How to interview industry experts for your newsletter

The fastest way to get an interview with an industry expert is to make it easy for them to say yes. Specific ask, short time commitment, clear value to their audience as well as yours. That's the whole formula.

Most people overcomplicate this. They send long, vague emails about how they'd love to "have a chat," they don't explain who they are, and they don't make it clear what's actually being asked. Then they wonder why busy people don't respond. Busy people don't respond because they get fifty of those emails a week, and yours doesn't stand out.

Start with people who almost know you

The cold email to a stranger has roughly a 5% response rate, even when it's well written. The warm intro has a 50% response rate. The "we've actually met before" email lands somewhere in the middle. So the first place to start your interview list is with people who already know you, even slightly.

Have you commented on their work? Have you exchanged a few messages on LinkedIn? Did you meet at an event? Did a mutual contact come up in conversation? Any of these is enough to remove the cold-email handicap. It's not about gaming the system, it's about acknowledging that recommendations and recognition are how trust works.

Build your interview list with this in mind. Start with the people you already have one degree of separation from. Once you've done a few interviews, you'll have a track record to point to, which makes the next set of asks dramatically easier.

Make the ask specific and small

The worst interview ask sounds like this: "I'd love to chat sometime about your work." There's no commitment, no clear topic, no time bound, and no obvious value to the person being asked.

The better version sounds like this: "I write a weekly newsletter for [specific audience] with [specific number] subscribers. I'd love a 25-minute call to talk specifically about [specific topic]. I'd publish a 1000-word piece based on the conversation, with you reviewing the final quote before it goes out. Would Thursday or Friday next week work?"

That's a different email. The reader knows exactly what they're agreeing to, who they're talking to, why it's worth it, and what control they retain over the output. The 25 minutes is short enough to feel manageable. The review clause removes the fear of being misquoted.

Do your research before you ask, not after

Nothing kills an interview faster than the expert realising halfway through that you haven't read their work. They know within the first three questions, and they immediately mentally check out. The conversation continues, but the depth disappears.

Before you reach out, read enough of their public work to know their main positions, their recent thinking, and the questions you don't need to ask because they've already answered them publicly. The interview is for the things you can't get from reading their published material. Asking them to repeat their own articles is a waste of their time and yours.

A good signal you're prepared enough is when you can write down three questions that nobody else has asked them. If you can't, keep researching.

Prep questions that go somewhere

Most interview questions are too broad to lead anywhere interesting. "What are your thoughts on the future of the industry?" produces a generic answer because it's a generic question. "I noticed you wrote in 2023 that X would happen by now and it hasn't. What's your current view on why?" produces something genuinely useful.

Specificity invites specificity. The more concrete your question, the more concrete the answer, and the more interesting the resulting piece. Aim for five or six questions for a 25-minute interview. That gives you about four minutes per question, enough time for follow-ups when something interesting comes up.

Order them carefully. Start with something easy to warm up. Put the harder, more pointed questions in the middle when you've built rapport. End on something forward-looking, because that's usually the most quotable bit and where readers stop reading anyway.

Record everything, transcribe later

Always record interviews, with the expert's permission. Trying to take notes while listening properly is genuinely impossible. You either capture the words and miss the nuance, or capture the nuance and miss the words.

Modern transcription tools are good enough now that you can have a usable transcript within minutes of the call ending. That lets you focus completely on listening during the interview itself. Listening is most of the job. The bit where they say something unexpected, and you ask the obvious follow-up question, is where the interview becomes interesting. You can't do that if you're taking dictation.

Write the piece around their best lines

When you sit down to write the article, don't try to use everything. A 25-minute interview will give you maybe three or four genuinely strong quotes. Build the piece around those. Cut everything else.

The temptation is to honour the time the expert gave you by including all of it. Resist it. The expert would rather you publish a tight, sharp piece that uses their best material than a long, meandering one that includes every utterance. The reader certainly prefers it. We talk about respecting reader attention in how to write a newsletter that people actually read.

Send the draft for review

Before you publish, send the expert the final draft and let them check their quotes. Yes, even if you're confident you've got them right. This is partly about accuracy and partly about trust. They'll do this interview, see you handled their words carefully, and they'll do the next one. They'll also recommend you to other experts, which is how interview-driven newsletters scale.

Be clear about what they can change. Quotes for accuracy, yes. Adding additional points, sometimes. Rewriting the framing, no. Most experts will respect this if you're clear about it upfront.

The follow-up that builds relationships

After the piece publishes, send a short note. The link, a thank you, and any genuine signal that the piece performed well. Reader replies, share counts, anything. Experts who do interviews want to know their words landed somewhere. Most interviewers never close that loop, and that's why their interview pipeline dries up.

Then, six months later, do something useful for them. Send a reader their way. Recommend their work in a piece. Make an introduction. The relationship doesn't end when the article publishes. That's where it actually starts.

Cheers