The Questions We Sent Your Guest Were Written for You

By Junaid Ahmed

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Book a guest and PodGlue writes their prep for you. Questions, specific to them, drawn from whatever they told you when they booked. You hit send, they get a few days to think, and you both turn up ready.

I ran a real booking through it this week. Seven questions came back. I read them as if I were the guest.

"Super, welcome to Hacks and Hobbies! Could you start by walking us through your journey…"

"Super, for listeners who might be inspired by your work and want to learn more, where can they…"

The first is me opening the show. The second is me closing it. Neither is something a guest can prepare. What is my guest supposed to do with "where can people find you" three days before we record? Rehearse their own URL?

The middle ones were closer. Several still started by saying the guest's name at them, the way you greet someone rather than the way you ask them something.

So the list was not sendable. I would have had to rewrite it. And rewriting it is the job the feature existed to do.

What was actually going on

The prep gets written in one go: the run of show, your opening script, the questions for your guest, the questions for you, a promo hook. All in one request.

And the only thing I had ever said about the guest's questions was "six to ten, specific to this guest".

I never said the part that matters: these get emailed to your guest, word for word, days before you record.

Sitting in a request that also asks for an opening script, with no instruction to the contrary, the model did the sensible thing and wrote me an interview. Welcome, journey, middle, plug, out. That is a good interview. It is just not a list you can hand to somebody else.

What changed

Two things, and I need both.

I told it the truth about where these questions end up. Each one has to stand on its own, out of order and out of context, answerable by your guest from their own life.

Then I stopped trusting that. Asking nicely is a hope. So there is now a filter that strips greetings off the front of a question and drops the ones that are show mechanics rather than questions. The welcomes, the sign-offs, the where-can-people-find-you.

That filter is deliberately timid. Throwing away a real question is worse than letting a weak one through. Two examples of why, both caught before this shipped: an early version ate "Where can people learn to recognise the early signs of burnout?" because it started with "where can people". And another version threw out "Why now?" for being too short, which is one of the best questions in the business.

Your run of show, your opening script and your outro all still exist. They are yours. They just stopped being copied into your guest's inbox.

What's next

If you have a booking coming up, open the questions modal. Read it as your guest. If anything still reads like a stage direction, tell me. That filter is meant to grow.

Your guest gets one email from you before the show. It should make them feel prepared, not make them wonder whether you meant to send it.