Exchange founders ignore pitches and say yes to a microphone: how to sell to crypto exchanges

Sunny Ray · Jun 4, 2026 · 6 min read

Exchange founders ignore partnership pitches and say yes to a microphone. I know because I've been the exchange founder getting pitched.

If you sell to crypto exchanges, stop sending partnership decks. Invite the founder or CEO onto your show as a guest. Use a short pre-interview to qualify them, record a live conversation about how they run their exchange, and let the sales conversation happen after, once they know you. Standard cold pitches into this market convert around 1% if you're lucky. The invitation gets you into the room, and the episode keeps working even if they never buy.

What an exchange founder's inbox looks like

I co-founded Unocoin, India's first Bitcoin exchange, and we fought India's central bank all the way to the Supreme Court and won. I also ran global business development at Kraken. So I've sat on both sides of this email.

From the exchange side, the pitches blur together. Liquidity providers. Custody. Compliance tooling. Listings. Market makers. Payment rails. Every one of them wants a call, most of them attach a deck, and almost all of them open with their own company. The exchange founder is running a business that can turn on a headline, with a support queue that never empties. A partnership pitch from a stranger lands at the bottom of the pile, every time.

What never landed at the bottom of my pile? Someone asking what I thought.

Two calls, one answer

On June 4 I had two calls back to back that were the same problem from different angles.

The first was a fintech team that already runs outbound. Their infrastructure works and their campaigns are live. They wanted special angles for one segment that wasn't moving: crypto exchange platforms. My answer was that the angle isn't in the copy. It's in the offer. Give value before you ask for value. Offer exchange executives a stage.

The second was a Bitcoin-only services company that wants to become the go-to technical support provider for exchanges across North America. A small, specific market where every name matters. They were weighing whether to raise money first or prove their go-to-market first. My suggestion was to do both with one campaign: about 1,000 emails a day, 70% to exchanges and 30% to investors, and the email to exchanges invites the CEO to be a guest, not to buy.

Why partnership pitches die at about 1%

On the first call I said standard cold email converts at about 1%, if you're lucky. In a market that small, 1% is a handful of conversations a year. You can't A/B test your way out of a list that small. Every exchange you burn with a bad pitch is one you can't email again for months.

The pitch fails for a structural reason. It asks the busiest person at the company to do work for you: read the deck, understand the integration, take the call, carry it internally. The invitation asks them to do something they already like doing: talk about how they built the thing. One is a request. The other is a gift.

The stage: pre-interview, live stream, then the conversation

The process we laid out has four steps.

• Find the right people. C-level and founders, with real email addresses.
• Pre-interview. A short call to qualify and to get them comfortable before anything is recorded.
• Live stream. Around 45 minutes, broadcast across six platforms.
• The conversation after. Once the recording stops, the sales conversation happens naturally, often in about fifteen minutes.

The pre-interview is where the selling starts, though nobody calls it that. You're learning their stack, their support load, what broke last quarter, who decides. This week I saved a post on X arguing that a discovery call has one job: get enough to build a strategy so good the next call closes itself. A pre-interview does that job, and the guest thanks you for it.

Then the live show. The CEO talks about their market, their users, what keeps them up at night. You ask good questions. By the end you know more about their operations than any vendor who has pitched them, and they know you as the host who made them look smart.

Split the volume: exchanges and investors in the same campaign

The 70/30 split on the second call deserves a closer look. That team was torn between raising and selling. Running both from one engine settles it. The same show invites exchange CEOs as guests and invites investors as guests. Exchange episodes produce pipeline. Investor episodes produce relationships for the raise. And every exchange that shows up is a proof point the investor episodes can reference.

It also tells you fast what's working. Data from a thousand sends a day tells you within weeks which segment replies, which subject line opens doors and which titles say yes. You optimize on response rates, not opinions.

The asset you keep when they say no

Here's what a pitch leaves behind when the exchange says no: nothing. A dead thread.

Here's what an episode leaves behind: a recorded conversation with an exchange founder, in your name, on six platforms, that every other exchange founder in your market can watch. The next time you invite someone, you're not a vendor with a deck. You're the show where their peers have already been guests.

In a small market that compounds hard. Exchange founders know each other. They go to the same events and sit on the same panels. Being the host they've all heard of is worth more than any partnership email you'll ever write.

If you're selling into exchanges this quarter

• Build the list of founders and C-level operators at the exchanges you want. A few hundred names is fine.
• Write an invitation, not a pitch. One reason you picked them, one ask: come on the show.
• Qualify on the pre-interview. Cut it short if there's no fit.
• Record, publish, and have the real conversation after.

If you want this run for you, list, invitations, pre-interviews and the show, put your buyers in the guest chair.

Frequently asked questions