We Turned Off a Button That Never Actually Worked

By Junaid Ahmed

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There was a card in Settings called Overlap. Connect it, and it would turn your episode into short clips for social. It looked finished. It was not.

Getting it connected meant leaving PodGlue, signing up for a separate service, generating an API key, and pasting it back in. Three steps too many for a feature that was supposed to save you time, not cost you an afternoon.

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What was actually going on

We brought in Overlap months ago as the fastest way to get clip generation into PodGlue without building the whole thing ourselves. That's a reasonable bet to make early. It stopped being one once I looked at how many people actually got through that sign-up flow.

Almost nobody did. The card sat there, technically live, practically invisible. A feature nobody can turn on isn't a feature. It's a promise the product isn't keeping.

What changed

We removed it. All of it: the card in Settings, the clip panel on the video tab, the backend pieces that talked to Overlap, the database tables tracking those jobs. If you never connected it, you'll notice nothing except one less card in your integrations list. If you did connect it, that connection is gone, and there's nothing to reconnect to.

This isn't a "we'll bring it back later" removal. It's a "we're building the real version" removal.

What's next

PodGlue already records video during a live session, host and guest tracks both. That footage has never been used for anything beyond playback. It's the actual raw material for clips, and it's sitting right here, already ours, with nobody needing to sign up for anything.

That's the direction: pick the best moments straight out of a recorded session, cut them, and get them into the same Distribution Center where everything else you publish already lives. No third-party account, no API key, no leaving the app to find out if it worked.

It'll take a few passes to get there. The first one starts with using what a host already does today: flagging a moment as a highlight while recording. That's free signal we've been collecting and doing nothing with. Turning it into an actual clip is the next real step.