founder intro video: the six questions to answer

a founder intro video is the short film where you say what you are building, who it is for and why. most advice about it is about production: lighting, length, a template, an agency. the hard part is not any of that. the hard part is knowing what to say, and saying it like a person rather than a pitch. the fix is to be asked, by something that has already done its homework.

on underway the founder intro video is episode zero, the first episode of every series. as of today it starts from more than one line. step 1 asks for your website, optional, and the screen after it offers to connect github and your calendar. underway reads the site and what you have shipped before episode zero, writes it down where you can see it, and the questions start from there.

what a founder intro video should answer

six things, in this order. they are the questions episode zero asks every founder, whatever they are building, and they work just as well if you are filming one for an accelerator application or your homepage.

• what it is, in your own words. not the tagline: the sentence you would say to a friend who asked.
• who it is for. one real, specific person, not a market.
• what problem it solves, and what those people do instead today. the second half is the one people skip, and it is the one that makes the first half believable.
• where it honestly stands right now. an idea, half built, ten customers, years in. this is the before shot.
• the hardest part of it right now.
• what you are setting out to do, and by when. this is the line everything afterwards is measured against.

notice what is not on the list: why it is the best, how big the market is, a call to action. a question that invites marketing language has failed, because an intro that sounds like an advert is the one nobody finishes.

why founder intro videos come out as pitches

when you write your own script, you write from your website, because that is the version you have already polished. the result is a founder reading their homepage aloud. the camera picks it up straight away.

an interviewer who has read the website does the opposite. it already knows what the site claims, so it has no reason to ask you to repeat it. it asks what a website cannot say: who actually pays, how close the site is to where things really stand, why you started, what you tried that did not work. those answers are the ones people remember.

what changed in underway

step 1 of getting started now has a fifth box, your website (optional), between the one line about what you are documenting and how you see yourself making it. account's series tab asks the same thing in the same place, on the web and the phone.

save my series, and under your series card there is a new section, give it a head start. github and google calendar are there to connect, with your choice of which repositories the series is about, and the marks of everything else underway reads, which you can connect from context whenever you like. all of it is optional.

under that is what it picked up. underway reads your website the same way the marketing brief in promote does, the homepage, the pages it links and the topics in its sitemap, and, with github connected, the titles of what you have shipped lately. it writes each down as plain facts, in a box you can edit: what the site says the business is, who it is for, what it costs if it says; and what you have been working on, grouped into a few themes. fix anything wrong, or take it out. it usually takes under a minute.

if your series card still has underway's own look, it also takes your site's logo, its main colour and the nearest of our typefaces, so episode zero opens on a card that looks like yours. a card you already chose is left alone.

different questions for every founder

what underway knows changes the questions, never the ground they cover. with only your one line, episode zero is open and curious. with your website read, it skips what the site already answers and asks what it cannot. with github connected, it names the work: the payments change, the new onboarding, whatever you have actually been shipping. the first question always asks you to say what it is in your own words, because someone arriving cold at episode zero needs to hear it from you, and nothing from the site is ever read back to you or quoted as something you said.

the co-host works the same way, whether you film episode zero on camera or with just your voice.