Case study — Founder-Led Podcast Engine

0 → 40,000 podcast subscribers. No paid growth.

Prompt to Market is a founder-led podcast on AI-for-enterprise go-to-market strategy. Built from zero using the Founder-Led Podcast Engine. 18 months. Pure POV distribution.

40K

subscribers in 18 months

2,400

average downloads per episode (month 6+)

enterprise deals sourced from podcast listeners

The situation

The founder had built an AI-for-enterprise product at a time when every analyst, VC, and vendor was also talking about AI-for-enterprise. The category was loud. Differentiation was hard.

The insight: enterprise buyers don’t trust AI vendors. They trust other operators who’ve navigated the same buying process. A founder-led podcast built around real deployment stories — not AI hype — could own that trust position.

The challenge: podcasting has no shortcuts. Guest-borrowing doesn’t compound. Paid downloads don’t convert. We needed to build an audience that would actually care about the content.

Starting point

Subscribers (Day 1)0

Existing audience8K LinkedIn followers

Previous podcast experienceNone

Budget for paid promotion$0

Episode formatSolo + occasional guests

What we built

Month 1

Show concept and positioning

Named it "Prompt to Market" — a title that signals AI, go-to-market, and momentum simultaneously. Cover art, RSS setup, trailer episode. Distribution on Spotify, Apple, YouTube simultaneously from day one.

Month 1–3

First 12 episodes — solo format

No guests for the first 3 months. Solo episodes only — the founder's POV on AI deployment mistakes, enterprise buying patterns, and what vendors get wrong. Built a distinct voice before inviting anyone else in.

Month 3–6

LinkedIn → Podcast funnel

Every episode repurposed into 3 LinkedIn posts. Each post ended with "Full episode link in comments." LinkedIn became the discovery engine. Podcast became the depth play. Cross-pollination drove 60% of early subscribers.

Month 6–12

Guest strategy activated

Guests added — but only practitioners. No VCs, no analysts, no other vendors. Operators who had deployed AI in enterprise. Guests shared episodes; their audiences subscribed. Average subscriber gain per guest episode: 400.

Month 12–18

Inbound acceleration

At 25K subscribers, inbound enterprise conversations started arriving unprompted. Buyers had listened to 8–10 episodes before reaching out. Sales cycle shortened by ~40% on podcast-sourced leads.

“Enterprise buyers started showing up to demo calls having already heard my take on their exact problem — from a podcast episode I recorded 6 months earlier. The podcast is working as a trust machine that operates independently of my sales team.”

Founder, Prompt to Market