five free episodes, and your build in our ads

the short version

underway's free plan is now five episodes, not three, for everyone, with no card. and once five of your episodes are public on your page, your build can be featured in the facebook and instagram ads we run to the builders directory. no form, no judging, no winners. it is free, it is automatic, and it is the same everywhere in the world. you can switch it off in settings whenever you like.

why five free episodes

three episodes showed you the interview and the cut. it did not show you the thing the product is actually for, which is the habit. the first episode is new and interesting. the second is easy because you remember the first. the third is often the day you are busy, and that used to be the last free one, so the trial ended on the hardest day rather than after it.

five gets you past that. it is monday to friday on the weekday default, so by the end of it you know what a week of underway is like: whether the daily prompt arrives at a time that suits you, whether the questions get better as the app learns what you are building, and whether a week of episodes in order reads like a story. that is the decision worth making before you pay, and three episodes was too few to make it.

it is still counted in episodes, not days. there is no clock and nothing expires. if your first week is a busy one and you film two, the other three are waiting whenever you come back. episode zero, the introduction, does not count against the five. the sixth episode is where a plan starts, and everything you made before it stays yours whatever you decide, including the raw footage. if you had already made your three free episodes before this change, you have two more, with nothing to claim.

your build in our ads

we run facebook and instagram ads for underway, and the most honest thing an ad for underway can show is a real build. so the ads point at the builders directory, and the builders in them are the people documenting on it. once five of your episodes are public on your page, you are on the list we build those ads from. that can mean your name, your series and a few seconds of an episode you already published, with a link through to the directory where your series lives.

today shows a section called get seen with a live count: how many of your episodes are public, out of five. an episode counts once it is on your page for everyone: not held back, not limited to subscribers, and not episode zero or a round-up. there is no deadline and no month to hit it in. five public episodes, whenever you get there, is enough.

the list is small right now, so the builders on it get seen the most. that is a fact about today rather than a promise about forever: as more people reach five, each one shares the space with more. joining early is the advantage, the same way it is in the directory itself.

why reward episodes and not views

the hardest part of building in public is not the first episode. it is posting episode six into silence. picking the builds with the most views would reward whoever already has an audience, and it would push everyone towards filming for the hook. putting everyone with five public episodes in front of new people rewards the thing underway exists to build: showing up and telling the truth about the work. a series with no audience yet gets the same chance as one with thousands, which is the point.

nothing about the ads reaches the interview or the cut. your questions are written from your day and your season, as before, and the episode is your words in the order you said them. we only use what you have already made public, and never edited to change what you meant.

switching it off

it is on unless you say otherwise. in settings, under publishing, feature my build in underway's ads is one switch, on the web and on the phone. switch it off and your build is never included in a new ad, and we take it out of any running ad as soon as we reasonably can. the terms say the same thing in full.

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