A Discovery Call Is Not an Interview

By Junaid Ahmed

---

I record interviews on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. That's when the house is quiet, the light in the studio is right, and I've had enough coffee to be a good listener for ninety minutes.

Discovery calls are nothing like that. Fifteen minutes, no setup, no lighting. I can take one at 8am on a Monday between school drop-off and everything else.

Two completely different things. My booking page thought they were the same thing.

---

Here's how it actually broke.

There was one schedule. One grid of "here's when I'm available." Every session type I offered pulled from it.

So the moment I opened up Monday morning for a quick call, Monday morning also became available for a full recording. Somebody could book ninety minutes of me at 8am on a Monday, and I'd find out about it after the fact.

My workaround was to just not offer the Monday slots. Which meant I wasn't taking discovery calls, which meant people who wanted fifteen minutes with me either booked a full interview they didn't need, or didn't book at all.

I did that for months. It never once occurred to me that it was a bug rather than a fact of life.

---

Now each block of time on your availability grid can belong to a session type.

Tag Tuesday and Thursday afternoons as interviews. Tag Monday mornings as discovery calls. Leave a block untagged and it works the way it always has, open to everything.

That last part mattered more than the rest of it. Every schedule that already existed keeps working exactly as it did, nobody has to go re-tag anything, and if you only offer one type of session you won't even see the new option. It stays out of your way until you need it.

Your guest just sees the times that make sense for the thing they're actually booking. If there aren't any yet, the page now says so plainly instead of looking broken.

---

Two things I know are still rough, so I'd rather say them than have you find them.

You get one window per day per type right now. If you want interviews Tuesday morning and discovery calls Tuesday afternoon, you can't express that yet.

And on the in-app version of the public page, some of the slot math still assumes 45 minutes instead of reading each session type's real length. The version at podglue.com gets this right. I'm fixing the other one.

---

The thing I keep relearning is that the workarounds stop registering as problems.

I wasn't frustrated about the Monday thing. I'd stopped noticing it entirely, I'd just quietly shrunk what I offered people until the tool stopped fighting me.

Worth asking yourself what you've stopped noticing.