a daily startup vlog nobody has to edit

the daily startup vlog is the format people actually watch. a serial about a company being built, one entry a night, with a person in it, going somewhere. it is also the format almost nobody sustains past a month, and the reason is not talent.

it dies on editing. a daily vlog cut by hand is an hour a night on top of the company, and the only people who keep that up are the ones for whom the vlog becomes the job. then the company is the content, which is backwards.

underway makes the vlog from an interview and cuts it by machine, on rules. every evening it asks five questions about the day you had. the answers are cut on full sentences, filler removed, captions burned in, episode number on the front, by morning. you never open an editor and you never decide what to say from a blank screen.

the rules keep it honest. answers stay in the order you gave them. no line is moved forward to make a hook. no words are added. no clips are invented and no pictures are generated. what you get is a diary that happens to look made, which is a different thing from content that looks like a diary.

the clock keeps it daily. three minutes of answers is the target and five is the ceiling, enforced in code rather than left to judgement, because there is always one more interesting thread and taking it is how a daily ritual becomes a chore. an entry that fits a tired tuesday is one that happens on wednesday too.

the number keeps it going. episode 47 is a thing that exists. it goes on the front, it goes in the caption, and it is the reason someone who watched 46 comes back. days are not counted, because a day count breaks in public the first time life happens.

the shape changes with the evening. a portrait short most nights for tiktok, reels and shorts. a landscape sit-down once a week, longer, for youtube and linkedin. a travel entry cut from the day's own footage with a voice over it. an audio entry when the camera is not happening, with the questions kept in. same number, same series, chosen in the evening from the energy you actually have.

the questions get better as it goes. it keeps a private memory of your series and starts tonight where last night stopped. it can read your commits and your calendar if you connect them, so it asks about the meeting that overran rather than about meetings in general. the vlog stops being a status update and starts being a story with a memory.

the words around each entry are written for where it lands: a thread for x, a longer first-person post for linkedin, a caption and hashtags for the short-form platforms, show notes for the podcast version. you post them. automated posting is the obvious next step and it is not built yet.

the archive is what you end up with. a year of entries, dated, in order, in your own voice, is the founding story of the company filmed while nobody knew how it would go. it is also the most thorough due-diligence artefact a founder can hand anyone, and it is downloadable in full on every plan.

three episodes are free, no card. the first takes two minutes tonight, and it is episode 1 whatever the date is.