Sources for guest discovery:
Twitter - by following niche influencers
Indiehackers - community of indie makers
Substack landing page - substack is a newsletter hosting service where you can find people who are writing on your subject.
Niche communities - discover them on Community Finder
[ ] Create a guest on-boarding form
On-boarding forms are a simple and easy way to organize your podcast. In this form, ask your guest to include their bio, social media links, information they want you to mention, contact email, basically anything you're collecting about them. For forms, you can use Google Forms, TypeForm or Airtable (or any other platform you enjoy).
This step helps you to to connect with them in a more organized way, and also helps to prepare show notes faster. You'll just need to copy and paste the information from form to the show notes of your hosting provider.
Book the time on their calendar for the meeting. Kind of an obvious step but, you know, we all get busy sometimes!
Let your guest know what software you use for recording. Do you use Zoom, Skype, Squadcast or something else? Send them a link to your upcoming call and let them know if they need to create an account on the software.
Do you do just chill discussion like podcast or do you have a strict agenda? Let them know what's the mood of the podcast in general. Sending a rough outline of the episode (with the questions you might ask or general theme) can be a request your guest makes.