There was a moment during my eighth or ninth research call when I realized I wasn't solving my own problem anymore.
I was talking to another agency owner. Different city, different shows, different tools. But the exact same pain. And I thought: this isn't a "me" thing. This is an industry thing.
That's what starts a product — not a clever idea, but a pattern that won't stop repeating.
Why I Did This
I host Hacks & Hobbies. Over 700 episodes. I've booked hundreds of guests, managed the coordination myself, dropped follow-ups I promised, lost track of conversations that should have turned into relationships.
At some point I started building systems to fix it — not because I'm especially organized, but because the chaos was costing me.
Then I started wondering: is every podcast agency living with the same chaos? Or had someone cracked this already?
So I went and asked. Fifteen agency owners. Real calls. Real questions. I took notes, recorded the conversations, tracked the data.
Here's what I found.
Finding #1: Everyone Has Built Their Own Patchwork
Look at the tools across the 15 agencies I spoke with: Notion, ClickUp, Asana, Google Sheets, Trello, Monday.com, Descript, Dropbox Replay, Slack, Loom, Simplecast, WordPress, Google Data Studio, Zapier, Calendly, Riverside — and that's a partial list.
Not a single agency was using the same stack. Not even close.
Tyler Atwell at Tyler Atwell Productions was running Descript, Dropbox Replay, Google Sheets, Simplecast, Google Data Studio, Loom, and WordPress — simultaneously. Seth Silvers at Story On Media was in Trello, Google Drive, Google Sheets, and Slack. Doug Sandler at Turnkey Podcast Productions, managing 60 to 70 shows, was running Monday.com.
These are experienced operators with real teams. And every single one had assembled their own combination of tools to do the same basic job: manage podcasts, coordinate guests, deliver episodes.
Nobody had one place for everything. Everyone had four or five tools holding hands and hoping nothing fell through the cracks.
Finding #2: Four Years to Build What Should Ship in a Week
Mark Savant at Mark Savant Media was one of the sharper operators I talked to. He's been in this space for years, has a growing agency, runs a mastermind, has real clients with real results.
When I asked about his podcast production workflow, he said something that stuck with me: "It's taken four years to get to where we're at."
Four years. Combining the right people, the right systems, the right automations, and now AI — four years to get to a workflow he felt good about.
When we talked, he had a whiteboard behind him covered in sticky notes. He was building a digital course around his workflow — not because it was simple, but because it was complex enough that other people needed it explained.
That's the tell. When your workflow is complex enough to teach, it's too complex to scale.
Finding #3: Pre-Production Is Where the Pain Lives
Seth Silvers runs Story On Media. He manages 15 shows with a team of 7. His goal is to be the most trusted podcast agency in the country and scale to 100-200 shows.
He's also one of the more hands-on operators I talked to. Most agencies, Seth told me, just receive recorded audio and edit it. His team is in the studio — virtual or in person — screening guests, checking tech setups, communicating with guests before they ever hit record.
But then he said this: "We just don't do it consistently enough."
That's it. That's the whole problem in one sentence.
They know what good looks like. They do it sometimes. But the process is manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent — because there's no system that makes consistent easy.
Seth also noted something interesting about scale: most big agencies seem to max out around 80 to 100 shows. He's seen it again and again. His ambition is to break through that ceiling. But without better systems, the ceiling doesn't move.
Finding #4: The Guest Is an Afterthought
This is the thing that hit me hardest across all 15 conversations.
Everyone talked about production. Editing, delivery, scheduling, file management. The guest coordination piece — finding them, prepping them, following up after — was almost always described as a burden or an inconsistency.
Carl Richards at Podcast Solutions Made Simple was bringing on new clients at a steady pace. Molly Ruland at Heartcast Media was managing 25 shows. Billy Saleeby at Podify had 36 active projects. These are real production operations.
But the guest — the person who actually makes the conversation worth recording — was being managed through a patchwork of emails, spreadsheets, and hope.
Nobody was treating guests as long-term relationships. They were one-time bookings in a queue.
That's not a guest workflow problem. That's a relationship problem.
What Was Actually Missing
Every agency I talked to was working hard. The problem wasn't effort.
The problem was architecture. Specifically: there was no category of software built around the idea that a podcast guest is a relationship, not a transaction.
CRMs exist for sales relationships. Project management tools exist for deliverables. Booking tools exist for scheduling.
But nothing existed that said: here is your guest, here is every interaction you've had with them, here's what you promised to send them, here's when their episode went live, here's the follow-up you haven't sent yet.
That's what a podcast relationship management system — a PRM — would do. And nobody had built one.
What I Built Instead
PodGlue started as a solution to my own chaos. After 15 conversations, I understood it was an industry gap.
The workflow problem isn't that agencies lack tools. They have too many. The gap is that none of those tools understand what a podcast guest is — someone who gave you their time, their story, their audience, and deserves more than silence after the episode drops.
PodGlue is built around that belief. One place for guest history, episode tracking, follow-ups, and the pre-production workflow that makes good recordings possible.
Not more tools. A system.
If you're managing more than a handful of shows and you've built your own patchwork — you already know what I'm describing. That feeling of things falling through the gaps isn't a you problem.
It's what every operator in this industry is living with. I have the transcripts to prove it.