The Business That Started Because Travel Collapsed
Noémi Beres did not set out to build a podcast booking agency. She built an online travel business in Ireland, ran it for over a decade, and watched it disappear in April 2020 when the pandemic shut down an entire industry overnight. What came next was not a pivot so much as a reinvention. Working with a mentor, she stepped into the podcasting world and founded Podcast Connections, a boutique agency that books entrepreneurs, authors, and thought leaders onto quality shows. That word quality matters enormously to her. She describes shows in the top ten percent of podcasts worldwide as the target, but more than any download metric, she looks for hosts who treat guests like people. She often gets on a show herself before placing a client there, acting as what she calls the guinea pig, so she knows exactly what kind of experience her clients are walking into. It is the kind of standard that only makes sense if you genuinely believe, as Noémi does, that meaningful conversations change lives. That tagline is not marketing copy. It is the operating principle behind every booking she makes.
The Mistake That Quietly Kills an Episode in the First Five Minutes
Robin and Noémi spent a good portion of this conversation on a problem that anyone who has hosted or guested on a podcast will recognize immediately. Guests arrive treating the interview like an infomercial. They rehearse their product features, they wait for applause lines, and they forget that the person across from them is not a moderator but a human being who did actual research to make the conversation worth having. Noémi is direct about what fixes this: listen to at least one episode before you show up, connect with the host on LinkedIn before the recording starts, and understand that you are not there to sell anything. You are there to share knowledge that makes the listener’s life better. If you do that well, the credibility, the clients, and the book sales follow as a consequence rather than a goal. She also pushes back on the idea that results come quickly. Podcast guesting is a muscle, she says, and you are not going to look like Schwarzenegger after two weeks in the gym. The guests who see real ROI are the ones who show up consistently across multiple shows over several months and then do the work of sharing the episode, tagging the host, and continuing the conversation after the recording stops. That post-recording window, she argues, is where the real relationship begins.
Why the Human Touch Is the Only Part AI Cannot Automate
The podcast booking space has become crowded with AI-generated pitches and automated outreach tools, and Noémi is candid about what gets lost when agencies reduce the work to spray-and-pray email blasts. The thing that distinguishes her approach is the strategy call that happens before any pitch goes out. She spends an hour getting to know a new client inside out, understanding not just what they do but who they are, what problems they solve, and who is actually listening on the other end. She references Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework as a north star: if you cannot explain what you do in three sentences that an eighth grader understands, you are not ready to guest yet. Robin adds his own version of this test, the elevator pitch across five floors, and both of them land on the same conclusion. The clients who struggle most are not the ones who lack expertise. They are the ones who have never been asked to connect their expertise to a human problem that someone else is actually living with. That is the gap Noémi helps close, and it is a gap that no automation tool is currently built to bridge. She closed with a success story that said it better than any metric could: a long-standing client recently came back not because of book sales or LinkedIn reach, but because two of the podcast hosts Noémi had connected her with had become genuine friends. That, she said, is the win that nobody talks about enough.
If this conversation changed how you think about showing up on a microphone, the full episode is worth your time in either format. Watch on YouTube if you want to catch the moments where the conversation visibly shifts, or Listen on Simplecast if you prefer to take it with you on a walk. You can also find Noémi Beres at podcastconnections.co or connect with her directly on LinkedIn, where she is easy to find by the small microphone icon next to her name.
Robin Ayoub 
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