build in public tools, honestly compared

there are more build in public tools than there are people building in public, and most of them solve the wrong end of the problem. here is the landscape, honestly, including where underway is not the right buy.

clip tools. descript, opus clip, and the rest take a long recording and cut it into short ones, find the highlights, add captions. they are good at what they do. they assume the long recording exists. for most founders it does not, because sitting down to record an hour is exactly the thing that never happens. if you already record a weekly hour, a clip tool is the right buy and underway is not.

scheduling tools. typefully, hypefury, buffer, and the native schedulers on every platform. they take posts you wrote and send them at the right time, with threads and analytics. the writing is assumed. a scheduler with nothing in it is a calendar. useful once there is a habit; useless for building one.

screen recorders. loom is excellent for showing a thing to a colleague. it is not a diary. it has no memory of yesterday, it does not ask you anything, and a folder of looms is not a series. the same goes for the built-in screen recorders on every laptop.

open startup dashboards. public revenue graphs, user counts, the open metrics pages. honest and worth having once there is revenue. they are a number, not a story, and nobody follows a number. they work best as one line in an episode rather than as the whole channel.

note-taking and journaling apps. day one, notion, obsidian. a private written diary is a fine thing and a different thing. text can be written afterwards, which is exactly what makes it weaker as a public record: there is no proof of when it was written or by whom. video filmed on the day is its own timestamp.

ai video generators. avatars, generated b-roll, synthetic voices. the fastest way to make a build in public channel that nobody trusts. the entire value of the format is that a real person said a real thing on a real day. a made-up picture in front of a real diary is the exact dissonance the format cannot survive.

the gap is at the start of the chain: something that gets tonight's material out of you, every night, when you are tired and unprepared. that is what underway is for. it interviews you about the day you had, cuts the answers into a numbered episode overnight, keeps a private memory so tonight starts where last night stopped, and keeps the archive in order.

it is not a clip tool. it never reorders answers to make a better hook, never adds words you did not say, and does not make anything up. it is not a scheduler either. it writes the words that go around the episode for each platform and you post them yourself. automated posting is the obvious next thing and it is not built yet, and the pricing page says so rather than ticking a box.

what it costs: three episodes free with no card. founder is £29 a month for the evening interview, an episode every morning, the archive page and the text for every platform. series is £79 a month and adds the weekly recap, compilations, the podcast feed and the series deck. raw footage is downloadable on every plan, because it is your face and your voice.

so: if the problem is that you record plenty and need it cut, buy a clip tool. if the problem is that you write plenty and need it sent, buy a scheduler. if the problem is that nothing gets recorded, start here.