Team onboarding
A practical first-hour path for the Owner, Admins, Members, and the teammate validating AI access.
Use this page as the shared checklist after the Owner has completed the Quickstart — or, if the Channel was built for you, after the handover path. The goal is not to index the entire archive immediately. The goal is to give every teammate the right access, publish a representative slice, and verify the human and agent experiences end to end.
Before the call
The Owner should have these ready:
- The exact YouTube channel URL or RSS feed URL.
- Access to the owning Google/Brand Account, or to the email published in the RSS feed.
- A preferred Library slug and, if applicable, a custom subdomain such as
library.example.com. - Two or three representative episodes: one recent, one evergreen, and one that contains a question your audience often asks.
- The names and email addresses of the initial operators.
Team Invitations require Pro or Studio. On Free, the Owner can complete the whole setup alone and upgrade before inviting collaborators.
Assign roles deliberately
| Role | Give it to | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | The person accountable for billing and the long-term Channel relationship | Everything, including Billing and transferring ownership. Their Plan and Credits fund all indexing on the Channel. |
| Admin | A trusted producer, operations lead, or technical lead | Operate content and settings, invite/remove teammates, and change Member/Admin roles. Cannot manage the Owner's billing. |
| Member | Editors, researchers, and people doing day-to-day content work | Open the Studio, sync/index episodes, inspect the private catalog, and correct episode speakers. Cannot manage the team. |
Keep exactly one Owner. Ownership transfer is a billing handoff as well as an access change: the selected existing Member becomes Owner, the previous Owner becomes Admin, and future indexing uses the new Owner's Plan and Credits. Neither person's subscription or existing Credit balance is transferred.
The first-hour runbook
Owner — establish the Channel
Complete Quickstart, then check:
- The newest episode finished indexing and opens in both Studio and Library.
- Settings → General has the intended Library URL and Podcast language.
- Settings → Billing shows the expected Plan, available Credits, and renewal/expiry state.
- Settings → Domains has the intended custom domain, or the team has consciously chosen to launch on
<slug>.podhood.com.
Owner or Admin — invite the operating team
Open Settings → Members, enter the teammate's email, and choose Admin or Member. The invitee must sign in with that same email and accept the invitation. Pending Invitations can be canceled from the same page.
After everyone joins, verify that only the small group who genuinely needs team-management access is Admin. A plain Member should be the default.
Content lead — publish a representative slice
From Episodes in the Studio:
- Click Sync now if the source changed after onboarding.
- Select the two or three representative unindexed episodes.
- Click Index and wait for each to reach Live.
- Open each episode in the Studio and spot-check the summary, chapters, Q&A, speakers, transcript, entities, and topics.
The first successful Index publishes an episode. A Re-index replaces the derived Brief but reuses the existing transcript.
Editor — correct the high-value mistakes
On a Studio episode page, use the pencil beside a speaker to associate one line or every matching voice with an existing person, create a new person, or Unidentify it. Multi-select transcript lines for a batch correction. If diarization swaps two people partway through, use Swap from here to the end at the breakpoint.
Then visit Settings → People / Companies / Products to rename, merge, archive, or restore entities. Mark recurring people as Hosts and add avatars where useful. Topics are regenerated as a whole tree under Settings → Topics rather than edited row by row.
Growth or audience lead — inspect the public experience
Open the Library in a signed-out window and verify:
- Search returns the representative episodes for real audience questions.
- Topic/person/company/product hub pages open from episode chips.
- Timestamp links start at the intended moment.
- Subscribe works, including on a white-labeled Library.
- The canonical host, artwork, show name, and Interface language are correct.
Back in the Studio, Subscribers shows people who followed from the Library, including whether they still receive new-episode email.
Deciding on white-label? It changes only the brand chrome — Subscribe and sign-in keep working, so Subscribers keep accruing while it is on. Note that the sign-in flow and new-episode email remain PodHood-operated even on a white-label domain.
AI or technical lead — verify machine access
Use Connect AI in the Library to install the Channel's MCP server in one team client. Run a question that the representative episodes answer, confirm the result includes timestamped quotations, and open at least one citation.
Also check:
https://<library-host>/llms.txt- One episode's
.mdtwin https://<library-host>/mcp- The REST API, if the team plans a custom integration
Ready-to-share checklist
- The Owner and initial Admin/Member roles are correct.
- The slug and Podcast language are final enough to share publicly.
- The Plan and Credit balance can cover the intended first batch.
- At least three representative episodes are Live and reviewed.
- Important speaker/entity errors are corrected.
- Search, a hub page, one timestamp link, and one Translation were exercised.
- Connect AI/MCP returned a grounded answer with a working citation.
- The canonical domain and
llms.txtare reachable. - The team knows that Sync imports metadata, while Indexing spends Credits and publishes.
Once this passes, expand into the back catalog in deliberate batches. See Syncing & indexing and Get found & cited.