There is a particular kind of sentence that makes a founder dangerous. It usually arrives from a customer as an excuse. In Danielle Letayf's case, event organizers kept giving her the same one: they wanted more varied speakers, but they did not know where to find them. Letayf, a Lebanese American community builder who had spent years creating programs for young women in tech, found the claim both irritating and useful. If the people running stages could not find the talent, she would build the directory, the community, and the booking mechanism herself.
Badassery launched in November 2018 as a public-speaking marketplace for voices that conventional conference circuits overlooked. It was specific, legible, and attached to a physical ritual: people assembled in a room, someone walked onstage, a microphone changed hands. Then 2020 arrived and abolished the room.
The first product met the first hard stop
Badassery's first failure was brutally literal: live events stopped. A company built around booking speakers suddenly had no stages to book. Letayf later described COVID as the kick that forced a complete change. She gathered the speakers into a paid membership community, moved workshops and networking online, and made access to one another the product. By 2021, the community had nearly 150 members across the United States; 74 percent came from underrepresented groups.
The pivot worked. That detail matters because founders often rewrite history so that the discarded product was obviously doomed. This one was not. The membership business kept Badassery alive and, by Letayf's account, produced its most successful year to that point. Yet a successful form can still become the wrong form. In a later interview, she described closing a healthy arm of the company because it no longer aligned with where she wanted to take the work.
“The form is not the same as the mission.”Danielle Letayf
The agency hiding inside the community
The latest Badassery is a podcast-placement agency for executives, experts, authors, and founders. It sits in an interesting crack in the market. A self-serve matching platform gives guests a database and wishes them luck. A traditional PR firm may include podcasts in a much wider media plan. An executive coach works on the person but does not necessarily run the outreach. Badassery bundles the edit, the pitch, the logistics, and, at higher tiers, the afterlife of the recording.
The edit comes first. A one-to-one strategy session turns a career's worth of scattered experience into a point of view, a rebuilt biography, sharper speaking topics, and a live one-sheet. Then a dedicated agent develops a show list, pitches hosts, explains why each offer fits, manages the back-and-forth, and leaves the client with final say. The company aims for two aligned placements a month; roughly 90 percent are remote.
Find the point
Distill the expertise into a voice, topics, bio, and useful argument.
Find the room
Build a narrow show list, pitch the host, and manage the relationship.
Multiply the talk
Turn one recording into clips, summaries, posts, proof, and follow-up.
That order - positioning before placement - is the company's most coherent distinction. Plenty of services can send email. The expensive part is deciding what should be in the email, whether the guest can carry the idea for 45 minutes, and which small audience might actually care. Badassery calls its selection method the Podcast Fit Formula, a blend of data, agent experience, and what its site describes as deep listening.
The price of being heard, stated plainly
Badassery is unusually open about cost. On a six-month commitment, Get Known is $1,000 a month and covers two bookings, onboarding, pitch materials, scheduling, and preparation. Get Positioned is $2,500 a month and adds monthly brand coaching, ongoing access to the team, a dedicated strategist, and a custom AI brand coach. Get Unstoppable is $3,500 a month and adds short-form video, search-ready summaries, and help turning interviews into a broader content system. Every plan carries a $500 onboarding fee. A three-month plan costs 10 percent more per month.
Six-month plans / published monthly price
The tiers reveal what Badassery believes compounds. Booking is the base. Interpretation costs more: regular conversations that help a leader recognize and name the through-line in their work. Reuse costs most, because a recorded hour only becomes an asset after someone cuts, writes, distributes, and connects it to a larger goal.
A booking is an event. Recognition is a system.
The agency reports more than 350 placements worldwide, many on podcasts ranked in the top 10 percent globally. Its published performance numbers say clients reach a first booking in 14 days on average, all measured clients see increased industry recognition in three months, and 60 percent generate qualified leads within 90 days. These are company-reported figures, useful as signals rather than promises.
The more revealing evidence is a client story. Stephen Minix, a vice president at impact-reporting software company UpMetrics, began working with Badassery in April 2025 with an indistinct boundary between his personal identity and his company role. By November, the agency reported 16 interviews, with 91 percent on top-10-percent shows, plus inbound speaking invitations and a rise in his self-rated industry recognition from six to eight out of ten. Coaching gave his ideas names: “Point Guard Energy,” “Power & Philanthropy,” and “Black Coffee Conversations.” The custom AI coach then helped him rehearse and reuse those ideas.
The AI is not presented as an oracle. It is closer to a well-briefed rehearsal partner: something a client can use to refine a post, prepare for an interview, or keep language consistent during a busy week. In a category full of automated spray-and-pray outreach, Badassery's better argument is that software should preserve proximity to the person, not replace it.
The parts worth stealing
The copyable move is not “start a podcast agency.” It is to treat a business model as a hypothesis instead of an identity. Letayf now talks about timeboxed experiments: define the test, choose the window, decide what success means before the result arrives, then either invest or stop. Badassery's speaker bureau, membership community, and agency were all experiments. The company became durable because its founder did not confuse duration with virtue.
A compact field guide
Keep the problem stable. Badassery has always worked on the gap between valuable expertise and public attention. The delivery mechanism was allowed to move.
Do the interpretive work first. A list of 500 shows cannot rescue an empty or generic pitch. Write the argument, then find its room.
Design the afterlife. Decide before recording how one conversation will become clips, writing, sales proof, and a reason to follow up.
Put an expiration date on the test. A 90-day experiment creates evidence. An indefinite side project creates guilt.
There are also conditions. The service screens for original topics, storytelling ability, and evidence that an applicant can speak. The person who wants fame but has no distinct idea is early. The person who will not share an episode, reuse the material, or practice in public is buying an introduction without doing the compounding work. A narrow podcast can produce a valuable relationship, a speaking invitation, or a client; it cannot guarantee any of them. Episodes may also publish weeks or months after recording, which makes the format poorly suited to an urgent launch.
Badassery's market is therefore smaller than “anyone who wants publicity” and more interesting: people with accumulated expertise who have not yet built a public language for it. They are often impressive on paper and strangely beige online. The agency's job is to remove the beige, find the right microphone, and make sure the conversation does not disappear the morning after it airs.
The company began because event organizers claimed the right voices were hard to find. Eight years and two discarded products later, Badassery has refined the complaint. The voices are there. What is scarce is the combination of a clear idea, a fitting room, and the discipline to keep talking after the applause - or the download - has ended.