The Reason I Built PodGlue

By Junaid Ahmed

I had 147 rows in a spreadsheet.

Color-coded. Formulas. Dropdown menus. It was immaculate.

It was also completely useless. Every time I opened it, I felt overwhelmed, not organized. I had the data but not the system. I had the conversations but not the continuity.

That spreadsheet was my guest list. After years of hosting Hacks & Hobbies, it represented hundreds of people I'd talked to, entrepreneurs, makers, researchers, builders, people who had given me an hour of their time and trusted me with their story.

And I couldn't tell you what happened to most of them after publish day.

I'd send the episode link. Sometimes. I'd share their clip. When I remembered. I'd follow up on something they mentioned. Almost never. The conversation ended, the episode went out, and that person, that relationship, just… stopped.

Not because I didn't care. Because I had no system that made caring easy.

By the time I started building PodGlue, I had recorded over 750 episodes. Nearly a decade of hosting.

The problem wasn't discipline. It wasn't effort. I had plenty of both.

The problem was that nobody had ever built the right infrastructure for what podcasting actually creates. Not content. Relationships.

Every episode is a conversation with a real person. That person has a network, a story, an audience of their own. If you treat the episode as the endpoint, if you hit publish and move on, you've left most of the value on the table.

I had been doing that for years. The spreadsheet proved it.

In 2018, I became a beekeeper.

Not passively. I'd spent six months watching beekeeping videos, hive management, swarm behavior, seasonal cycles. Completely obsessed. Then, at the end of the last video I watched, a master beekeeper said something simple: if you're really interested, stop watching and join your local beekeepers association.

So I did. I took the class. I got my first hive. And then I started a podcast to document the journey, which is where Hacks & Hobbies actually came from.

What I found inside that association changed how I thought about everything else. A group of people who showed up for each other without being asked. They shared what they knew. They moved faster together than any one of them would have moved alone. Someone would have a problem with their hive and three other beekeepers would be in their yard the next weekend.

That stuck with me. The most capable people I've ever met, the builders, the makers, the ones who seem to get more done than anyone else, they're all drawing from something. A mentor. A community. A network they've spent years building.

Success is never as solo as it looks from the outside.

That's true in beekeeping. It's true in podcasting.

I read Nathan Barry's book Authority around this time.

It rewired how I thought about what I was building with my show. Nathan's argument was simple: the right book, at the right moment, changes how people see you. Not just what you do, who you are.

I tested it. I wrote my first book chapter shortly after finishing it. Then another. Then another. I've written several books since, 7 Stages of Home Studio Evolution, Mastering iPhone Video Production, The Ultimate Guide to Video Podcasting, The Power of Community, Podcast Relationship Management, and contributed to others, including a #1 international bestseller.

Every one of those books came from conversations. From episodes. From guests who said something that unlocked a framework I hadn't seen clearly until I heard it out loud.

The podcast was always generating material. The problem was that I had no way to find it, build on it, or stay in relationship with the people who gave it to me.

Here's the gap I kept seeing, in my own show and in conversations with other podcasters:

You have an extraordinary conversation. It goes live. It performs well, or it doesn't, but either way, three weeks later you've moved on to the next one. The guest gets an email they may or may not open. The episode joins an archive you can't search. The insight your guest shared at the 34-minute mark disappears into a folder no one ever opens again.

The show never compounds. The relationships don't grow. You're just producing content, not building anything.

I'd lived all of it myself. The spreadsheet. The missed follow-ups. The archive I couldn't search. The guest I meant to reconnect with and never did.

I built PodGlue because that tool didn't exist and I was tired of working around its absence.

Twenty-five years in UX design taught me one thing above everything else: the system shapes the behavior. If the system makes the right thing easy, people do the right thing. If it makes it hard, they don't, no matter how much they want to.

The follow-up email to a guest shouldn't require remembering. The archive of 750 episodes shouldn't be unsearchable. The relationship with someone who gave you an hour of their time shouldn't live in a spreadsheet row that you feel vaguely guilty every time you look at.

Build the right infrastructure, and the rest follows.

PodGlue is built for what happens after the recording stops.

Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks & Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue.

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