02/06/2026
The most downloaded podcast in your sector is rarely the one closing deals.
The one closing deals is the most specific.
I watched a founder spend eight months chasing download numbers. He ran a consulting practice for PE-backed manufacturers, revenue around £4M, genuine expertise that took twenty years to build. He recorded broad episodes. Productivity. Leadership. The future of work. Topics he thought would pull a crowd.
The crowd came. Roughly 2,400 downloads a month by episode thirty. He was pleased. His pipeline was not.
Here is the problem with broadcasting wide. You attract listeners who will never buy from you. A productivity episode brings in students, jobseekers, and people three career steps away from your offer. The numbers go up. The relevance goes down. You are paying in time and getting paid in vanity.
So we narrowed it. Hard.
Every episode after that was built around one decision his ideal client was about to make. Not "the future of work." Instead: "what breaks when you bolt a new ERP onto a business that grew through acquisition." Not "leadership." Instead: "how to keep your finance director through a buyout when the new owners want their own person in."
The downloads dropped. Episode thirty-one did 340. He nearly stopped.
Then the messages started. Three CFOs at PE-backed manufacturers, the exact people he sells to, reached out inside six weeks. One of them said he had listened to four episodes and already knew how this founder thought about ERP migration. The discovery call lasted eleven minutes. The contract was £85,000.
Three hundred and forty downloads beat 2,400 because of who those 340 were.
This is the part most founders get backwards. They treat reach as the goal and relevance as a bonus. It works the other way round. A podcast is not a billboard. It is a filter. The point is not to be heard by everyone. The point is to be unmissable to the forty people whose problem you solve for a living.
Specific content does three things wide content cannot. It signals to the right listener that you understand their exact situation, which builds trust faster than any general thought leadership ever will. It ranks for the searches your buyers actually run, because nobody Googles "the future of work" before hiring a consultant, they Google their specific problem. And it sounds like expertise rather than commentary, because anyone can have an opinion about leadership, but only the practitioner can talk about the £200,000 mistake a manufacturer made on their ERP rollout.
Going narrow feels like shrinking your market. It is the opposite. You are not reducing the audience. You are removing the noise so the buyer can find you.
The founder I mentioned now has 71 episodes live. His back catalogue does the selling before he ever joins a call. He records for two hours a month. We turn that into five episodes a week, the social clips, the show notes, the LinkedIn posts. He has stopped looking at his download numbers entirely.
The right 300 people will pay for a year of revenue. The wrong 30,000 will pay for nothing.
If you are a B2B founder publishing broad and wondering why the inbound is thin, reply with "NARROW" and I will send you the five-question brief we use to find the specific show inside your business.
