The Home Screen Was a Lobby. Now It's a Desk.

By Junaid Ahmed

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The old PodGlue home screen looked great in a screenshot. Big dark banner, your podcast name in giant letters, a wall of navigation buttons for every corner of the app.

And then I watched what people actually did with it: they scrolled past all of it to find the one list that mattered, the episodes that needed something from them. The home screen was a lobby. People wanted a desk.

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So we rebuilt it.

The banner is gone. In its place: your show's name, an Upload button, and four counters that actually do something. Needs Action. Ready. Fresh. Stale. They're not decoration anymore, click one and you land in your episode library filtered to exactly those episodes. If the card says 4 episodes are stale, you click it and see those 4 episodes. No hunting.

Below that, the action queue got smarter. We borrowed the idea straight from our iOS app, where it's been working well: your work is grouped into Blockers (something's broken, fix it first), Today (the next real steps), and Upcoming (it can wait). And if a task on the list is something you've already done, checked the show notes, sent the guest their link, you tick it off right there. No clicking into the episode just to mark a box.

The navigation wall came out entirely. Those buttons duplicated the menu that's already on every page. The space they took up now belongs to your actual work.

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Here's a concrete morning with the new screen: you open PodGlue, see "Needs Action: 3, Stale: 1." The queue shows one blocker, a transcript that failed, and two tasks for today. You fix the transcript, tick off a task you handled yesterday, click the Stale card, and nudge that episode that's been sitting for two weeks. Two minutes, and you know your whole show is moving.

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And the right side of the screen now carries the relationship work too: your next guest sessions at a glance (with a count of bookings still waiting on confirmation), and a daily "reach out" suggestion, one guest worth reconnecting with today, with a reason why and one-tap Sent / Scheduled / Skip. iPhone users have had that nudge for a bit; now it's on the web where the rest of your workflow lives.

Two more pieces round it out: a pipeline strip along the bottom showing every episode by stage, idea through published, click a stage to see exactly those episodes, and a recent-activity feed so you can see what moved since you last opened the app. Episodes added, tasks ticked off, guests you connected with. Two weeks of motion, at a glance.

What's next is mostly under the hood: making the web and iPhone apps compute these numbers in one shared place so they can never drift apart. The goal stays the same the whole way: open PodGlue, know exactly where your show stands, do the next thing.

That's what gluing the workflow together is supposed to feel like.