---
aliases: ["Podcasting Is Relationship Building at Scale"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-podcasting]]", "[[topic-b2b-marketing]]"]
Status: Published
---
# Podcasting Is Relationship Building at Scale
A podcast guest who has a good experience will often become an advocate for your brand in ways that are hard to manufacture any other way. They share the episode with their audience, mention it in talks, and remember you warmly when your paths cross again.

The distribution value of a podcast episode is real but often secondary to the relationship value. Some of Refactoring's best sponsor introductions came from guests who had been on the show and recommended us to a contact.

This reframes how to think about guest selection. The right question isn't just 'who has the biggest audience?' but 'who do I want a real relationship with?'

The mechanism behind this is worth understanding. A podcast conversation is one of the few formats where two professionals spend 45-90 minutes in genuine, focused dialogue. In an era of five-minute video calls and fragmented attention, this is remarkably intimate. The guest has your full attention, you have theirs, and the conversation goes deep enough to build real mutual understanding. After recording, both parties walk away with a qualitatively different relationship than they had before. This is not replicable through social media interactions, email exchanges, or even most in-person networking events where conversations are shallow by necessity.

I have been deliberate about using the podcast as a relationship-building tool for Refactoring's broader business. When I identify a company that would be an ideal sponsor, I look for someone at that company who would be a genuinely interesting guest — not as a quid-pro-quo, but because the Venn diagram of "interesting engineering leaders" and "people at companies that sponsor engineering newsletters" has substantial overlap. The podcast conversation builds a relationship. The relationship sometimes leads to a sponsorship conversation months later, initiated by them rather than by me. This indirect path produces better, longer-lasting sponsor relationships than cold outreach ever could.

The broader principle extends beyond podcasting to any content format that creates genuine human connection. Interviews, co-authored pieces, collaborative projects — anything that requires two people to spend meaningful time together creates relationship capital that pure content creation does not. The podcast just happens to be the format that does this most efficiently, because the recording creates a distributable artifact (the episode) and a non-distributable artifact (the relationship) simultaneously. Both are valuable, but the relationship is usually worth more.

## Key insight
Podcasting is undervalued as a business development channel because the relationship value is hard to attribute in a spreadsheet. The most important outcomes — warm introductions, sponsor relationships, co-marketing opportunities, hiring referrals — emerge months or years after the recording and cannot be traced to a single episode. This makes podcasting look like a vanity project in most ROI analyses. The founders and creators who understand this asymmetry invest in podcasting not for downloads but for the network effects of genuine professional relationships built one conversation at a time.

## Related
- [[what-makes-a-good-podcast-guest]] — The criteria for selecting guests that maximize both content and relationship value
- [[the-sponsorship-relationship]] — How podcast-built relationships translate into better sponsor partnerships
- [[b2b-content-is-trust-not-traffic]] — Podcasting as a trust-building channel, not a traffic-building one
- [[procedure-podcast-recording]] — The practical procedure for recording and producing podcast episodes
- [[topic-podcasting]] — Broader thinking on podcasting as a medium
