--- title: "The Crypto Podcast Pitch That Actually Gets You Booked" description: "Generic pitch templates won't get you onto Unchained, Bankless, Epicenter, or On The Brink. Here's what those shows actually want — with a line-by-line teardown." author: "Shilika Jain" date: "2026-10-15T11:28:24.1+00:00" tags: ["founder-profiling", "podcast-tour", "personal-brand", "web3-pr"] canonical: "https://www.shilikajain.com/blog/crypto-podcast-pitch-template-web3-founders" --- # The Crypto Podcast Pitch That Actually Gets You Booked By [Shilika Jain](https://www.shilikajain.com/authors/shilika-jain) - 10/15/2026 Generic pitch templates won't get you onto Unchained, Bankless, Epicenter, or On The Brink. Here's what those shows actually want — with a line-by-line teardown. --- # The Crypto Podcast Pitch That Actually Gets You Booked A short email, a clear argument, and a specific episode reference. That's the entire formula. The problem isn't that Web3 founders don't know it — it's that almost nobody executes it correctly when pitching the shows that actually matter. I've booked founder clients onto shows at every tier, from Rug Radio to GAIA's CEO Matt Wright getting spotlighted at Agents Unleashed Denver and onto multiple interview slots across 2024 and 2025. The pitches that land share exactly the same structure. The ones that don't land fall into three predictable failure modes. I'll show you both. ## Why the Generic Pitch Template Doesn't Work Here Most podcast pitch advice is written for coaches, consultants, and SaaS founders who want to land any show with a few hundred listeners. Send a flattering opener, cite your credentials, propose three vague topics, sign off. That approach fails for crypto-native shows because the editorial bar is genuinely different. Laura Shin is a journalist. Nic Carter and Matt Walsh of On The Brink are investors with a very specific thesis about public blockchains. The Epicenter hosts have been doing technical deep-dives since 2014. Frank Chaparro built The Scoop as an interview show rooted in breaking news and institutional finance angles. None of these people are looking for a feel-good founder story. They're looking for something their specific audience hasn't heard yet. Send a generic pitch to any of these shows and you're not just ignored — you're quietly flagged as someone who doesn't listen. ## Know the Show Before You Write One Word Before you draft anything, audit the last 10 episodes of whatever show you're targeting. Not to flatter the host. To understand the pattern. **Unchained** (Laura Shin) covers regulation, market structure, and policy. The guests who get booked have a point of view on how rules affect builders or investors, not just a product announcement. If your angle is "my protocol does X," that's not enough. If your angle is "why the GENIUS Act creates a compliance gap that no stablecoin issuer has solved," you have something to work with. **Bankless** (David Hoffman, Ryan Sean Adams) is Ethereum-aligned and leans into protocols, DeFi mechanics, and the broader crypto economy thesis. Guests are typically at the intersection of technical depth and narrative. You need to move the Ethereum or DeFi story forward in a way listeners haven't heard. Your L2 announcement isn't the angle; your specific bet on how intent-based architecture changes liquidity fragmentation is. **Epicenter** is the oldest serious crypto podcast still running, and its guest bar is calibrated for architects and researchers. You need to talk about mechanism design, adversarial models, or protocol trade-offs at a level that goes past buzzwords. If your co-founder can't go two hours on how your system works under stress, this isn't your first target. **On The Brink with Castle Island** (Matt Walsh, Nic Carter, Wyatt Lonergan) books builders and investors who are working at the frontier of public blockchains. Recent guests include founders from Squads, DoubleZero, Monad, and Ethena. The through-line is founders who are actively shipping something with a strong opinion about why it matters. DeFi mechanics, stablecoin infrastructure, and financial services convergence are recurring themes. **The Scoop** (The Block, historically Frank Chaparro) is tied to The Block's newsroom. Guests land here because they have something adjacent to a news cycle — a big raise, an institutional partnership, a market-structure take that connects to current events. It's the show where you bring data or a contrarian read on a story that's already running. Knowing this, you can immediately see why the generic pitch fails: it doesn't speak to the specific editorial logic of any show. ## The Three Failure Modes **1. Leading with your credentials instead of the argument.** "I'm the CEO of [protocol] and we've raised $X" is not a podcast pitch. It's a press release. What the host needs to know is: what will your audience learn that they can't get from five other episodes? Your title and funding round tell them nothing about that. **2. Proposing topics so broad they could fit any show.** "I can talk about DeFi, Web3 adoption, and the future of finance" is a pitch for zero shows. Bankless gets 50 emails a week from people who can talk about the future of finance. You need a specific argument with a specific tension. "Why the current batch of DePIN projects are measuring the wrong metric and why it's going to cost them in the next cycle" — that's a topic, not a category. **3. No episode reference hook.** The first line of your pitch needs to prove you actually listen to the show. Not with flattery — with specificity. Reference an episode by name, cite a specific point the host made, and connect it to your angle. This is the single fastest signal that separates founders who are genuine about the show from the ones mass-pitching a list. ## The Pitch Structure That Works Keep the whole email under 150 words. Yes, 150. Hosts at tier-1 shows read these on a phone. They're not reading essays. The pitch is a door-opener, not the conversation. Here's the structure: **Subject line:** one clear hook. No "guest pitch" in the subject. That's admin language, not editorial. Something like: "Angle for Epicenter: why DePIN's revenue metric is broken" **Para 1 — Episode reference hook (2 sentences max):** Name a specific recent episode. Draw a direct line to your angle. **Para 2 — The argument (3 sentences max):** State the specific, debatable point you'd make on air. Not your product. The argument your product or experience gives you standing to make. **Para 3 — Why this audience (2 sentences max):** What do Bankless listeners, or Epicenter listeners, or On The Brink listeners specifically get from this that they don't get elsewhere? Ground it in something about their audience, not about your goals. **Sign-off:** Who you are in one line. A link to a previous interview or media hit. Nothing else. ## The Worked Template --- **Subject:** Angle for On The Brink: stablecoin rails are solving the wrong layer Hi Wyatt — Caught your episode with Brandon Arvanaghi on banking AI agents. The part on how financial services need to evolve to service LLMs got me thinking about a gap that nobody's talking about publicly. Argument: the current stablecoin infrastructure build-out is optimizing for issuance and compliance, but the actual bottleneck in cross-border payments is settlement finality on the receivables side — and the protocols that solve finality first will capture the market before the issuance race matters. I've been sitting inside this specific problem with [client] for 18 months and have the data to show where the actual friction is. This would be useful for your audience because the investors and builders who follow the show are making capital allocation decisions right now on stablecoin infrastructure, and most of them are looking at the wrong layer. [Name], co-founder of [protocol] — backed by [fund]. Previous interview: [link]. --- **What makes this work:** - The episode reference in line one proves you listened to the Meow episode (EP.715). Wyatt recorded it. That's specific. - The argument is debatable. A host can push back on it, which makes for a better episode than a product announcement. - The audience bridge is concrete: investors making allocation decisions is the exact listener profile On The Brink serves. You're not saying "your audience will love this." You're identifying what they're trying to figure out. - The bio is one line plus one link. That's all you need. ## Targeting by Founder Stage **Pre-seed to $5M seed:** Don't cold-pitch Unchained or Bankless. Your name recognition isn't there yet and their queues for non-celebrity guests run three to six months if they book at all. Target niche shows with 2,000 to 20,000 listeners per episode where you match the audience profile exactly. A DePIN founder should be on DePIN-native shows before Bankless. A DeFi protocol on a chain-specific podcast before The Scoop. Build your interview backlog, then use it as social proof. **$10M–$30M Series A, working product:** You can now pitch mid-tier shows credibly. A previous interview link in your pitch is worth more than your funding round. Shows like Web3 with Sam Kamani, Rug Radio, and chain ecosystem podcasts (Solana-focused, Cosmos-focused) should be the volume layer. Target two to three per month. **Post-Series A with tier-1 coverage:** Now the cold pitch to Bankless or On The Brink can work, but only if the angle is tied to something news-adjacent. A new ecosystem integration, a data release, a contrarian take on something that's happening in the market this week. Bankless books around narratives that move the Ethereum roadmap conversation forward. If you can be that conversation, the pitch lands. If you're announcing a feature, it doesn't. ## The Part Nobody Talks About: Timing and Follow-up The episode reference hook ages. An episode you cite from two months ago signals you're working from a stale list. Keep your target list live and update your reference hook before sending each batch. If the host published something on X that's related to your angle in the last two weeks, that's a better hook than an episode from six weeks ago. One follow-up is fine. One. Send it five to seven business days after the first email. Keep it to two sentences: "Following up on the pitch below. Happy to share a brief overview if it'd be easier to assess." That's it. A second follow-up turns you into noise. ## What I Said About PR in General Applies Double Here > builders build, PR's pitch lol > > [Shilika Jain on X, 28 Mar 2025](https://x.com/Shilika_jain/status/1905715877187838364) The pitch is craft. Most founders don't think of it that way because they're used to telling their own story and expecting it to land. Podcast pitching is different from fundraising, where you're the one being evaluated. In a podcast pitch, you're pitching a product for the host's audience. The product is the episode. You are not the point. The episode is. Internalize that, and the rest of the structure follows logically. ## The GAIA Example When I was running founder profiling for GAIA in late 2024 and into 2025, the approach that compounded was not one big booking — it was a steady cadence of placements anchored to one narrative (decentralized AI agents, node count as the proof metric) that gave each pitch a news hook. By the time the Crypto Coin Show episode went live around GAIA hitting 400,000 nodes, the earlier interviews on Rug Radio and Francesco Andreoli had built enough reference points that booking tier-1 slots became markedly easier. The pitch didn't change — the social proof stack behind it did. That's the play for a pre-Series-A Web3 founder. Don't spend six months trying to crack Bankless. Build the interview backlog on niche shows with the right audience profile, and let that stack become the credential you lead with when you do pitch up. The pitch template is a tool. The strategy behind it is what actually moves you up the tier ladder. --- If you want a teardown of your current pitch draft or a podcast target list built to your stage and category, [book a 30-min call with me](https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/) and we'll work through it together. --- **Book a 30-min teardown with Shilika** - https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/ Canonical: https://www.shilikajain.com/blog/crypto-podcast-pitch-template-web3-founders