Research before questions, always
Before writing a single question, I scrape the guest's entire LinkedIn post history and read it end to end. Not to quote it back at them, but to learn how they actually talk: their pet phrases, the topics they light up on, the claims they keep repeating. I also pull their conference talks and, when the guest is one of our app customers, their real analytics.
A question with the guest's own number in it gets a real answer. A generic question gets the answer they've given on five other podcasts.
The cold open: the guest speaks first
I studied the top interview podcasts and borrowed their best structural trick: stitch three pre-clipped guest quotes before the host says a word. Three hooks land before the intro even starts. By the time you hear "Welcome to Brewed," you're already invested.
This also changes how I write questions. Some exist purely to produce those clips.
The spine
Every episode gets one philosophical thread that everything hangs on. For a VP who had migrated three companies off broken platforms, the spine was the courage to call something broken and rebuild it. It surfaces in the opener, gets named explicitly in the middle, and returns in the final question.
Without a spine, an interview is a list. With one, it's a story that happens to be told in questions.
Chapters, not question lists
The script is 20 to 21 questions organized into about five chapters, each a distinct act: the guest's lens, how their customer decides, the industry arc, their strategic bets, and a reflective close. The guest feels flow. I have structure.
Two species of question
Operator questions make guests defend decisions: why this, why not that, what did it cost. They produce sharp, quotable clips. Reflection questions make guests narrate their industry: what changed, what everyone gets wrong. They produce slow, anecdotal gold.
A good script deliberately alternates both, because a full episode of either one is exhausting.
Without a spine, an interview is a list. With one, it's a story that happens to be told in questions.
The last mile
The script isn't done at the final question. Every episode also ships with its distribution plan: which moments become clips, what the teaser looks like, and where it lives. Ours live at appbrew.com/podcast.