SKILL/TREE
Creator Economy · standard

Stop spending 2 hours researching every podcast guest.

Give it a name, a feed URL, or a handful of articles — get back a tight one-page brief with the questions your guest hasn't been asked yet.

$3.99
Works in Claude + ChatGPT
01Turns a guest name or 3 articles into a complete research brief in under 5 minutes — not 2 hours.
02Surfaces 5 specific questions your guest probably hasn't fielded on the last 10 podcasts they appeared on.
03Flags 2 genuine disagreement angles so you can push back without ambushing them.
04Works for household names AND niche guests with almost no online footprint — handles thin-presence cases explicitly.
05Outputs a clean, skimmable one-pager you can read in the green room before you hit record.
06Includes the Question Craft Guide — so if the first draft feels flat, you know exactly why and how to sharpen it.

What it does

Every interview lives or dies on your prep. Guests can feel when you've done the work — and listeners can too. This skill takes whatever you have (a name, a podcast feed, a few articles) and produces a structured one-page brief: concise bio summary, their recent talking points, five questions they haven't been asked to death, and two angles where a smart host could respectfully push back. It doesn't just regurgitate their Wikipedia page. It's built for solo hosts doing one or two interviews a week — people who need to go from 'booked' to 'ready' fast, without a producer or a researcher on staff. It handles well-known guests and niche experts with thin online presences differently, because those are genuinely different problems. Two annotated example briefs are bundled in so you can see exactly what good output looks like before you commit to a format. The Question Craft Guide is also included — a reference on what separates a question that unlocks a great answer from one that gets a polished non-answer. Load it when the draft questions feel too safe.

Frequently asked

Does it actually find new information, or does it just summarize what I paste in?
If you give it a name or a URL, it uses web access to pull recent interviews, articles, and talks before building the brief — it's not just reorganizing your input. If you paste articles directly, it works from those plus any context it can find. The goal is questions your guest hasn't been asked, which means it has to know what they have been asked.
My guest has almost no online presence — one Instagram and a local news mention. Will it just fail?
No. Thin-presence guests are an explicit case this skill handles. It'll tell you what it found, work with what exists, and shift toward question frameworks that make sense for someone the audience doesn't already know. The bundled example brief covers exactly this scenario.
Can't I just write a prompt myself and get the same thing?
You can write a prompt. But the research brief format — what goes in, what gets cut, how the disagreement angles are framed, what makes a question genuinely good vs. generic — took iteration to get right. The bundled Question Craft Guide alone is the kind of reference you'd spend an afternoon building yourself. This is the shortcut.
Does it work if my guest is famous and has done 200 podcast interviews?
That's actually where it earns its keep. High-profile guests have well-worn talking tracks. The skill is specifically looking for what hasn't been covered recently — angles that feel fresh to a listener who's already heard them on three other shows.
Is this included in a subscription or is it a separate purchase?
Check the listing price — skills are priced individually. If you're buying multiple skills, look for bundle options on the storefront.

Install

After purchase you'll get a license key. Then:

$ npx skilltree-network login # paste your license key
$ npx skilltree-network install podcast-guest-research-brief

ChatGPT version included — your account page also has a download zip.