How do I get on a podcast to promote my product?
Short answer
By pitching a topic, never a product. Hosts need an interesting episode; nobody books a guest to hear about a piece of software. Find shows whose audience overlaps yours, listen to two episodes so the pitch is specific, and offer one genuinely interesting story you can tell — the technical problem you solved, the thing you got wrong, the counter-intuitive finding from your data. Small shows convert better than big ones and are far easier to get on.
The longer version
Pitch a topic, never a product. A host's job is to produce an episode their audience wants to hear, and nobody has ever tuned in to hear about a piece of software. The moment your email reads as a product pitch it is deleted, because it is asking the host to do you a favour at their audience's expense.
So work out what you can talk about that is genuinely interesting on its own — the technical problem you solved in an unusual way, the thing you got badly wrong and what it cost, a counter-intuitive finding from your own data. The product comes up naturally in the telling, once, and that is enough.
Do the small amount of homework that almost nobody does: listen to two actual episodes and reference them specifically. Hosts can tell instantly whether you have heard the show, and being one of the few who has puts you ahead of most of the inbox.
Aim small. A show with 500 listeners who care about exactly your topic converts better than one with 50,000 general listeners, and it will actually say yes.
The full argument, with the rest of the picture around it:
Every Way to Promote a Product, and Why Developers Get Each One Wrong