Eighteen Settings, Buried Two Menus Deep

By Junaid Ahmed

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I built our settings page the way most products do. One feature at a time.

It started clean: four tabs across the top. Brand, workspace, integrations, billing. Then bookings needed a home. Then the RSS feed. Then team access, cover assets, custom feeds, download analytics, AI agent access. Each new thing landed inside the Workspace tab, which quietly grew a second menu down its side.

By last week, PodGlue had eighteen settings screens. Fifteen of them were hiding behind one tab.

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Here is the test that convinced me.

I went looking for our own RSS settings. I built this page, and I still hesitated. Top tab first? Which one? Then a sidebar with four groups and fifteen entries. I found it, but I had to think about it.

Now picture a host who is mid-task, maybe on a call, trying to update one URL. They don't know our internal map. They shouldn't have to.

Settings are the one part of an app where nobody wants to browse. You show up with a job: change the thing, get back to work. Two layers of menus is a tax on that.

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So we flattened it.

One sidebar now. Every destination on it, grouped in plain words: account, setup, bookings, distribution, workspace. No tab inside a tab. Everything is one click away.

And at the top, a search box. Type "rss" and the feed settings surface. Type "team" and there's team access. Type "plan" and billing shows up. You don't have to learn our categories. You just have to know your own words.

The part you can't see matters too: every old link still works. Bookmarks, help docs, the deep links inside the app. We redrew the map without moving the houses.

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There's a lesson in here I keep relearning.

Nobody decides to build a confusing settings page. It happens one reasonable decision at a time. Each feature got a sensible home the day it shipped. The mess only exists when you add it all up.

That's true of podcast workflows too. No one decides to spend their whole Saturday on post-production. It accumulates, one small task at a time, until you can't find your weekend under it.

Either way, the fix is the same. Stop organizing by how it grew. Organize by what the person came to do.

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Here's the part I didn't plan.

The new sidebar borrows its look from our episode workspace, the page hosts already spend their day in. Settings stopped feeling like a different product bolted onto the side.

And because we built it as one shared piece instead of a one-off, our affiliate portal got the same treatment the same day. Same sidebar, same collapsing groups. Two pages fixed, one thing built.

Clean something up properly and the second page is almost free.

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PodGlue exists for exactly that reason: the work after you hit publish shouldn't eat your week. We're in beta now, and you can join the waitlist at podglue.com/join.

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