A pitch video is used by recording a single sixty-second introduction that states who you are, what you speak about, and what a host receives by booking you, then sending that same video to each target with a personal note rather than rewriting a pitch every time. The recording is edited once with b-roll and social proof showing prior appearances, and reused as an evergreen asset. Sending it through a platform with contact-level tracking shows which recipients watched and which clicked the call to action, so follow-up is directed at demonstrated interest rather than guessed at.

What Is a Pitch Video?

A pitch video is a short recorded introduction created to secure a booking or opportunity, in which the sender presents their background, subject expertise, and the value delivered to an audience, closing with a specific next step such as a calendar link. It functions as a reusable asset rather than a per-recipient message, distinguishing it from a personalized one-to-one recording.

In Dubb, a pitch video is stored in the video account and can be pinned so it stays at the top of the library for repeat use. Sending it through Share and Send with a recipient email address attached enables contact-level reporting, which shows whether that specific person watched the video and whether they clicked the call to action.

Thirty Seconds Should Take Thirty Seconds

Recording a thirty-second video should take about thirty seconds. For most people it takes thirty minutes. Sometimes, and this is not an exaggeration, it takes thirty days, because the recording sits on a list where it slowly becomes a project instead of a task.

That gap is worth naming before anything else, because it is the actual obstacle standing between most people and a stage. Not talent, not credentials, not connections. The willingness to record something in one take and send it.

The opportunities are real and they are more available than they look. Podcasts, keynote slots, conference panels, TEDx stages. Every one of those is filled by someone who asked, and the people doing the booking are actively looking for guests. Setting the goal of getting on a specific stage is not wishful thinking. It requires one asset you almost certainly do not have yet.

The Anatomy of a Pitch That Gets Replies

A pitch video runs no longer than a minute and does a specific sequence of jobs. Here is the structure underneath a working one.

Note the balance. Roughly half the runtime is about you and half is about what the other side receives. Pitches that fail are almost always all first half.

A Real Script, Broken Into Its Parts

Structure is easier to trust when you can see it working. Here is a real pitch used to book podcasts and speaking slots, mapped to the beats above.

Name and mission. "Hey, I'm Ruben. My passion is simple: to help people help other people."

Origin. "Years ago I found a need in the marketplace for people to bring humanity back into business, sales, and marketing, to share authentic stories and create real connections as a result. I have dedicated my life to evangelizing the power of storytelling, results, and authenticity through the lens of video."

Credentials. "I'm an author, a podcaster, a keynote speaker, a father, and the CEO and founder of Dubb, the world's video sales platform."

The ask. "If you're interested in chatting about content collaborations, podcasts, or YouTube shows, I'm game. Let's talk."

What they get. "I promise to bring energy, insight, and actionable advice to your listeners, and to promote our work to a community of Dubb businesses."

Call to action. "Please reply to this email or click the link below to book a time on my calendar."

Two details are easy to miss. "A father" sits in the middle of a credentials list, which is not an accident; it makes the person recognizable rather than only impressive. And the promise to promote the episode to an existing community reframes the entire request. The host is no longer doing a favor. They are getting distribution.

The closing in the original recording is a Ferris Bueller joke about why you are still watching. Worth keeping something like it. A pitch is an audition, and the only reliable way to prove you will not bore an audience is to not bore them for sixty seconds.

What Belongs in the Edit

Record it yourself, then put real work into the edit. This is the one place where getting help is worth it.

Bring in an editor to add b-roll and social proof. Not stock footage of a city skyline, but evidence of you doing the thing you are pitching. Footage from a stage. A podcast studio. A room with an audience in it. Logos of places you have appeared.

The reason this matters is specific to pitching. A booker is managing risk. Their real question is whether you will be good on their platform, and the fastest way to answer it is footage of you being good on someone else's. Claiming you are a strong speaker is an assertion. Ten seconds of you speaking to a room is evidence.

If you have no footage yet, the fix is not to skip the video. Record the pitch, book the smallest opportunity you can find, film it, and re-cut the pitch with that material. The asset improves with every appearance you land.

Pin It and Stop Rebuilding It

Once the video exists, treat it as permanent inventory rather than as a one-off send. In Dubb, pin it so it sits at the top of your video account and does not sink under everything recorded since.

The mental model I use is a starting lineup. Most of what you record is situational and disposable. A small number of videos are the ones you reach for again and again, and the pitch video is one of those. Pinning is what keeps the best asset in reach instead of thirty scrolls deep.

The practical effect is that pitching stops being a project. When an opportunity appears, the video is already made. The only new work is the sentence at the top of the email.

Sending It With Tracking Attached

Sending it as a plain link works and gives you nothing back. Sending it with the recipient attached is what turns each pitch into a tracked opportunity.

1. Open the video page for your pitch video.
2. Click Share and Send.
3. Add the recipient's email address. This is the step that produces contact-level tracking. Without it you get anonymous views and no idea who they belong to.
4. Click Copy for Email and paste into your message.
5. Write the personalized line at the top. Their name, spelled correctly, and one sentence showing you know what you are pitching.
6. Check the spelling of their name. Then check it again against their signature.
7. Send.

The name check earns its own step because it is the single fastest way to undo a good pitch. A misspelled name in the first line tells the reader the video is a broadcast, which is precisely the impression the personal note existed to prevent.

Reading the Report and Following Up

Once it sends, contact-level reporting shows whether that person or someone on their team watched the video, and whether they clicked the call to action. Those two signals are enough to sort your list into three groups.

• Clicked the call to action. Interested. Follow up quickly and directly.
• Watched but did not click. Curious, unconvinced, or busy. Follow up with the specific thing your video did not answer.
• No open, no watch. Not a rejection. A delivery or timing problem. Try a different subject line or a different channel.

That third row is where most pitching quietly dies, because silence gets read as no when it usually means nobody saw it.

And the part everyone knows and few do: the gold is in the follow-up. The tracking exists so your follow-up lands on evidence instead of a guess.

Selling the Salesman

Here is the move worth stealing from this whole approach.

An event organizer sends you a sponsorship pitch. In the case that prompted this, roughly four thousand dollars for a booth at their event. The default responses are to buy, to decline, or to ignore. All three end the conversation.

There is a fourth option: counter-pitch. Some organizations do not want a booth because conferences are not their channel, but they do want the stage. So rather than declining, reply with your pitch video. You already have their attention, they have already demonstrated an interest in doing business, and you are proposing something that costs them nothing while filling a slot they need to fill anyway.

Every inbound sales email is a live contact who has confirmed they are reachable. Most people delete those. A small number of people pitch back, and it is one of the highest-yield lists available because it builds itself.

Building Your Hit List

The video is reusable, so the only remaining variable is who receives it. Three sources cover most of it.

People who email you. Sponsorship requests, vendor outreach, partnership feelers. Already warm in the sense that matters: they wrote first.

A generated list of upcoming events. Conferences, summits, and industry gatherings relevant to your market, with organizer contacts attached.

Podcasts in your category. Specifically shows serving the audience you serve, since a host books for their listeners rather than for you.

Be narrow about relevance. A pitch to a show whose audience is not yours fails for reasons no amount of production quality fixes.

Common Mistakes and Troubleshooting

Turning a sixty-second recording into a thirty-day project. Record it imperfectly this week. A pitch that exists beats a better one that does not.

Sending without attaching the recipient. If your report shows views you cannot attribute, the email address was never added at send time. Anonymous views cannot be followed up.

Skipping the edit entirely. The raw recording carries your claims. The b-roll carries your evidence. Pitching is exactly the situation where evidence does the work.

Reading silence as rejection. Check whether it was opened at all before concluding anything.

Rebuilding the pitch for every send. If you are re-recording each time, the asset is not doing its job. Record once, pin it, personalize only the note.

Ending without a next step. A pitch that closes on gratitude asks the recipient to invent the follow-up, and they will not.

Best Practices Worth Adopting

Keep it under a minute. The constraint is the feature, because it forces you to lead with what matters.

Give more runtime to what they receive than to your resume. Hosts are choosing on behalf of an audience.

Offer distribution as part of the ask. Promoting the episode to your own community changes the shape of the request entirely.

Attach the recipient every single time, so every send produces intelligence rather than just a delivery.

Re-cut the video as your credentials grow. What I see most often is people using a two-year-old pitch that omits everything they have done since, which is a slow leak in an otherwise good asset.

Restart without ceremony if you stop. Pitching campaigns lapse constantly, mine included. The asset is still there, and picking it back up costs a send rather than a rebuild.

Video Email Tools Compared

Several tools handle recorded video in email. For pitching specifically, the question is whether you learn anything after you press send.

For a single video sent to one person, any of these is fine. For one video sent to eighty organizers over a quarter, per-recipient attribution is the entire difference between a pipeline and a pile of sent mail.

Proof: Why This Actually Works

The counter-pitch described earlier is a live example rather than a hypothetical. An inbound sponsorship request became an outbound speaking pitch, sent as a tracked video, with the resulting activity report showing whether the organizer engaged. That is the whole loop, and it ran on an asset that already existed.

Two patterns hold across the pitching work we see. The first is that reusable assets survive and bespoke ones do not: people who record once and pin the video keep pitching for months, while people who plan to record a fresh video per opportunity tend to stop within a few weeks. The effort per send is what determines whether the campaign continues, more than motivation does.

The second concerns follow-up. Senders who act on watch and click data follow up on a meaningfully smaller number of contacts and hear back more often than senders who follow up with everyone on the same schedule. The tracking does not increase interest. It tells you where the interest already is.

Methodology note: these are directional observations drawn from aggregated, anonymized sending and engagement patterns across Dubb users, plus our own pitching activity. They are not a controlled study, no figures are attached, and outcomes vary by market and list quality.

The honest read is that the video is the smaller half of this. The reusability and the follow-up discipline are what turn one recording into a booked calendar.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get booked on podcasts?

Record a pitch video under a minute that says who you are, what you speak about, and what you will deliver to the host's listeners, then send it to shows serving your audience with a short personal note. Offering to promote the episode to your own community makes the request considerably more attractive, because the host gains distribution rather than just a guest.

Send it with the recipient's email attached so you get contact-level tracking, then follow up based on who actually watched. Silence usually means the message was never seen rather than that the answer is no.

How long should a pitch video be?

No longer than a minute. That constraint forces you to lead with what matters and cut the career history nobody asked for.

A workable split is roughly five seconds on your name and mission, ten each on your origin, credentials, the ask, and what the audience receives, then five seconds on the call to action. Half the runtime should be about what the other side gets.

What should I put in a pitch video?

State your name and what you care about, explain the gap you saw and went after, list the roles that make you bookable, name exactly what you are asking for, promise something concrete to their audience, and close with one clear next step such as a calendar link.

Then have an editor add b-roll and social proof showing you doing the thing you are pitching. Footage of you on a stage or in a studio answers the booker's real question, which is whether you will be good on their platform.

How do I know if someone watched my video?

Attach the recipient's email address when you send it. In Dubb that means opening the video page, clicking Share and Send, adding their address, and using Copy for Email to paste it into your message.

Once sent, contact-level reporting shows whether that person or someone on their team watched the video and whether they clicked the call to action. Skipping the email address step gives you anonymous views you cannot attribute to anyone.

What is contact level tracking?

It is reporting tied to a specific named recipient rather than to a video overall. Instead of knowing a video received forty views, you know which individuals watched and which clicked through.

That difference is what makes follow-up possible. You can separate the people who clicked your call to action from the people who watched without clicking and from those who never opened it at all, and treat each group differently.

How do I pitch myself as a speaker?

Build one evergreen pitch video and reuse it. Record it once, edit in evidence of prior appearances, pin it in your library so it stays easy to find, and send it with a personalized opening line to each organizer.

Draw your list from three places: people who email you first, generated lists of upcoming events in your industry, and podcasts serving your audience. Inbound sponsorship requests are especially worth answering with a counter-pitch, since the sender has already proven they are reachable and interested in doing business.

Getting Yourself on the Pedestal

The path to a stage is shorter than it looks and it runs through one asset. Record a pitch video under a minute. Edit in proof of you doing the thing. Pin it so it stays in reach. Send it with the recipient attached so every pitch reports back. Then follow up on the people who watched, because that is where the gold is.

Everything after the recording is mechanical, which is the good news. Dubb holds the video in your account where you can pin it, Share and Send attaches the recipient so the tracking works, and contact-level reporting tells you who watched and who clicked so your follow-up goes where the interest is.

The only genuinely hard part is the first take. Give it thirty seconds this week rather than thirty days, and you will have the asset that every future opportunity runs through.