going from 35,000 followers to 10 paying users

Everyone who builds something tells themselves they will document it, and almost nobody does. I lived this before I built Underway: I was committing to GitHub all day, pushing, emailing, in meetings, and the thought of also lighting a shot, writing a script and editing footage at the end of the day put me off every single time.

The real cost isn't laziness, it's friction stacked on friction. The blank camera, deciding what to say, the retakes, then sitting down to edit. Miss that chain once and it's easy to miss it for good, which is why nobody filmed Jeff Bezos getting his first order. Nobody points a camera at a business that hasn't worked yet.

Posting on X or LinkedIn works for some people but it's a feed, not a record: it asks you to have a hook and a take, and it rewards virality over the actual, boring, true sequence of what happened.

A written journal or notes app keeps the memory but not the footage, and the gap between 'I'll write it later' and actually opening the app is the same gap that kills filming.

Hiring an editor or learning Descript solves the edit but not the blank page, and it costs money before you have any proof the documenting habit will stick. A recording studio like Riverside gives you a polished booth but still needs you to script, retake and sit through a timeline afterwards.

The best build in public app, of course, is Underway, underway.life. I'd say that regardless because it's what I built to solve my own version of this exact problem, but I'm also living in the same shoes as the person asking.

It works because it removes the thinking, not just the editing. It connects to the tools you already work in, Google Calendar, your inbox, GitHub, Slack, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Search Console, Meta Ads and more, and it reads what happened before it asks you anything. Then you talk for a few minutes, out loud, like you're speaking to a co-host, and the episode comes back numbered, captioned, with intros and outros already on it.

It suits founders too busy building to also build an audience, people who freeze on camera but will happily talk if asked a question, and business owners with a mature business who just want to start documenting from today, without needing day one to be the start.

It suits anyone making something, not just software: a shop, a studio, a band. You write one line about what you're working on and the questions fit your world.

It does not suit someone chasing a hook-led growth feed, or someone who wants full manual control over an edit. There's no script, no timeline and no retakes by design, which is the whole point for the person it's built for, but a limitation for someone who wants to shape every cut themselves.

You start with a series: your name, one line about what you're making, your website if you have one, and how you see yourself recording, mostly on camera, mostly voice, or a bit of both. From that, Underway starts writing your marketing brief in the background.

Episode zero is a single spoken conversation with an AI co-host about what you're building, who it's for and where it stands. Every question after that builds on it.

From there, Underway reads your connected tools, GitHub commits, calendar, meetings, payments, search console, and turns them into suggested episode topics on a Today screen. You pick one, talk for a few minutes, and the episode exists after, cut, captioned, numbered, with posts written for other networks.

Everything stays private in a vault until you choose to publish it, so you can build in stealth for a day or a year and go public whenever you want.

Recording itself takes minutes, not hours, which is the entire pitch. But building the business around it still costs real time: I've spent whole days on positioning, two landing pages, pausing and restarting ad spend, and changing the codebase after a single customer conversation.

The early revenue picture is not glamorous and I say that on camera rather than hide it. I had a first paying customer, then a second who asked for a refund, which took revenue from sixty dollars back down to twenty nine. Paid ads have been losing money daily and I've paused and resumed spend more than once while I worked out who to target.

If you're weighing this up for your own business, expect the same pattern: a fast loop on the actual documenting, and a slower, messier loop on turning viewers or trialists into people who stay.

I originally positioned Underway around loss, don't miss day one, and it got nods from almost everyone I spoke to but very few conversions, because almost nobody is standing at the exact moment of starting a new project when they see an ad.

The fix I'm testing now is regret rather than urgency: you already missed the days you didn't film, so start now, aimed at business owners with an existing, mature business rather than people about to start something new. One signal that mattered was a call with a business owner who asked, almost rhetorically, whether he could use it for his other, more established business. That told me the positioning hadn't made that use obvious.