The Questions I Kept Forgetting To Send

A guest told me once that she'd spent the night before our interview rehearsing answers to questions I never asked.

She'd guessed. She had no idea what was coming, so she prepared for everything, which mostly meant she prepared for the wrong thing and arrived tired. That's a bad trade for both of us, I got a guest running on nerves instead of one running on the two stories she actually wanted to tell.

PodGlue has been able to fix this for a while. When it builds the run of show for an episode, it generates a set of guest-facing questions alongside it. There's a button in the app that emails them over. I built it. I use it.

Except I don't, reliably. I use it when I'm sitting in the episode anyway, and I forget it entirely the other times, the weeks with four recordings, which are exactly the weeks a guest most needs the heads-up.

And here's the part that took me longer than it should have to see: nothing about forgetting looks like a mistake. There's no error, no red flag, no empty state. An email that never got sent leaves no trace anywhere. My dashboard looks identical whether I sent the questions to all four guests or none of them. So I never caught up on it, because there was nothing to catch.

The fix is that the questions now ride along with the reminder that was already going out.

PodGlue sends every guest a prep note 48 hours before you record, the "here's how to get ready" email that's on by default. As of this week, if that episode has a run of show, the questions are simply part of that email. Nothing to click, nothing to remember. The guest opens the reminder they were already getting and the questions are right there.

A few things I was careful about, because guest email is not a place to be clever.

If you've written your own version of that prep email, and a lot of hosts have, your wording is untouched. The questions get added underneath what you already wrote, not folded into some new template that overwrites your voice.

If the episode doesn't have a run of show yet, the reminder goes out exactly as it does today. No blank "here are your questions" heading with nothing under it. An empty section is worse than no section; it makes you look like your software is half-working, in front of a guest, two days before they show up.

And the questions your guest gets are only ever the guest-facing ones. The private notes you keep for yourself, the follow-ups, the where-to-push notes, stay on your side. That line hasn't moved.

You can also see it before your guest does. The test-send on that reminder now includes the questions section, so you can mail yourself a copy and check it reads the way you'd want.

The manual button is still there. If you want to send questions early, or send a different set, nothing about that changed.

What I keep coming back to is that the feature already existed. The gap wasn't capability, it was that the capability had a human step in the middle of it, and the human was me at 11pm the night before a recording. Most of what I fix in PodGlue lately isn't a missing feature. It's a feature that quietly depends on me being at my best on my worst week.

Your guest shouldn't have to guess what you're going to ask. Now they don't have to, and neither of us has to remember anything for that to be true.