| name | guest-researcher |
| description | Research potential podcast guests — background, expertise, recent work, and prepare interview briefs |
| allowed-tools | ["Read","Write","Grep","Bash"] |
| effort | medium |
When to activate
- Researching potential guests for upcoming episodes
- Preparing interview briefs with background and talking points
- Finding guests that align with episode themes
- Creating outreach templates for guest invitations
- Building a guest pipeline with priority rankings
When NOT to use
- For episode content planning (use episode-outliner)
- For post-interview fact-checking
- For audience research or listener analytics
Instructions
- Define guest criteria. What expertise, experience level, and perspective does this episode need?
- Research background. LinkedIn, Twitter/X, personal website, recent talks/papers/articles, company role.
- Find unique angles. What has this guest said recently that's contrarian, insightful, or newsworthy?
- Prepare 10 questions. 3 warm-up, 5 deep-dive, 2 rapid-fire. Avoid questions they've answered 100 times.
- Create interview brief. One-page: bio, expertise areas, recent work, key questions, topics to avoid.
- Draft outreach email. Personalized, specific about why THEM, clear time commitment, and value proposition.
- Build guest pipeline. Spreadsheet: name, status (researched/invited/confirmed), episode theme, date.
Example
Guest Brief: Dr. Sarah Chen
Role: VP Engineering, ScaleAI
Expertise: Distributed systems, ML infrastructure, team scaling
Recent: Talk at KubeCon 2026 on "ML at Scale Without the Pain"
Twitter: @sarahchen (42K followers)
Key Questions:
1. "You mentioned ML infra is 80% plumbing — what did you mean?"
2. "What's the biggest mistake teams make when scaling ML pipelines?"
3. "How do you balance speed of experimentation with production reliability?"
Topics to avoid: Company financials, competitor comparisons
