Junaid Ahmed
Essays, playbooks, and product notes from Junaid Ahmed.
You've Been Consistent for Three Years. Why Is Your Audience the Same Size?
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.
Read articleYour Best Episode Is Invisible
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.
Read articleNinety Videos of IP Collecting Dust
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.
Read articleWhen a Beta User Tells You to Spin It Off
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.
Read articleThe Book He Built in 2015 With QR Codes
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.
Read articleA Business Card Says What You Do. A Book Says Who You Are.
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.
Read articleHelp That Knows the Product
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.
Read articleWhere Did Your Customer Feedback Actually Go?
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.
Read articleI'd Rather Pay You 30% Than Spend That on Ads
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.
Read articleFive Apps Open. Still Dropping the Ball.
Five Apps Open. Still Dropping the Ball.
Calendly, Zoom, Drive, Notion, a spreadsheet. The tools aren't the problem. The gaps between them are.
Read articleI Was the Bottleneck in Every Part of My Show
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.
Read articleThe Creator Economy Just Got Its Disney. The Other 50,000 Creators Still Need an OS.
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.
Read articleThe Guest You Booked Six Months Ago
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.
Read articleThe Headline That Stopped Me in 2014
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.
Read articleYour Guest List Is the Warmest Relationship List You Own
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.
Read articleYou Had a Great Conversation. Then You Disappeared.
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.
Read articleI Wanted to Invite 50 People to a Call
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.
Read articleThe Deploy That Never Deployed
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.
Read articleThe Email System I Almost Built Twice
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.
Read articleThe Reason I Built PodGlue
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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