalogue of data services with one key and pay-as-you-go credit: the people search, the profiles, the posts and the email checks all come through it. connect it once under account, connections, who to interview.

every search is paid from your treg credit, never from your underway plan, and one search stops at about seventy-five cents. it runs only when you press find guests. nothing runs in the background.

underway never sends your invites. open it in my email opens your own mail app with the words filled in, and copy the invite copies them for anywhere else, a linkedin message included. the replies come to you, because the email came from you.

nobody in the uk or the eu gets an email looked up. for them the card says to write on linkedin instead, and the invite is there to copy.

what it never touches

the guest search is about who to invite, not about your diary. nothing it finds reaches your day context, the questions the interview asks you, or the cut of any episode. the interview itself is unchanged: you host, the app asks nothing, both sides record themselves at full quality, and the episode is the two of you side by side with nothing reordered.

where it is

on the interview page, under the setup, as find people to interview. mark each guest they replied, then booked, and set up the interview puts their first name straight into the setup. connecting treg works on the phone too; the interview itself is recorded in chrome, edge or firefox on a computer, on both sides.