He Used This Cold Email To Get A Billionaire On His Podcast. You Won’t Believe How He Did It.

The very smart people who listen to my podcast on a daily basis expect me to always have the wealthiest, smartest, most successful guests on to share their revenue numbers. 

As a result, I’ve had to train myself to reach out to huge personalities, billionaires, and $100m+ entrepreneurs and get a response all via a cold email.

The process below articulates how I got $10b dollar man and Elon Musks first investor, Tim Draper, to say yes to coming on my show. Here’s his episode.

Keep reading to learn how I get anyone to answer my cold emails and to book a interview slot on my podcast, The Top, the fastest growing business podcast ever (many people tell me this!)

Most people I invite on my show are people I have heard about in books that the worlds top entrepreneurs recommend to me, top entrepreneur lists produced by other media outlets, and people I meet in everyday life whose business I’m curious about.

Forbes recently published an article “The Hottest Startups of 2015”. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how I went through this list of 50 people, reached out to them, got them to respond, and then scheduled them on my podcast calendar.

First step, you’ve got to creatively hunt down their email.

Creative Ways to Find Anyones Email

First, I make sure the company listed by Forbes would get my listeners fired up, like Porch.com.

Then, I google search “CEO Company Name”

Next, I go to mailtester.com and type in the first name of the entrepreneur and then their domain name.

Example: [email protected].

If the light turns red or yellow, your email is incorrect:

Try one of the other combinations below:

first initial last [email protected]
last [email protected]
first name last [email protected]
first initial last [email protected]
first initial last [email protected]
first [email protected]
first [email protected]

This means you have the correct email:

After you get their email, don’t shoot yourself in the foot with a subject line that’ll never get opened. Keep reading for subject lines that work.

How to Get Important People To Read and Respond To Your Emails

Most people pitch podcast guests with a subject line doomed to find itself in the ignore folder. This is a big mistake when you consider that this revolutionary insight is truly the future of email marketing.

When pitching guests, most people use this subject line (or a similar sleep-inducing one)

Guest on my Podcast

Stop the madness!

Instead, use subject lines that provoke curiosity. The subject line I use for pitching guests that gets an open rate well over 45% is:

You and apple

The content of your email must be short, quick, and to the point to get the guest to say “Yes, I’m in!” without loads of work. This is the email I typically use:

Matt, have podcast on Apple where I interview world’s top entrepreneurs for 15 minutes.

Will have 1m downloads by end of January.

Interested in coming on for 15 minutes to share Porch.com story?

Now, after finding their email, writing a high open rate subject line, and putting together a short email, you might click the send button – don’t do it!

Of the 40 emails I sent out to this Forbes Top 50 list, 90% of them got opened but only 2% responded to my first email!

Another 20% responded after my THIRD follow up over 5 days.

In other words, if you don’t follow up with your guests who you’re trying to sell to come on your show, you’re missing out on 20 of them saying yes for every 100 you pitch.

Here is my follow up process:

I want anyone who does not reply to get a “bump” from me 1 day after I emailed them originally, 3 days after I emailed them, and 7 days after. Here’s how I set that up using a tool called FollowUp.cc

Email 1:

Friendly bump. Interested?

Here is sample interview I did with billionaire (and Elon Musks first investor) Tim Draper: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/nathanlatkathetop/TT.Draper.129_FNL.mp3

Best, Nathan Latka

Email 2:

Hey, next studio session is almost full.

3 reasons you should come on the show:

• only takes 15 minutes
• free exposure (1 million listeners)
• INC just ranked the show #1 new business podcast:

www.inc.com/sujan-patel/the-smartest-entrepreneurs-are-listening-to-these-10-podcasts.html

Shoot me a quick reply either yes, or no.

Best,

Nathan Latka

Email 3:

Studio day just filled up. Want me to invite you when more times open up?

Best,

Nathan Latka

Most of you probably do something like this but you store all of these template emails in a word doc or something then copy and paste.

Plus you have to remember to actually follow up and always forget. Help yourself out and build a process that guarantees success.

I drop these email templates into Followup.cc and then just check the auto-followup button in gmail when I’m pitching a new guest. Followup.cc then automatically sends follow up emails (like a drip campaign) if the person hasn’t responded yet.

This is the key to getting 20% of everyone you pitch to say yes:

Once you click the “auto-followup” button in gmail, then hit send.

A few days later, here is what a slice of my inbox looked like: (btw, notice I was literally pitching people on Christmas – when very few people are thinking about business – these concepts still work!)

You’ll get three different responses to your email:

1. No, not interested (write the email right away and then click send later to schedule it to send in 3 months)
2. Yes, what’s next? (read below)
3. I’m swamped right now, can you reach out in 3 months?

If they say they are busy right now and to follow up in 3 months, do it! Write the email you want to send now, then click “send later” and select 3 months from now:

When you reach out several months from now, exactly when they told you to,they’ll be impressed and say yes!

I’m using the same tool to send later that I use to “auto-follow up” with potential podcasts guests. It’s called FollowUp.cc.

The 5 Second Method For Scheduling Guests

The first question I ask on my show is “How much money did you make last month”. We get into the numbers fast and I intimidate a lot of guests for the good of the listeners who are sick of dishonest people online – it’s not for everyone.

For this reason, once a guest says yes, I always reply with:

Hey Allon, you can get a feel for the show/style from INC’s summary here (they just ranked us #1 business podcast).

I just opened up slots for you in January. Grab a time for the interview here:https://nathanlatka.com/interview

Best,

(Allon is the CEO of Vroom, recently valued at $218m dollars. It’ll be a fantastic podcast episode. Listen in here.)

This gives them the chance to listen to an episode so they can’t get mad at me if they come on the show and are surprised by my questions.

In addition, you need to make it super simple for guests to schedule. I interview billionaires on my show who don’t have time for an endless back and forth of:

you: does friday at 2pm work for you?

them: no. how about next week?

you: 3pm EST?

them: what day?

Instead, I use scheduleonce.com to open up 20 minute slots on my recording days and simply let guests pick which time slot works for them.

Once they click my scheduling link, they can quickly put in information I need to do the interview and agree to the disclaimer so I can market their show after it’s live.

I typically schedule two studio days a month and record 15 episodes on each day (6 hours of  20 minute interview). This is what a typical studio day looks like: 

Conclusion:

Armed with these tools, you should be able to land any podcast guest you want. Go get ‘em!

If you’re curious why I released 8 episodes on launch date, how I got to #1 in new and noteworthy, and how we got 36,000 downloads in the first month,click here for all of the marketing A/B tests and experiments I ran.
In the meantime, go book more top notch guests for your show!