Not Every Conversation Is an Episode

By Junaid Ahmed

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I record a lot of conversations that never go in the feed.

Discovery calls. Research interviews. The fifteen agency owners I sat down with just to understand how they ran their shows. None of those were episodes. None of them belonged on Apple Podcasts. But some of them were good. Good enough that I wanted them on my own website, where the right person might actually read them.

For a long time, PodGlue made that an all-or-nothing choice. A conversation was either public everywhere or public nowhere.

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The reason is a flag we built a while back called publishable.

It does one job, and it does it hard. If a conversation is marked not publishable, it stays off your podcast. No Apple feed. No Spotify. No public episode page. That is on purpose. A sales call should never leak onto your show by accident, and that guardrail is one I am not willing to soften.

But it meant the side conversations were stuck. I could not put a research interview on my own site without also risking it on the canonical feed. So they just sat there.

That is the gap. The flag that keeps things safe was also keeping things hidden.

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So we added a second flag, and a small toggle to go with it.

It is called "Publish to feeds," and it lives on the conversation itself. Flip it on, and that one conversation becomes available to your custom feeds. The ones you build for your own site. It does not touch your Apple or Spotify feed. The copy on the toggle says exactly that, because I did not want anyone wondering whether they just accidentally published a discovery call to their show.

Your podcast feed stays your podcast feed. The side conversations get their own door.

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Here is what that looks like in practice.

Say you run research interviews. Most of them are private and should stay that way. But three of them are sharp, and you want them on your website. You open each one, flip "Publish to feeds," and leave the rest alone. Then you point your site at a custom feed scoped to research interviews.

Those three show up. Your podcast does not move an inch. Nobody scrolling Apple Podcasts ever sees them. The website pulls exactly what you opted in, and nothing else.

One conversation at a time, you decide.

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What is next is the part I am most excited about.

This was the piece I needed before I could wire my own site to PodGlue and let it pull conversations straight from the source. That work is starting now. The feed is the plumbing. The website is what sits on top of it.

For eight years I treated every conversation as research and most of it disappeared the moment the recording stopped. The whole point of PodGlue is that conversations are worth tending, not just the ones that made it into the feed. This is one more way to keep them working for you.

If you have good conversations that were never meant for your podcast, they finally have somewhere to go. PodGlue is in beta at podglue.com/join.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks and Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue. He has recorded over 700 episodes and a lot more conversations that never made the feed.