The cure for pitch fatigue

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Hello Prox Jox —

A few weeks ago, something strange happened. 

I sat down at my desk to make a trailer for Proxy’s official launch (coming next Tues!) and had a meltdown. 

Every podcast producer I know hates making trailers but we have to, mainly so that Apple and Spotify will consider featuring our shows. But my reaction was extreme.

I just needed to make 1-3 minutes of audio. Hardly anything. But something inside me kicked NO. 

I realized it was because I had pitch fatigue.

I’ve never been good at selling my work. I was late to social media. I avoided the journalist as influencer route as long as I could.

I’ve always resented how our culture rewards telling over doing. I much prefer the doing.

But over the last two years, since starting to work on Proxy, I went from barely being able to say hi to NPR’s podcast chief in the elevator to making my elevator pitch to podcast companies in Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting. Thanks to sheer repetition and a solid routine I’ve developed (steps below), I’ve gotten so much better at pitching. But also, it’s been a lot. I’m tired.

So I asked some listeners who filled out our survey if they’d send a voice memo making THEIR pitch for the show. In the end, I didn’t use the memos because I decided to make a simpler trailer, but thank you for helping me climbing out of my pitch fatigue hole and doing a better job at describing the show than me.

I loved the memos so much I’m going to share some highlights from them.

PROX VOX

Can’t believe someone compared Proxy to The Office. Pretty sure we can’t live up to that comparison, but I love that we can be a comfort show for someone!

PROXY IN THE WILD

The other week, my friend James texted me: “Hey! So I’m booking guests for the new John Mulaney Netflix show. And they’re looking for an HR person for an episode.” He had heard Catie Maillard, our star proxy HR rep in The Layoff Trilogy, on the pod and wanted to reach out to her.

For context, James is THE podcast producer James Kim of Moonface fame, who just came out with Season 2 of You Feeling This, an anthology podcast featuring ten different creators telling stories about what they fear most. 

Anyway, of course I gave James my blessing and Catie’s contact info, and then I promptly forgot about it. 

Until last week, when I came across a news article that Catie had appeared on a “Getting Fired” episode of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.

In the episode, Catie tells John Mulaney, Bill Hader, Chelsea Peretti, and Johnny Knoxville how to fire someone, and does a demonstration by firing Richard Kind, who’s pretending to be Gene Simmons. She wrote a LinkedIn post titled “From Nothing to NPR to Netflix” where she walks through the string of events that led to this surreal event, including the fact that she actually ignored the email from Netflix at first, because her house had just burned down in the Eaton fires.

I reached out to Catie and she said it’s been “a wild 2025” and that she’ll hopefully be resettling in a new home soon. In the meantime, she shared these links to nonprofits who’ve continued to help, along with her GoFundMe.

Congrats to Catie and also so relieved you and your family are safe.

Hope the rest of you enjoy the launch next week. Thank you for helping us get there. It’s been a ride.

Your emotional investigative journalist,

Yowei

p.s. Here is the routine I use before pitching and really, any event I’m nervous about:

1. 20 minutes of stream of conscious writing aka Morning Pages (shout out Julia Cameron).

2. 5 minutes of “mirror meditation,” but I do it looking into the Photo Booth app on my laptop (shout out Tara Well).

3. Saying my list of manifestations out loud while looking into the Photo Booth app while listening to the Drag Race credits song. (I’m hoping to condition my brain like a lab rat, so that I can play this song whenever I need it and have a positive Pavlovian association lol.)

4. A quick round of stretching and vocal warm-ups.

Edited by Juliana Feliciano Reyes.