This email is a response to the 50+ podcast pitches that arrived in my inbox just last month, and keep arriving in growing numbers, from PR agencies and marketing teams at various companies. It's also a message to tech founders building stuff for developers: focus on building something that devs love, or find epic, and not hiring marketing/PR folks who then mass-email podcast hosts with AI-generated podcast pitches.
I host The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. Thanks to so many of you tuning in, the podcast is widely listened to – it's one of the top-ranked software engineering podcasts, and episodes typically reach 500K+ people. If you're listening to the podcast, or reading the newsletter: thank you!
The podcast only has guests who, as as a software engineer, I'm excited to talk to and learn from. These folks typically fall into one of these categories:
- Built/builds epic pieces of technology. Examples include Chris Lattner (built LLVM, Swift, Mojo), Anders Heljsberg (created C#, TypeScript, TurboPascal), Andrey Breslav (created Kotlin), Greg KH (longtime Linux maintainer), Kat Cosgrove (longtime Kubernetes release lead), Mitchell Hashimoto (Terraform, Ghostty).
- Works at a company I find very interesting and relevant. Examples include Boris Cherny at Anthropic (created Claude Code), Elizabeth Stone (CTO at Netflix: a company whose engineering culture I've been fascinated with), or Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec (leads S3 at AWS)
- Is a deep domain expert - typically with a decade+ of experience. For example, Nicole Forsgren (developer productivity, DORA, SPACE), Laura Tacho (DX), Alice Ryhl (Rust), Robert Erez (CI/CD)
- Deep thinkers with a decade+ of experience. For example, Kelsey Hightower, Grady Booch, or Charity Majors.
As the podcast has become more popular, I am getting overloaded with pitches from PR people, Comms people, and Marketing people, though. The typical pitch is usually AI-written, and goes something like this:
From <CommsPerson@Startup.com>
Hi Gergely,
I have a potential guest and topic that feels unusually aligned with The Pragmatic Engineer’s audience.
X is the co-founder and CEO of Startup, which now serves ## million developers and ## thousand companies. The platform processes {large number of business metrics} every day, giving CEO a large-scale view into how engineering ability and team expectations are changing as AI-generated code becomes standard.
The useful conversation would not be a Startup product story. It would examine questions engineering leaders are actively dealing with:
- AI-generated topic #1 assumed to be a fit for the podcast
- AI-generated topic #2
- AI-generated topic #3
CEO has built Startup from its earliest days in Location all the way to global enterprise scale. He/she can bring both operating experience and concrete data instead of generic AI predictions.
Would this be worth exploring for the podcast?
Best,
MarketingPerson
Startup
I get 10-20 of these pitches, per week, in my inbox. Until now, I've been ignoring them, but then MarketingPerson sends two more follow-ups. I now have an AI agent monitoring my inbox, and I decided to at least send an AI reply to explain why I'm not sending a response to these pitches.
If you look at how my podcast works, it should be obvious to why such guest requests are not a good fit - and why having founders wanting to talk about their own startup would be a bore of a topic, and, frankly, a waste of time for 99% of listeners – possibly more.
But to spell it out to the marketing folks:
A) Send out AI emails: expect nothing back. Don't expect a response to an AI-written email, or a templated email. I get it, you think it's a numbers game: send a tweaked email out to 100 podcasts, and hope that at least one replies. In reality, by playing the same game as everyone else does, you are assisting to the noise, and end up drowning yourself in it as well.
And this goes not only to you, as a marketing person, but also to a founder/CEO who thinks they can put in zero effort in A Thing and get great results: you're kidding yourself. To those founders who have set themselves the goal of being invited onto a specific podcast: I'd challenge you, ask a former guest, how they got invited? I can already tell you that it sure wasn't an AI-generated email sent out by a marketing person they hired!
B) My podcast doesn't take self-pitches. The only type of pitch I listen to is a software engineer telling me "wow it could be great to have this and this person on the podcast, because of this thing they built/thing they did." In these cases, I check out that thing they built or thing they did. When a lot of people tell me the same thing, I might listen more.
But a CEO recommending themselves as a podcast guest? Or their marketing or PR team recommending the same? Ignore.
But to leave these marketing folks with some advice:
If your CEO/founder has so much to say about a topic: say it and write it! Ironically, every time I look up what the founder has written about the topic they (or their marketing team) are pitching, there's nothing! Nada.
If the pitch is sincere, then write down your thoughts! Post it on your company blog or personal blog.
But if you're just looking for "distribution", "free publicity", mass emailing podcasts is not how to go about it. Everyone is doing it, and it's not working for anyone.
The only founders you see on podcasts who are worth listening to? They built some epic stuff, are often hands-on, and they did not mass-email dozens or hundreds of podcasts with an AI-generated, generic agenda to talk about.
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