We Told Your Guest the Interview Already Happened

By Junaid Ahmed

---

Every guest who books with you gets a page. It shows them where their episode is: booked, recorded, in production, scheduled, live. It is the thing you point them at instead of answering "any update?" over email four times.

I booked a test interview for the 24th. Then I opened the guest's page on the 19th.

Booked. Good.

Recorded. "The conversation is in the can." Dated September 24th.

In production. "The episode is being edited." You are here.

None of that had happened. I had not met this person. And the page was telling them, with a checkmark, that we had.

What was actually going on

The page works out which stage you are at, and one of its checks was: does an episode exist yet? If yes, production has started.

That was a perfectly good check when I wrote it. Back then an episode only existed because you made one, and you only made one after you recorded something. The existence of the episode was as good as proof.

Then I changed something else. Bookings now create the episode the moment a guest picks a time, so the prep work is ready before you sit down. The run of show, the questions, all of it. I wrote that. I was pleased with it.

And it quietly turned the old check into a lie. An episode now exists from the second someone books, so the page started calling every future interview "in the can".

The rest of the logic was fine, by the way. It knew the 24th had not arrived. It knew the episode had not been recorded. That one line overruled both, and because the page fills in every step before your current one, it then went back and ticked "Recorded" too. With your recording date, presented as the day it happened.

This is the fourth time in a week I have found the same thing. Not a line that was ever wrong. A line that stopped being right because I changed the ground underneath it and nothing shouted.

What changed

The page now waits for actual evidence. Either the recording date has passed, or the episode says it has been recorded. An episode simply existing proves nothing any more, because it does not.

I also fixed something smaller that was doing real damage. Every step's description was written in the past tense, "the conversation is in the can" being the worst of them, and a step shows its description whether you have reached it or not. Greying it out does not stop it reading as a statement.

So the steps you have not reached now say what will happen. Under Recorded, before your interview: "This is when the two of you talk." With the date. Which is the truth, and is what your guest wanted to know anyway.

What's next

If you have a booking in the calendar right now, open the guest's link. It should say Booked, and nothing else should be ticked.

The other half of that same booking test turned up a second problem. The questions we email your guest are written for you, not for them. That one is tomorrow.

Your guest looks at that page when they are nervous about being on your show. It should never tell them something you would have to walk back.