I Watched My Product Break on a Sales Call

By Junaid Ahmed

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I did four demos in one day. A solo host, an agency owner, a brand-new podcaster, and a friend who wants to bring PodGlue to his whole network.

Three of those four calls, something broke while I was sharing my screen.

I want to tell you about that, because the parts that worked are not the parts I learned from.

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The parts that worked

The thesis sold itself, the way it always does once someone watches it move. You import a transcript. The transcript becomes the home for the episode, the guest's details, the social posts, the newsletter, the manuscript, the guest portal. One host said her brain was "moving 100 miles per minute." Another said, out loud, "great minds think alike" when she saw the book builder, because she'd just published a book the slow way.

That's the easy part to write a blog post about. Founder shows product, people like product. Not very interesting.

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The parts that broke

On one call, I clicked into the recording studio to show off the live two-person setup. The host joined from her Windows machine, picked her camera, picked her mic, and nothing came through. My screen cheerfully said "host video connected." It was not connected. We ended up just staying on Zoom and laughing about it.

On another call, a friend tried to log back in. He'd forgotten his password, which is fine, that's what reset flows are for. He typed a new one. He clicked "Update password." Nothing happened. No error. No spinner. The button just sat there. He switched to a different browser and it worked, but he only switched because he's patient and likes me. A stranger would have closed the tab and never come back.

Then there was the small one that stung the most: he couldn't find the login button on my homepage. Because there isn't one. The homepage is built to collect waitlist signups, and I never added a door for the people who already have keys.

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Why I'm glad it happened on camera

Here's the thing about a bug you find alone, late at night, clicking through your own app: you find the bugs you go looking for. You test the path you built. You don't test the path where someone's on Windows, on a different browser, coming back after two weeks, trying to do the obvious thing.

A real person on a real call does all of that in the first five minutes without trying.

The studio that said "connected" when it wasn't, I'd never have caught that, because on my machine it connects. The login button I never built, I'd never have missed it, because I'm already logged in. These aren't bugs you find in code review. They're bugs you find when someone who isn't you sits down and just tries to use the thing.

So I wrote them all down while they were happening. Five issues by the end of the day, each one with the exact moment it broke and the exact thing the person was trying to do. That context, Windows, second browser, returning user, is worth more than the bug report itself.

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What shipped, and what's next

The five issues are filed and triaged. The two that block a real human, the login button that does nothing, and the studio that lies about being connected, are the ones I'm fixing first, because they're the ones that quietly cost you the person on the other end of the call.

The rest are the kind of polish that beta is for: generated images that should save instead of vanish, links that should fill themselves in, a quote card that should show the quote you picked.

None of this changes the thesis. The product still does the thing it promises. But a demo is the most honest test environment you will ever get, and I'd rather break in front of four people who are rooting for me than ship something smooth to four hundred who aren't.

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PodGlue is in beta, which is a polite way of saying it's good enough to break in interesting ways. If you run a show and want to be one of the people who finds the rough edges with me, join at podglue.com.

Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks & Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue.