The Guests I Never Told

Here's a thing I built and then didn't notice was only half working.

When your episode goes live, PodGlue can email the guest to tell them. It's one of my favourite small features, because it's the moment a guest is most likely to actually share the episode. They just got told it exists. They're proud of it. That's the window.

It was firing for some guests and not others, and I couldn't tell you which.

The reason turned out to be about where the guest came from. If someone booked their recording through PodGlue, we had a booking record for them, and everything worked. If the episode came in another way, imported from my RSS feed, pulled from YouTube, added by hand, there was no booking record, and the whole notification path was built around bookings.

So the guest existed. The episode existed. They were linked to each other. And the part of the system that decides who to email was looking somewhere else entirely.

For a show like mine that's most episodes. I have 750 of them and I've been podcasting since 2018. Only a fraction of those guests ever went through the PodGlue booking flow, because PodGlue didn't exist for most of my back catalogue. Every one of the rest was invisible to the thing meant to tell them.

There was a second version of the same problem hiding inside it. Even where it did work, it only ever worked once per guest. If someone came back for a second or third episode, the system had already made up its mind about which episode was theirs, and it was always the first one. Repeat guests are the best guests. They were the ones getting the least.

The fix is that the notification now starts from the episode rather than from the booking. Every guest attached to an episode gets considered, whether they booked through PodGlue or not, and every episode counts, not just their first.

But the part I actually care about is the smaller change underneath it.

Before this, if PodGlue couldn't email a guest, no address on file, say, it just didn't. No record, no note, nothing. Which meant "we tried and couldn't" and "there was nothing to do" looked exactly the same from the outside: an empty space where an email would have been. That's the kind of silence that lets a problem live for months.

Now, when there's a reason a guest couldn't be told, PodGlue writes it down and shows it to you on the episode, right next to the button you'd use to email them yourself. "This guest has no email address on file." You can act on that. You can't act on nothing.

I keep coming back to this. The episode is the byproduct; the relationship is the product. But a relationship you're not maintaining and a relationship you think you're maintaining are very different problems, and the second one is worse, because you're not looking for it.

If you're using PodGlue, check the Promote tab on a recent episode. It'll tell you whether your guest heard from you, and if they didn't, why not.