a founder video diary that asks the questions

every founder video diary starts the same way. you open the camera, look at yourself, and have nothing to say. you say something anyway, watch it back, wince, and never film again. the blank camera kills more diaries than shyness ever did.

nobody talks well into silence. everybody talks well to a good question. that is the whole design of underway: it is an interview, not a camera.

every evening it asks five questions, out loud, about the day you actually had. how it started. what you worked on. what broke. what you did about it. what changes now. that skeleton fits a shop owner as well as an engineer, because it is shaped by the day and not by the trade.

the questions know what happened, if you let them. connect a repository and they know what shipped. connect a calendar and they know which meeting overran. leave a voice note at lunch about the idea you just had and tonight's question starts from it. a question that already knows gets an answer instead of a summary.

you answer to camera, one take. between answers it listens and decides whether to dig into something specific you named and left unexplained, or move to the next beat. it never probes to seem attentive, and it stops at three minutes of answers, before you run out of things to say. an interview that overruns is one you stop doing.

by morning the entry is cut. sentences kept whole, filler gone, captions on, your name and the episode number on the front. nothing reordered. nothing added. if a line should not be in it, you drop the line, and that is the extent of the editing you will ever do.

a diary is private by default. the archive is yours whether or not anyone ever sees it. publish the good ones, publish all of them, or publish nothing until launch day and release the whole vault in order on a page built for a back catalogue. plenty of founders stay private for good, and the archive is still the point.

it remembers. tonight's questions start where last night's answers stopped, from a private memory of your series: what you are building, who for, what you said you would do next. you can read every line of it, correct it, or delete it. no one else sees it.

it counts episodes, not days. episode 12 is your twelfth entry, whatever the calendar says. a week away is a week away, not a broken chain, and there is a one-tap pause for the weeks you know about in advance. the streak is tracked privately against the days you chose, weekdays by default.

on the night you cannot face the camera, an audio entry from the car keeps the diary going, with the questions kept in so it sounds like a conversation rather than a voice note. a travel day can be cut from the day's own footage with a voiceover added later. neither is the default. both keep the habit alive on the day that would otherwise have ended it.

a year of this is the founding story of your company in your own voice, filmed while you did not know how it would end. it cannot be reconstructed afterwards. the founders who have it will be the ones who started on an ordinary tuesday with nothing much to say, and said it anyway.

three episodes are free, no card. the first takes two minutes tonight.