600 Episodes and Nobody Got Credit

I found a bug in my own product this week, and it was hiding in plain sight.

I imported a full back catalog through PodGlue's RSS import. Six hundred episodes came in clean: titles, descriptions, audio, artwork. Looked great.

Then I opened the Guest Vault. Almost empty.

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The problem

Hundreds of those episodes had guest names sitting right there in the title. "Scaling a Studio with Sarah Connor." "Guest: Lisa Park." The information was in the feed all along.

But the import never did anything with it. No guest record created. No link between the episode and the person.

For a tool built around guest relationships, that's not a small miss. Every one of those episodes represents a real conversation with a real person. The import treated them like filenames.

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What shipped

The import pipeline now asks one question about every episode it touches: is this a solo episode, or is there a guest here?

If there's a guest, PodGlue creates the guest record and links it to the episode. If it's solo, it marks it solo and moves on. AI reads the title and description to make the call, with pattern matching as backup.

The part I'm most relieved about: nothing gets deleted. The episodes I already imported stay exactly where they are. A background sweep walks through the back catalog a batch at a time, classifies each episode, and fills in the missing guest links. My 600 episodes fix themselves while I do something else.

And if the automation ever gets one wrong, there's now a Re-detect button on any episode. One click, it re-reads the episode, and corrects the link.

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Why this matters

Your back catalog is not just an archive. It's a list of every person who ever said yes to you.

When those episodes are actually linked to guests, you can see who appeared three times, who you haven't talked to in two years, and who deserves a follow-up. That's the difference between an archive and a network.

PodGlue now builds that network automatically, starting from the feed you already have.

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Your spreadsheet finishes the job

Detection gives every guest a name and a link. It can't give them a phone number.

If you've been keeping a contact sheet all these years (and most of us have one somewhere), you can now import it on top. The CSV import matches each row to the guest that's already in your vault, even when your sheet says "Deborah Heiser" and the episode said "Dr. Deborah Heiser," and fills in the blanks: phone, email, socials.

It only fills empty fields. Anything you've typed by hand stays exactly as you wrote it. And when a row could match two different people, it tells you instead of guessing.

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What's next

The detection currently reads titles and descriptions. Audio tags are a possible next layer for feeds that keep their metadata thin.

If you've already imported your show into PodGlue, you don't need to do anything. The sweep is already running. Open your Guest Vault in a few hours and meet everyone you forgot you knew. Then bring your contact sheet, and watch the blanks fill in.