Junaid Ahmed
Essays, playbooks, and product notes from Junaid Ahmed.
Your Audience Is Not a Community. Not Yet.
Your Audience Is Not a Community. Not Yet.
I saw a chart that scored a real community against a typical event. Five requirements, and the event lost on all five. After 700-plus episodes, I realized I had been producing events and calling it a community.
Read articleYou Already Taught the Workshop. You Just Did It One Interview at a Time.
You Already Taught the Workshop. You Just Did It One Interview at a Time.
Every podcast interview you give leaves your best teaching scattered across other people's feeds. We built a way for guests to harvest it back.
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Your Guest Appearances Deserve an Address
You've been on twelve podcasts. Maybe thirty. Where do they live? A LinkedIn post that scrolled away. A link in a bio somewhere. We just gave every guest a single address for all of it: podglue.com/@you.
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Your Episode Is News. Nobody Told the News.
Every episode you publish has a claim, a story, or a take a journalist could run with. Most of them die in your feed because nobody wrote the press release. Now PodGlue writes it.
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The Promo Graphic You Never Made
You recorded a great episode. You exported the audio, uploaded it, wrote the notes. Then you needed a graphic for social and you opened Canva and never came back.
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The Home Screen Was a Lobby. Now It's a Desk.
PodGlue's home screen looked impressive and told you almost nothing. We rebuilt it so the first thing you see is what your show actually needs from you today.
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The Dots Were Already There. We Just Connected Them.
A guest page that doesn't link to the episodes. An episode page that doesn't link to the guest. A podcast page that never shows who came on. The information existed. Nobody was surfacing it. We fixed that.
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The Deploy Button That Did Nothing
For two months, every backend improvement we shipped quietly went nowhere. The code was written, reviewed, and merged. It just never reached you. Here's how we found out, and what we changed so it can't happen again.
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The Blank Box Problem
Every press release needs an 'about the show' paragraph. We added a field for it and then watched everyone leave it empty. So we taught PodGlue to write the first draft.
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PodGlue Is on My Phone Now
The thoughts about my show don't happen at my desk. They happen walking to the car after a recording, in line at the coffee shop, the morning after an episode goes out. Until this week, none of them survived.
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600 Episodes and Nobody Got Credit
I imported my entire back catalog into PodGlue and discovered something embarrassing: hundreds of episodes with guest names right there in the title, and not one of them linked to an actual guest. Here's what we fixed.
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Not Every Conversation Is an Episode
Some of my best material was never meant for the podcast feed. Discovery calls, research interviews, the conversations I had on the side. I wanted to publish a few of those to my own site without them ever showing up on Apple or Spotify. Now I can.
Read articleI Made the Images, Then I Switched Tabs and They Were Gone
I Made the Images, Then I Switched Tabs and They Were Gone
PodGlue's Social Studio made a full set of post-ready images for an episode. Then I clicked another tab to check a caption, came back, and the whole set was gone. Here is why that happened and how we fixed it.
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Eighteen Settings, Buried Two Menus Deep
PodGlue's settings page grew one feature at a time until fifteen screens were hiding behind a single tab. I built it, and I still clicked the wrong menu. So we flattened the whole thing and put a search box on top.
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I Watched My Product Break on a Sales Call
Four demos in one day. The product sold itself, and then the studio wouldn't connect, and a login button did nothing. Here's what the rough edges taught me that the polished parts couldn't.
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We Kept Shipping. The Page Stopped Saying So.
Our community Release Notes sat on one version for weeks while we shipped almost every day. The work was happening. The record wasn't. Here's why it froze, and how it fixes itself now.
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The Internet Replaced Travel Agents. AI Won't Replace the Ones Who Became the Voice.
We're building a dedicated entry point for independent insurance agents introduced by APPLICA Innovations. Here's the thinking behind it, and why a weekly conversation does more for an agency right now than any ad spend.
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Our Homepage Was Too Clever. So We Rewrote All of It.
We described PodGlue like a pitch deck instead of a tool. A busy podcaster does not want a philosophy. They want their Saturday back. So we rewrote the whole homepage to say what it actually does.
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When You Run More Than One Show
One podcast is a workflow you can hold in your head. Five is not. At some point you stop making episodes and start losing track of them, and you can't see it happening until a client asks where theirs is.
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Is It You, or Is It Us?
When something feels off with your show, you don't want an apology. You want one honest answer: is it me, or is it them? PodGlue now has a page for exactly that.
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I Built a Team of AI Agents. The Best One Said Stop.
I wired up four AI agents to ship a feature while I slept. The first real job they ran, the most valuable thing any of them did was refuse to write code.
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You've Been Consistent for Three Years. Why Is Your Audience the Same Size?
Consistency is necessary. It is not sufficient. The podcasters who stay stuck aren't doing anything wrong, they're just running on a treadmill that was never built to go anywhere.
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One Link for Every Live Event We'll Ever Run
Every launch, every webinar, every office hours session used to mean a new landing page. Now it's one URL that knows what state it's in.
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Your Best Episode Is Invisible
The episode that would change everything for a specific listener is already in your feed. They'll never find it. Not because it's bad, because it's organized by date, and ideas don't live on a calendar.
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Ninety Videos of IP Collecting Dust
Doreca Delbridge isn't a podcaster. She has roughly ninety YouTube videos and a recurring philosophy she talks about across all of them. That's a book. It just hasn't been one yet.
Read articleThe Day the Tolerance Ran Out
The Day the Tolerance Ran Out
Doreca Delbridge told me her tolerance for things she doesn't enjoy started going down the year she turned forty. Three years later she's still redesigning her business around that. It's the most honest framing of a creator's career I've heard this year.
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When a Beta User Tells You to Spin It Off
Adam Bird watched the PodGlue book builder for ninety seconds and said it should be a standalone product. He's probably right. That doesn't mean I'm doing it yet.
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The Book He Built in 2015 With QR Codes
Adam Bird runs a podcast network. In 2015 he cut up interviews into a book and put QR codes at the bottom of each chapter. It was before its time. The work he did then is the work PodGlue does now.
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The Calendar That Went Blank on My Own Show
My scheduled posts were sitting right there in the database. The calendar showed me nothing. The reason it broke was the one thing I'm proudest of: a very long back catalog.
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A Business Card Says What You Do. A Book Says Who You Are.
Podcasters with 200 episodes on a single topic still introduce themselves as 'I have a podcast.' The material to change that has been sitting in their archive for years.
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Help That Knows the Product
My own Help button was confidently lying to me. The fix wasn't a smarter AI. It was handing the AI the docs that were sitting on the shelf behind it.
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Your Next Listener Is Not Searching for Podcasts
A friend told me how she'd found her current favorite show. She didn't say Apple Podcasts. She didn't say Spotify. She said she'd seen a clip on Instagram that stopped her thumb. That's not unusual anymore. It's the default.
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Five Apps Open. Still Dropping the Ball.
Calendly, Zoom, Drive, Notion, a spreadsheet. The tools aren't the problem. The gaps between them are.
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I'd Rather Pay You 30% Than Spend That on Ads
Most podcast tools either don't have an affiliate program or pay you 10% once. PodGlue pays 30% recurring on every Amplify subscriber you refer, for as long as they stay. There's a reason for that.
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Where Did Your Customer Feedback Actually Go?
I clicked Submit on my own product's Feedback button and watched the issue land in the wrong place. Six weeks of customer feedback had been quietly going to a team that wasn't watching.
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I Was the Bottleneck in Every Part of My Show
For years I ran Hacks & Hobbies alone, host, editor, scheduler, show notes writer, follow-up person. The show didn't stall because I ran out of ideas. It stalled because I ran out of me.
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The Creator Economy Just Got Its Disney. The Other 50,000 Creators Still Need an OS.
Steven Bartlett's $425M Steven.com is the most important validation the creator economy has ever received. It's also a model that, by design, will only serve a few dozen creators. Here's what the rest of us are building toward.
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The Guest You Booked Six Months Ago
You booked them when it felt right. Now it's the night before, the doc is blank, and you're piecing together who they are from LinkedIn and three browser tabs. This happens every episode. It doesn't have to.
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The Headline That Stopped Me in 2014
Instacart raised $44M and I quietly stopped building. Twelve years later, a $425M creator economy raise is teaching me the same lesson, except this time I'm not putting the laptop down.
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Your Guest List Is the Warmest Relationship List You Own
Podcasters treat their guest roster like a CRM of strangers. It isn't. Every person on that list chose to show up, gave their time, and shared something real. Most of them never heard from you again.
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You Had a Great Conversation. Then You Disappeared.
Your guest showed up, prepared, shared something real, promoted the episode, and then waited. Most hosts never came back. That's the moment it breaks.
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I Wanted to Invite 50 People to a Call
What started as a weekly beta call invite turned into rebuilding how PodGlue tracks people. The smallest tasks reveal the most about what you actually need.
Read articleFrom 642 Megabytes to Nine
From 642 Megabytes to Nine
Our admin app deploy was uploading 642MB. The container only needed 9MB. The fix was one config file, and a question I'd been avoiding.
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The Deploy That Never Deployed
Our CI had been silently rejecting every edge function deploy for months. I only noticed because something I shipped didn't appear.
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The Email System I Almost Built Twice
I was three commits into a custom email broadcast tool when I remembered I was already paying for one that did it better. The lesson wasn't about email.
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The Reason I Built PodGlue
I had 147 rows in a spreadsheet. Color-coded. Formulas. Dropdown menus. It was immaculate. It was also completely useless. That's where this started.
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How to Turn Your Podcast Into a Book
The material is already there. Here's exactly how I selected ten episodes from 750+, structured each chapter into four parts, and turned hundreds of hours of conversation into a published book.
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Your Archive Is Not an Archive. It's a Research Library You've Never Opened.
If you've done fifty, a hundred, three hundred episodes, you've assembled something most people never have: a structured body of expert knowledge organized by conversation. The problem is you can't get to it.
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The Best Conversation You've Had Is Probably Still Waiting for a Follow-Up.
The conversation is the easy part. Showing up for it consistently, with the right guest, at the right time, that part requires something a good microphone can't give you.
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Podcasting Disrupted Radio. Nobody Asked What Comes Next.
The podcast industry built better tools for making episodes. Nobody built tools for making something more durable. That's the gap PodGlue was built to close.
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You Think You're in the Audio Business. You're Not.
Most podcast tools were built to solve the audio problem. They solved it. But nobody went back and asked what happens to the conversation after it ends.
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How I Turned 20 Podcast Episodes into a Book Manuscript in Under an Hour
I had 300+ episodes of Hacks & Hobbies sitting in a digital vault. Here’s how I finally unlocked that content and turned it into a book manuscript in 45 minutes.
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