The Podcast SOPs That Run My Show

By Junaid Ahmed

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For years, my entire podcast lived in one place: my head.

How to book a guest. What to send them. How I formatted the show notes. Which folder the edited file went in. When to email the guest their clips. I knew all of it. And because I knew all of it, I was the only one who could do any of it.

That's the trap. "It's in my head" feels like control. It's actually a ceiling.

A podcast SOP is the way out. Standard operating procedure. A fancy term for the same simple thing: write down the steps so the steps can run without you.

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Why doesn't "in my head" scale?

Because your head has a bad day. It gets a deadline at work. It gets a sick kid. It forgets whether it sent the thank-you email to the guest from three weeks ago.

When the whole operation depends on you remembering, the operation pauses every time you do. The episode slips. The clips don't go out. The guest never hears from you. Not because you stopped caring. Because the only copy of the system was busy living its life.

Written steps don't have a bad day.

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Here's what a real SOP looks like. Not a binder. Not a 40-page manual nobody reads.

It's the actual steps, in order, plain enough that someone else could follow them. For booking a guest, mine reads close to this:

• Confirm the date and send the calendar invite with the recording link.
• Send the intake form and the prep questions.
• Three days out, send the reminder and confirm their bio and headshot.
• Day of, have their one-sheet open before you hit record.

That's it. Four lines. But those four lines are the difference between a smooth booking and eight scattered emails.

The test of a good SOP is simple: could a capable person who isn't you do this without asking you a question? If yes, you've written it well. If they'd have to interrupt you, you've left a step in your head.

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I think about my show as a pipeline now. Idea to live. Six stages.

Book. Prep. Record. Publish. Follow up. Repurpose.

Each one is repeatable. Each one used to depend on me. And each one is the kind of thing that benefits from being written down once, because you do it every single episode, the same way, forever.

The recording itself isn't on that list as a step to systematize. That's the part that's mine. The conversation needs me present, paying attention, following the thread. That part can't be a checklist, and it shouldn't be.

Everything around it can.

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Booking and prep are the front of the pipeline. The guest gets confirmed, gets their intake, gets a prep call if it matters. Their context lands in one place so the night before isn't a research scramble.

Record is the part that stays mine.

Publish is where the SOP earns its keep. Audio goes to editing. Show notes get written to the same format every time. The episode gets scheduled. None of that requires my judgment after the first time I wrote down how I want it done.

Follow up is the step I used to drop most. The guest gets their link, their clips, their assets. A thank-you. This is the one that quietly decides whether a guest ever promotes you, and it's the easiest one to forget when you're underwater.

Repurpose is the long tail. The clips, the quotes, the post that turns one conversation into a week of material.

Six stages. One of them is mine. Five of them are a system.

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Now the honest part.

Writing the SOPs is not the hard bit. The hard bit is the discipline to follow them when you're in a hurry.

The temptation, always, is to skip the step "just this once" because you can do it faster in your head. And you can, the first time. But every time you go around your own system, you teach yourself that the system is optional. Then it isn't a system. It's a suggestion.

I still fight this. I'm not going to pretend I follow my own pipeline perfectly. But the weeks I trust it are the weeks the show runs while I'm busy living my life. And the weeks I freelance it are the weeks something falls through.

The discipline is the product. The document is just where you keep it.

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There's a second payoff, and it's the one that took me longest to see.

Once the steps are written down, you can hand them off. A VA. A part-time editor. A friend who wants to help. You're not training them on the contents of your head anymore. You're pointing them at a page.

You can't delegate a system that only exists when you're awake to explain it. You can delegate a written one in an afternoon.

That's the whole reason to write them down. Not tidiness. Freedom.

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This is the thinking PodGlue is built around: the repeatable parts of a show (booking, prep, publishing, follow-up, repurposing) connected so they run without you standing over them, and clear enough to hand to help. PodGlue is in beta. If you're tired of being the only person who knows how your show works, you can join at podglue.com/join.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks and Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue. He spent years being the bottleneck in every part of his show, and wrote it all down so he wouldn't have to be.