Your Guest Already Told You How to Interview Them

By Junaid Ahmed

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When you book a guest, they usually fill out a form.

Their bio. The thing they want to talk about. A story. Sometimes a hobby, or how the two of you even found each other. Good stuff. The stuff that makes an interview feel like a conversation instead of a Q and A.

Then it lands in a calendar invite. And it sits there.

By the time you sit down to record, you are scrolling back through your inbox trying to remember what they said. Or you skip it and wing it. I have done both, more times than I would like to admit across 700-plus episodes.

The information was never the problem. Nobody built a place for it to go.

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Here is what bugged me most. Every host asks different questions.

I ask guests what hobby they wish they got into. You might ask about their biggest failure. Someone else asks for a hot take. There is no universal intake form, and there never will be. So most tools either ignore the answers or squeeze them into their own boxes and lose what made them yours.

We took the other road.

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PodGlue now imports a booking straight from wherever you scheduled it. Your calendar, your scheduler, your own form. It brings the whole intake with it. Your questions, kept exactly as you wrote them. Their answers, word for word. Nothing flattened, nothing dropped.

Then it does the part that matters. Those questions and answers become the context that builds your run of show.

Say a marketing coach books you. Her intake says she teaches a framework for landing clients, the episode she wants is a how-to, she used to sing in a band, and the two of you met at a conference. When you go to plan the episode, the run of show already knows all of that. The opener can use the band as an icebreaker. The questions can dig into her framework. You met at that conference, so you can open like people who already know each other, because you do.

You are prepping from what she already handed you.

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The best part is it works even when the booking did not come through PodGlue.

Booked them on a different scheduler? Paste the invite. We keep your questions, capture the answers, and it flows into the same place. No re-typing, no lost context.

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What is next is making the guest side just as smooth, so the person across the mic feels that same care from the moment they say yes.

I have interviewed more than 700 people. The episodes I remember are the ones where I actually used what the guest told me before we hit record. That is the whole idea here. The details your guest already gave you should show up in the room.

That is what we are building at PodGlue. The show already has the context. We just make sure it does not get lost on the way to the mic.