Your Guests Just Met Each Other

By Junaid Ahmed

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Last week I wrote that an audience is not a community, and that a podcast episode is an event: it sparks something, but it does not hold it.

This week we shipped the first piece of the holding.

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Here is the problem in one sentence. After 700-plus episodes, I was the only person who knew my guests.

Not knew them personally. Knew of them, together. I could see that the leadership coach from episode 212 and the burnout researcher from episode 540 belonged in the same room. They could not see it. Each of them knew exactly one person in my network: me.

That is the shape of most podcasts. A wheel with a hundred spokes and every spoke connected only to the hub.

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So we changed it. Every public guest page on PodGlue now has a section called "Shared the mic with."

If you have a guest page at podglue.com/@your-handle, it now shows the other guests who appeared on the same shows you did. Ranked by how much you overlap. One click takes you to their page.

Nothing about it is complicated. That is sort of the point. The data was always there: who appeared on what show has been public since the day those episodes went live. We just never drew the lines between the dots.

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A concrete example. Say you were on three podcasts last year. Each of those shows had a dozen other guests. That is roughly thirty people who share a stage with you, who talk to the same audiences you do, who probably think about the same problems you do.

Before this week, finding them meant scrolling three feeds and taking notes.

Now they are on your page, and you are on theirs.

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Two things we were careful about.

Only public profiles show up. If a guest has not made their page public, they are not in anyone's section, full stop. And the section only draws from episodes that are already published and public. Nothing appears that was not already on the open web.

And you can turn it off. Every guest controls their own page sections, and this one is no different. Hide it, move it, keep it. Your page, your call.

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And here is the part I am genuinely excited about. Seeing a familiar name is recognition. So we also shipped the next step: you can now ask for an introduction, right from your Network page.

The request does not go to the other guest. It goes to the host.

That was a deliberate choice. The host knows both of you. The host vouched for both of you by putting you on the show. So the host reviews the request, and if it feels right, makes the introduction the way a good host always has. Nothing is shared automatically. No inbox gets cold-pitched. If the host passes, you simply see "not right now."

Because introductions were never really a software feature. Walking around the room introducing your guests to each other is just what a good host does. We are only making it possible when the room is spread across a year of episodes.

The episode was the event. This is the room staying open after it ends.

That is what PodGlue is for.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks and Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue. He has built tools for 700 conversations, and now the people in them are starting to find each other.