Setting up Snipd and testing real exports
Snipd is supposed to be your magical shortcut to turning podcast audio into clean notes with timestamps, AI summaries, and highlights. And to be fair, when it works, it’s weirdly satisfying. You just listen to a podcast, tap “bookmark moment,” and it spits out a chunk of semi-sane text. Great. But the very first hiccup happened when I realized: nothing was actually leaving Snipd. Like, my highlights were definitely there in the app, but there was no sign of an export button or any sort of clear way to move them anywhere.
Here’s what finally worked:
– I signed in with my Gmail, because for some reason Snipd didn’t like my Apple login when trying to authorize for external apps.
– In Settings, I went down to “Integrations,” and it let me connect my Notion account. That worked okay.
– I tested the “Export all highlights” button. Nothing happened. Literally nothing.
Turns out, it doesn’t trigger anything unless you also set up a Zapier connection. Which was not obvious. I lost twenty minutes thinking my data was stuck inside Snipd forever, like some kind of podcast purgatory ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To test it, I manually exported a single highlight to email, just to make sure the text looked clean before feeding it into another app. If your highlight has multiple speakers or overlapping ideas, the AI tends to blend things into a fake summary that kinda sounds right but feels off when you re-listen. So double-check the ones you’re piping into Notion.
Connecting Snipd to Zapier with the webhook
Snipd doesn’t connect to Zapier directly. You have to go around the side door with webhooks. Honestly, this feels like someone left an escape hatch open for nerds, and we’re all just crawling through it now.
To do this:
1. In Zapier, create a new Zap and choose Webhooks by Zapier as the trigger app.
2. Select “Catch Hook.” Zapier gives you a unique URL where Snipd will send POST requests (that’s the kind with data inside).
Here’s where things slowed to a halt. Snipd’s webhook only fires when you explicitly bookmark an insight *after* setting up the integration. It doesn’t seem to retroactively blast your backlog of highlights. So I went back to one of my old podcast bookmarks, re-edited the note, and hoped it would trigger something. It didn’t. Only new highlights started showing up.
I tested it with Postman to make sure the Zap was ready for incoming data. That helped, because you can fake what Snipd might send and confirm your Zap is wired correctly before waiting around listening to a 90-minute episode just to test a trigger.
Once the webhook workflow was confirmed live, I hit “bookmark” during a new episode and finally saw data hit Zapier. The payload was messy. Like, AI-summary messy:
– It included the highlight’s title, description, and speaker name (sometimes wrong)
– Timestamps were there but in a weird format (15:30 instead of 930 seconds)
– No image, no podcast metadata — you’ll have to grab that manually if you want logos or context
But hey, it fired. And the Zap didn’t explode. So that was a small win 🙂
Parsing the Snipd data in the Zap
Okay, now the webhook is sending stuff into your Zap, but it’s coming in like a pile of laundry — totally unorganized. Some fields are named reasonably (“title”, “summary”), but others are cryptic or blank. I had success dragging in the timestamp, note content, and source podcast episode name. But not everything works consistently.
Biggest issue I had: indentation and newlines kept breaking inside Notion. I thought I could just push the AI summary directly into a Notion paragraph block, but line breaks were getting flattened. Instead I used a Code block in Notion to preserve formatting when needed. Not ideal, but cleaner than a wall of text.
If you want Snipd’s timestamp to actually link to the podcast spot (like click and it jumps to 18:24 into an episode), you’ll need to manually construct that URL. They don’t pass it as a field in the webhook — because of course they don’t. I copied the base podcast URL from their app and spliced the timestamp into it using Zapier’s Formatter tool:
Example formula:
“`PodcastURL?timestamp=852“`
…which kinda works, but only if the podcast is hosted in their supported players. Apple Podcasts doesn’t seem to care about timestamps in the URL. So in the end, I used Snipd’s built-in share link, which works properly. You can find that by long-pressing the highlight in the Snipd app and choosing “Copy Link” — inexplicably, this version has all the metadata embedded.
Sending parsed highlights into Notion
I set up Notion as the endpoint in my Zap. But Zapier’s Notion integration is still weirdly restrictive — it doesn’t support everything. For example, it took me a while to realize you can’t create page icons or cover images unless you use the unofficial Notion API or run code (which I wasn’t ready to do that day).
What worked best: Create a template database in Notion with these columns already set up:
– Title (for the insight summary)
– Podcast episode (plain text)
– Timestamp (I formatted this as text like “18:24”)
– Snipd link (URL to play that moment)
– Full highlight (multi-line text block or toggle block)
Then in Zapier, map Snipd’s webhook fields to each column. The dropdown menus inside the Zap will only show up after a webhook is caught at least once, so trigger a test one before expecting to populate the fields.
I tried fancy formatting — like making buttons in Notion, or nesting a quote in a quote — but unless you build JSON-rich text blocks, most of that is off the table. Notion keeps things plain.
The highlight content from Snipd often came with dashes and random extra spaces. I cleaned these up using Zapier’s Formatter “Text > Replace” action — I made a substep that removed double dashes and stray newlines using simple regex. If that sounds confusing, you can also just use “Text > Trim Whitespace.” Super low-effort fix that works 80% of the time.
What broke in the middle of the Zap
Two days in, everything suddenly stopped. I didn’t touch anything, I swear. I bookmarked a new podcast moment in Snipd, and… crickets. Zapier didn’t catch anything at all.
I went into the Zap history, and the last successful run said “Trigger skipped due to change in data.” No further explanation.
After thirty minutes of tearing my hair out, I discovered Snipd had updated their webhook payload format. Yep. They added a new enclosing field around all the content, so instead of sending a flat object, it was now nested under “event[highlight]”.
Which meant all my field mappings in Zapier were now invalid. Ugh.
Fixing it was as dumb as re-triggering the webhook and re-selecting each field again. So I triggered a new podcast moment in Snipd, then reloaded the sample data in Zapier’s webhook trigger, and remapped the nested fields. This time, I made a backup copy of the Zap just in case Snipd updated again next week 🫠
Filtering Snipd highlights to avoid dumping everything
One underrated problem: not every highlight is actually useful. Sometimes you bookmark something thinking it’ll be great later, but reading the summary back later, it reads like AI poetry:
“This moment is about… the essential essence of change.” What does that even mean? 😛
So I added a filter step in Zapier to only keep highlights containing certain keywords. For instance:
– productivity
– tools
– automation
I also tried leveraging the speaker name — like only let it through if the speaker is “Cal Newport” or something. But Snipd doesn’t always tag the speaker correctly.
A better approach: only push highlights that include a specific tag. When you add a highlight in Snipd, you can type in optional tags manually. So I added keywords like #sendtonotion or just #z, then filtered in Zapier:
“Only continue if Tags contains z”
Now I can listen freely and only tag the bits I actually care to push downstream.
Building a reading queue database in Notion
Once my highlights were landing in Notion, I realized I didn’t actually want to read them all at once. I wanted a queue — something I could skim through later when I had time. So I built a Kanban-style Board view in Notion with these columns:
– New
– Skimmed
– Converted to project
Each new highlight landing through Zapier drops into “New.” I added a checkbox property called “Archived” too — if that gets marked as true, the view hides the card. Nice subtle cleanup trick.
I also made Notion auto-generate page previews using the AI summary, and inside each page, I added a “Question this answers” property. That way, I’m not just collecting quotes, I’m actually tracking *use cases*.
Yeah, it started as just podcast bookmarks. But now I’ve got this self-refreshing pile of audio-turned-notes, sorted by actionability.
When to just give up and export manually
Sometimes, it’s just not worth the Zap. If you’re only trying to capture one golden quote from an hour-long podcast, setting up a full webhook pipeline and regex formatting is kind of ridiculous.
Snipd offers a share-to-email feature from the app. I used that to send a single highlight to myself, then copied it into Notion manually. Took 30 seconds. Compare that to the three hours I spent debugging why timestamps weren’t parsing 😅
My rule now is: if your workflow feels more like programming than notebooking, maybe it’s time to step outside the automation spiral for a minute