How do podcasters find great podcast guests at scale?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how hard podcast guest booking still is.

Most podcasters either:

• search manually on LinkedIn

• ask their network

• rely on agencies

• or spend too much time on cold outreach

We’re building SpeakUp to make podcast guest discovery and expert matching faster, but I’d love to learn from real workflows.

If you run a podcast or book guests for one, how do you usually find relevant people?

And what is the biggest bottleneck:

• finding niche experts

• getting replies

• checking credibility

• scheduling and coordination

• finding guests consistently every week

Curious what works best for people here.