Web3 Founder Podcast Tour: How to Book 8 to 12 Tier-1 Crypto Shows in 90 Days

A Web3 founder podcast tour is a 90-day sequence where you book 8 to 12 crypto-native shows back to back, time the recordings around a single narrative beat (raise, launch, mainnet, product release), and turn each episode into 10 to 15 distributable assets. Done right, it's the highest-conversion thought leadership channel in crypto. Done wrong, you get four "thanks but not a fit" replies and three months of silence.

I've run tours for protocol founders, exchange operators, and AI x crypto teams. The pattern that works is not "spray and pray to 50 shows." It's a tiered list, a one-paragraph pitch tied to a real news beat, and a clip distribution loop that runs the day each episode ships. The operating model is below.

Why a podcast tour beats a press tour for most Web3 founders

A press tour gives you a moment. A reporter publishes once, the post lives 36 hours on the homepage, and if you didn't time the embargo around a fundable beat, the piece dies in the archive.

A podcast tour gives you a library. Each episode is 45 to 90 minutes of you, in your own words, indexed on YouTube and Spotify, clippable for a year. Founders who do 10 shows in a quarter end up with roughly 100 to 150 short-form clips, a dozen long-tail Google results for their name, and a stack of credibility signals that show up every time an investor or journalist Googles them.

The conversion math also runs differently. A Forbes hit moves brand. A 60-minute conversation on a crypto-native show moves pipeline. Investors listen. Partner BD listens. Reporters listen, then DM you because they've now heard you reason out loud and they trust you to be quotable.

The three-tier show list

Don't pitch your dream show first. Build credibility on tier 3, sharpen your reps on tier 2, then go for tier 1 with a clean track record.

Tier 1 (dream tier). The shows with the biggest audiences and the hardest gates. Bankless. Unchained with Laura Shin. Empire (Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos). The Chopping Block. The Scoop. Lightspeed for Solana-native stories. These bookers turn down 90% of pitches. You get in when you have a real news hook plus a track record they can verify in three minutes of Googling.

Tier 2 (the working tier). Mid-audience crypto-native shows where serious founders go to think out loud. Examples: vertical-specific shows on DeFi, infra, gaming, and L2s. Regional anchors like Blockcast out of Singapore for APAC reach. VC-hosted shows from funds like Outlier Ventures or LongHash. Web3 Talks, hosted by Mac Budkowski, is one of the long-form options where founders share backstage perspective on their work. These are where you do most of your tour. Bookers respond fast, audiences are qualified, and clips perform.

Tier 3 (the warm-up tier). Newer shows, smaller audiences, but high reply rates and founder-friendly hosts. Shows like Web3 with Sam Kamani sit here, with guests ranging from project founders to leaders at protocols like ENS and Kraken. Tier 3 is where you debug your story. The first three recordings of any tour are calibration runs. You'll hear yourself fumble the same answer twice and finally land it on take three. That sharpening is the entire point.

The mistake founders make is starting at tier 1 cold. You waste your one shot at Bankless on a half-formed narrative. Burn tier 3 first.

The 90-day calendar

The timeline compresses fast. Most founders try to run a tour in 30 days and end up with three confirmations and no clips.

You will not record 12 episodes in 12 weeks. You'll record 8 to 10 and the others slip. That's fine. Plan for slippage.

The pitch template that lands replies

Most founder pitches fail because they sound like a press release. The opener is the company, the middle is the product, the close is "would love to chat." Bookers see 50 of those a week. They reply to none of them.

A pitch that works has four moves in under 150 words:

1. One sentence that proves you listen to the show. Reference a specific recent episode and the one idea from it you disagreed with or extended. Not "great episode," the actual idea.
2. One sentence on the news hook. The fundable beat. A raise closing, a mainnet date, a controversial position you can defend with data, a category call you're ready to make on the record.
3. Two or three bullets on what you'd argue. Not your bio. The hot takes. The booker's job is to imagine the episode. Make that easy.
4. Logistics close. Calendly link, ideal recording window, prior episode you've done if any.

What you do not include: a deck, a 400-word bio, a list of awards, "passionate about disrupting." The booker is reading on their phone between meetings.

What makes a real news hook (and what doesn't)

A hook is something a host can lead the episode with. "We just shipped X" is not a hook unless X is genuinely first or controversial. "We raised Y" is a hook only if Y is large, from named funds, or signals a category shift.

Real hooks I've seen land on tier 1:

• A category position the founder will defend against the consensus. (Not "DeFi is the future." A specific call like "restaking is over-collateralized theater and here's the math.")
• An on-record disagreement with a named competitor or thesis. Hosts love this because it produces clippable conflict.
• Original data nobody else has. On-chain analysis, internal product metrics, regional adoption numbers from APAC or LATAM that Western shows can't source.
• A mainnet or token launch with a specific date, paired with a thesis about why the timing matters.
• A regulatory moment that intersects with your category, where you have a real opinion and are willing to be quoted defending it.

What doesn't work: product walkthroughs, "we hit 100K users," partnership announcements, ecosystem grants. Save those for written press.

The clip distribution loop

This is where most founders leave 80% of the value on the table. You did the recording. The host published. Now what?

The default founder behavior is to retweet the host's announcement once and move on. That's a wasted asset. A 60-minute episode contains roughly 12 to 15 social clips if you cut it properly:

• 3 to 5 vertical clips for TikTok, Reels, Shorts (45 to 90 seconds each, hook in the first 2 seconds)
• 2 to 3 horizontal clips for X and LinkedIn (60 to 120 seconds)
• 1 long pull-quote graphic for static feeds
• 1 transcript-derived essay for LinkedIn or your blog
• 1 X thread with 6 to 10 key arguments and timestamps
• 1 newsletter feature linking the episode

Run this loop on a 10-day cadence after each episode drops. Day 1: episode goes live, you boost the host's post. Day 3: first vertical clip. Day 5: thread. Day 7: second clip. Day 10: long-form recap or essay.

If you have an in-house social team, brief them. If you don't, this is exactly where a fractional PR operator pays for themselves in the first month. The clip cutting alone is 6 to 10 hours per episode if you want it done well.

Common pitfalls

I've seen the same five mistakes kill tours over and over.

Pitching all 12 shows in the same week. You haven't recorded any yet, so you have no social proof. Half your tier 1 targets ghost you. Stagger by wave so you can reference recent episodes in later pitches.

Letting the host frame the narrative. A good host will steer you toward what makes a clippable episode for their audience. That's their job. But if you walk in without your own three or four anchor arguments, you'll come out sounding generic. Pre-write your hot takes. Practice them out loud. Bring them back into the conversation when the host drifts.

Skipping the prep call. Bookers will offer a 15-minute pre-recording with the host or producer. Take it every time. That's where you align on the narrative arc and quietly veto the questions that would put you in a bad position.

Ignoring tier 3 because the audience is small. The audience is not the point on tier 3. The reps are the point. You will fumble your founder story in your first two recordings. Don't fumble it on Bankless.

Treating the recording as the deliverable. The deliverable is the clip library and the second-order coverage. If you don't have a distribution plan before the recording, you don't have a tour. You have a hobby.

Pre-seed vs Series B: how the tour shape changes

The tour you run depends on where you are. Stage changes everything.

Pre-seed and seed. You're building credibility from zero. Skip tier 1 entirely. Run 6 to 8 tier 3 and lower tier 2 shows over 60 days. The goal is a Google footprint and a founder story you've told 8 times so it's tight when investors ask. Hooks are vision-led: category thesis, founder origin, market gap.

Series A. This is the sweet spot for a full 90-day, 10-show tour. You have a raise to anchor the narrative, a product in market, and enough traction to be interesting to mid-tier shows. Tier 1 is reachable in wave 3. Hooks blend raise news with category positioning.

Series B and beyond. You're past the "explain what we do" tour. The tour becomes selective: 4 to 6 tier 1 shows per year, paired with a major beat each time (token, expansion, controversial position). You're using the tour to set agenda inside the industry, not to build awareness.

Token launch teams. Special case. The tour has to compress into the pre-TGE window without violating quiet periods. I usually run 4 to 6 shows in the 6 weeks before launch, plus 2 to 3 in the 4 weeks after. Sequencing matters: the post-launch episodes are where you address community questions and reset expectations.

Manual vs operator-led: what each looks like

You can run this yourself. Founders do, and some of them do it well. The honest comparison is below.

Manual. You build the tier list (a weekend). You write the pitch template (a few hours, multiple revisions). You source booker emails (LinkedIn, episode show notes, a few cold replies). You manage the calendar. You cut the clips or pay someone on Upwork to do it. Expect 15 to 25 hours per week for 12 weeks if you want it run right. Most founders manage 4 to 6 shows in 90 days this way, not 10 to 12.

Operator-led. A fractional PR operator already has the relationships at tier 2 and a quarter of the tier 1 shows. The pitch goes from "cold email" to "warm intro from someone the booker trusts." Reply rates roughly triple. Recording calendar gets managed end to end. Clip cutting either runs in-house or through a vendor the operator manages. Founder time drops to 3 to 5 hours per week, almost all of it on the recordings themselves.

The honest take: if you're early stage and have time more than money, run it yourself and use a fractional only for the tier 1 introductions in wave 3. If you're Series A or later and your time is the bottleneck, the math flips fast. The cost of a fractional retainer is less than the cost of you spending 200 hours managing show bookers instead of running the company.

What success actually looks like at day 90

A successful tour ends with measurable artifacts, not vibes:

• 8 to 12 episodes published, with at least 2 on tier 1 shows
• 100 to 150 short-form clips in the library, with the top 10 boosted on paid
• A first-page Google result for your name that's all founder podcast content, not random aggregator pages
• Inbound from at least one investor and one reporter who heard you on a specific episode
• A founder story you can now tell in 90 seconds, in 5 minutes, or in 45 minutes depending on the audience

That last one is the underrated outcome. The reps change you. By episode 8 you've stopped explaining your category and started arguing for it. That voice is what investors and journalists end up quoting for the next two years.

If you want to map out your own 90-day tour against your stage, raise timing, and category positioning, that's what the teardown call is for.

Book a 30-min teardown with Shilika. Bring your tier list and the news beat you're working with. You leave with a real plan.