PodSaid
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Quickstart

Welcome to PodSaid. This page walks you from creating an account to having a working widget on your site. The clickable steps take about 5 minutes. Then your feed processes in the background — usually a few hours for a small catalog, longer for a big backlog — and we email you when it’s live.

You do not need a credit card. You do not need to talk to sales. You do need:

  • An email address
  • The RSS feed URL or YouTube channel for your podcast / sermons
  • The domain where you plan to embed the widget (e.g. www.yourchurch.org or podpodcast.com)

If you have those three, keep going.

1. Sign up

Go to console.podsaid.com and click Sign up.

Enter your email. We send you a one-time link — click it, and you’re in. No password to remember, no credit card, no verification call.

If your email domain is a Google Workspace or Outlook 365 tenant, you can also click Continue with Google or Continue with Microsoft and skip the magic-link step. Both create the same account.

2. Pick your segment

We’ll ask whether you’re setting up PodSaid for:

  • A church — sermon feeds, pastor’s teaching library, weekly service audio
  • A podcast — independent podcasters, small studios, media orgs

Same product either way. Your choice tunes the copy you see, the examples in these docs, and whether we surface church-specific things like the “book 15 minutes with Mark” link or podcaster things like Buzzsprout / Transistor migration notes.

You can change it later if you set up both under one account — that’s fine, we don’t segment your data.

3. Add your feed and your embed domain

Two fields on one form.

Your feed source. One of:

  • An RSS URL — usually something like https://yourchurch.org/feed/sermons.rss or your podcast host’s feed URL (Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Transistor, Anchor all provide one)
  • A YouTube channel — the @handle or the channel URL. We prefer YouTube when you have both, because captions are faster and cleaner than transcribing raw audio

Your embed domain. The site where the widget will live. Enter the full origin including https://:

https://www.yourchurch.org

This gets added to your key’s allowlist right away, so the widget just works the first time you paste the snippet. You can add more domains later (staging, a second site, localhost for development) under Settings → Allowed Origins. See Allowed origins if you’re setting up a multi-environment deploy.

Click Create feed. You’re done with signup.

4. Meet your console

You land on /console with two panels side by side.

Left: the Demo Widget. A live widget already loaded against a public demo feed (Dr. James Tour’s science-and-faith archive, or Clear Creek Community Church’s sermon archive — whichever fits your segment). Ask it a question. Watch it cite specific episodes with timestamps. This is exactly what your own widget will do once your feed is ready — same code, same behavior, same UI, just different content.

Try it before doing anything else. Two minutes here saves you the “is this really what I signed up for?” doubt later.

Right: Ingest Progress. Your own feed’s live processing state. You’ll see:

  • Total episodes we’ve discovered
  • How many are through each stage (transcribe → embed → enrich)
  • Which episode is being processed right now
  • An estimated time to first ready-state

Refresh whenever. Nothing you click here affects the pipeline — it just runs.

5. Grab your embed snippet

Go to Settings → Embed Code. You’ll see the snippet with your feed-id and pk_live_ key already substituted — no placeholders to swap:

<script src="https://widget.podsaid.com/v1/widgets.iife.js" defer></script>
<ask-pod-widget
    feed-id="yourfeedslug"
    api-key="pk_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx">
</ask-pod-widget>

Copy it. Paste it into the page where you want the widget.

Where you paste depends on your platform. Pick yours:

If your platform isn’t listed, the plain HTML page works nine times out of ten.

6. Load your page

Open the URL where you pasted the snippet. You’ll see one of two things:

  • The widget with a “still preparing your content” state — this is normal and expected. Your paste is correct; your feed just isn’t done ingesting yet. You’ll get an email when it is.
  • The widget open and ready — this happens if ingest finishes faster than you paste (small feeds, YouTube channels with clean captions). Ask it a question.

If you see nothing, or you see an error message, jump to Widget errors — what each one means. The two most common first-time errors are origin_denied (your embed domain isn’t in the allowlist yet — go check step 3) and key_missing (the api-key attribute is empty or missing — check your paste).

7. Wait for the “your widget is live” email

Your feed processes in the background. How long depends on the size:

  • YouTube channel with clean captions, ~20 videos: typically under an hour
  • RSS podcast, 20 episodes, audio only: several hours (transcription is the slow part)
  • Podcast with a 200+ episode backlog: one to three days for the full backfill; you’ll get the “live” email as soon as we have enough to answer questions well, and the rest continues in the background

See How ingest works for the full breakdown.

The moment we hit ready state, we send you an email with a one-click example question that fires against your own feed. Click it, watch your widget answer, share the URL with whoever needs to see it work.

8. Your trial clock starts on ready, not signup

You get a 14-day trial of the paid tier. The clock does not start when you sign up — it starts when your feed is ready enough for the widget to answer well. This way you’re not spending days of your trial staring at a progress bar.

On day 14, if you haven’t upgraded, your key stays live — the widget keeps working — but it drops to the free tier: a small “Powered by PodSaid” footer appears, and you have a monthly search cap. Nothing breaks, nothing changes on your embed. See Your trial, and what happens on day 14 for the specifics.

While you wait

The ingest window is the least exciting part of using PodSaid. Things that are worth doing during it:

  • Paste the snippet on your site now, not later. Even before content is ready, the widget mounts with the “still preparing” state — no ugly error page, no broken UI. That way the moment ingest completes, your live site already works with no second visit.
  • Add any staging or preview domains to your allowlist so you can test in your CI/preview environment (see Allowed origins).
  • If you’re a church, forward the “Ask your webmaster to install this” email from Settings → Embed Code to whoever actually edits your site. It has the snippet and where to paste it, ready to send.
  • If you have questions — for churches, especially — book 15 minutes with Mark from /docs/support. Even at this stage, human context helps.

Still stuck?