I Was Hiding on My Own Homepage

By Junaid Ahmed

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A few days ago my mentor Pat Flynn reviewed the PodGlue homepage on a call.

He had a lot of notes. My eye does not know where to go. Too many taglines all competing to be the headline. The text is too small. Say it tighter.

Then, near the end, he said the thing I have not stopped thinking about.

"We wanna see faces. We wanna see real people, Junaid."

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Here is what stung.

He was not telling me the site was ugly. He actually liked the branding and the dark mode. He liked the pricing.

The problem was simpler, and worse than ugly. You could read the whole page and not find me anywhere.

I built PodGlue because podcasting is about people. The guest. The relationship. The person doing the work. That is the whole idea.

And then I built a homepage with no people on it.

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So I rebuilt it around the person

The new homepage opens with me. A real photo, in the studio where I have spent most of my life.

The headline is in my own voice now. First person, the way I would actually say it. One headline, not five.

There is a section that says, plainly, who PodGlue is not for. I would rather tell you the truth and keep your trust than sell you something you will regret on day three.

And there is the real reason I built it. A spreadsheet with 147 guest names I mostly lost track of after publish day. My signature at the bottom, like a letter, because it is one.

It is not a brochure anymore. It is a person telling you what he made and why.

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You are probably doing the same thing

Here is the part that matters for you.

I hid behind my software. You hide behind your show.

The format. The edit. The intro music. The clean, polished feed. The person who actually does the work, the one people would follow, stays off the page.

You can be very good at this and still be invisible. That is the gap nobody warns you about. Being good at something is not the same as being known for it.

Pat's note came down to one line. We want to see real people. It turns out that is true of a software homepage and a podcast feed in exactly the same way.

People follow people.

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What is next

Pat gave me more than one thing to fix, and I am still working through the list. Tighter copy. Clearer hierarchy. One headline instead of a pile of them.

But the first fix was the one that mattered, and it was not really a design decision. It was a decision to stop hiding.

PodGlue was always meant to put the person back in podcasting. It was time the homepage did the same.

If your show is doing this to you, hiding the one person worth following, that is worth fixing. PodGlue is built for podcasters who want the relationship, not just the download.