video diary: how to keep one going while you build

a video diary is a record you keep on camera instead of on paper: you talk to the lens about what happened, and every entry is saved with its date. kept for a few weeks it is a diary. kept for a year it is the only honest record of how something was built, because nobody can go back and film the beginning.

underway is a video diary for founders and anyone building something. it asks you questions out loud, one for each thing you pick, and cuts your answers into a numbered episode, in the order you said them, with captions and a title card. it stays private until you publish it. this page is about how to keep a video diary of your work going, what to say in it, and the tools that help.

what a video diary is for, when you are building something

a personal video diary is for you. a video diary of a build has more than one reader, eventually. you, in six months, trying to remember why you changed the pricing. a co-founder or a first hire, who wants to know how decisions get made. an investor, who would learn more from twenty honest entries than from one deck. and, if you choose to publish, an audience that comes back to see what happened next.

• it remembers what you forget: the call that changed the plan, the week nothing worked, the first customer.
• it shows your thinking, not just your results, which is what people trust.
• it is footage you cannot make later. the doubts at the start only exist if you filmed them at the start.
• it is content without a content plan, if you decide to post it.

why most video diaries stop in the second week

the guides that rank for this search give the same advice: pick a format, face a window, find a quiet room, be authentic. all true. none of it is why a video diary stops. it stops for three plainer reasons.

• the blank camera. you press record and have nothing to say, so you say something vague, so the entry is not worth watching, so you skip the next one.
• the edit. twenty minutes of rambling needs trimming before anyone, you included, will watch it. that is a second job, and it is the one people drop.
• the missed day. you skip a week, the count says day 23 after day 16, and the gap feels like a failure, so you stop.

fix those three and the diary keeps going. a question fixes the blank camera. somebody else doing the cut fixes the edit. counting entries instead of days fixes the gap.

what to say in a video diary of your work

the best entries answer one specific question, not a general one. how did today go gets a shrug. what happened with the signup email today gets an answer that makes sense to someone who arrives with no context. here are questions worth answering on camera, depending on the day.

• what are you working on right now, and why that and not something else?
• what broke, and what did you try first?
• what did a customer say that surprised you?
• what decision are you putting off, and what would make it easy?
• what changed since the last entry?
• what are you setting out to do by the end of this month?

start the diary with an entry that explains the whole thing: what it is, who it is for, what problem it solves, where it honestly stands, the hardest part, and what you are setting out to do. every later entry stands on it, and anyone who finds the diary later starts there.

the setup for a video diary, in a minute

you do not need kit. a phone or a laptop camera is enough. face a window rather than sitting with one behind you, so your face is lit and not a silhouette. find the quietest room you have, because the microphone hears the fridge before you do. prop the camera at eye height, on a stack of books if that is what there is. then leave it set up, in the same place, so the next entry costs you one press and not ten minutes of arranging. the same spot every time also makes the diary look like one thing rather than forty, which matters more than any single entry looking good. in underway, light in the corner of the picture turns the screen around you into a warm white when the room is dim, and it never shows in the take.

how underway keeps a video diary for you

underway is built around those three failures. it reads your day from the tools you connect, github, google calendar, your inbox, stripe and the rest, and offers topics from it and from your season so far. you pick what this entry is about; each pick becomes one question, asked out loud, answered for as long as it takes. there is no clock and no follow-up; the entry ends after the last question you picked. if you want to be pushed, the ai co-host is a live conversation that follows up and digs in.

then it does the edit. the answers are cut in the order you said them, filler and false starts out, captions on, a title card at the front, and the episode is numbered. it never reorders what you said and never adds a word you did not say. most days you watch it, nod, and leave it in the vault.

and it counts episodes, not days. episode 47 is your 47th, whenever it was filmed, so a missed week leaves no hole. the streak is private and counts against the commitment you chose, weekdays, every day, five a week or three, and a pause protects it when you are away.

ways to keep a video diary, compared

the phone's camera costs nothing and is fine for a diary you keep now and then. 1 Second Everyday and Memovi are good at turning short clips into a film of your year, with nothing to say. Loom is good at a recorded message for a team, and every recording is its own link. pick underway when the diary is about your work and the thing stopping you is what to say and the edit afterwards.

what it costs

a 14-day free trial of founder, with a card added at the start and nothing charged until day 15. founder is $29 a month or $290 a year: the interview by camera, voice or screen, an episode minutes after you finish, your own page, the words for every platform and every connection that reads your day. series is $79 a month or $790 a year and adds one tap to every connected network, the week in one cut, the month in one film, chapters, the podcast feed and the series deck. raw footage downloads on every plan.

a video diary that stays private

every series starts private and nothing leaves the vault until you publish it. go public whenever you like, post one entry on its own, or never post at all. a share link can show the vault to one person, an investor or a co-founder, without publishing anything. delete any entry and its video, transcripts and everything cut from them go, from the device and from your account, with no undo.

faqs

the plans, side by side: pricing.

the first entry, and what it asks: episode zero.