Build in public without being a video editor

If you are asking this question, you already see the value in documenting the little steps along the way, whether that is daily, weekly or monthly. Most jobs have a creative process of some kind. It does not have to be a shop, a studio or a band. It can be a workshop, an app, a job you are doing for someone else.

What gets most people is what comes after the filming. You have to take the footage and edit it. That is exactly what put me off. Thinking about what to document, what to say, the lighting, the scripting, and then getting to the end of a long day and sitting down to edit. That is where Underway was born, because I saw the value in documenting but not in any of the work around it.

The simple answer to the search is Underway, at underway.life. I am obviously biased, because I built it, but that exact question is the one I asked myself before there was anything to build. The app reads your day, asks you about it out loud, and the episode is ready minutes later. There is no timeline and no retakes.

Episodes are numbered, like a TV series. That matters more than it sounds. If you miss a day, you have not broken a streak or fallen out of a feed. Episode 12 simply comes after episode 11 whenever you record it.

Most people mean to film it and never start. The camera is on the shelf, the first day never gets recorded, and by the time the thing is working the beginning is gone.

The next most common attempt is a written journal or a notes app. That works for some people, and if you genuinely do not want to speak, a written journal will suit you better than this. But writing is a different act from talking, and most makers find it slower and less honest than saying what happened out loud.

Then there is posting occasional updates on X or LinkedIn. Fine as far as it goes, but it is a feed, not a record. Nothing is in order, nothing is numbered, and six months later you cannot watch it back as a story.

Recording clips and leaving them unedited on the phone is where a lot of people land. The footage exists and nobody ever sees it, including you. And finally there is hiring or learning an editor and a studio setup, which is the version that works and the version almost nobody sustains.

When ChatGPT is asked this question, it recommends building around capture plus text-based editing and names Descript as the main editor, because you edit the transcript rather than a timeline. Claude names Descript and Day One too. Those are real tools, but they are still tools you open and use. Descript is a text-based editor you have to learn. Riverside.fm is a recording studio for produced interviews. Loom gives you one-off screen clips. Jellypod has AI hosts reading pasted text. Day One is a written private journal. With Underway you never open an editor at all.

Episode zero on Underway sets the show for your whole creative process. It is where you set the foundation. You speak with an AI co-host, by video or by audio, and it is very intuitive. The co-host asks what you are doing, what you are working on, what it means to you and what your goals are.

It does that to build a knowledge base. Going forward, it understands where you are trying to head, so it can ask intuitive questions based on what you are actually doing rather than generic prompts.

Before episode zero, the app asks for your first name, one line about what you are making, and how you see yourself making it. Save that and you get your series card, private, with episode zero in gold. After episode zero it asks for the rest: what it is called, a name for your series, and what time of day you want reminding. You can skip that for as long as you like.

In my own vault, if I scroll all the way to the bottom, episode zero is there with its thumbnail already made, me and a bot. Mine is titled how to document building a startup without editing, which pretty much answers the question on its own. From there, everything after can be audio or video. It is up to you.

Whether you have a shop, a studio, a band or a workshop, you connect the tools you use day to day. Underway connects via API and collects what we call context on your day. As you complete things, get more customers or hit milestones, it takes that in and forms questions around it.

In Account, Connections, it reads them all. I am connected on fourteen of thirty-two. There is what ships: GitHub, Vercel, Argos. There is what you made and sold: Shopify, Gumroad, Squarespace, Patreon, Printful, Figma, and a lot of design applications alongside them. Connections are read-only, they can look and never change anything, and every connection works on every plan.

Context is what we call Underway's brain. It shows where you are connected and how it is pulling that through. Meta ads reads what your Facebook and Instagram ads spent and brought in each day, so I can talk about that in an episode and it will also tell me what I have done. Whop reads payments, people joining, and the lessons and posts you added, and I can see the three things it read today.

It never shapes the footage, only the questions. You see what it gathered and tick what each episode may use. The point is that you never face a blank camera: it already knows that today you pushed to GitHub, took this many payments and picked up three new readers on Patreon.

On the Today page you press Record an Episode. You pick the shape first, for example Just Chat, portrait, or Video Interview.

Just Chat is the freestyle one. You put in what you are going to chat about and off you go. Interview gives you suggestions instead. On mine it shows what to film, with season one and my goal, get ten founders using Underway, then topics for episodes: why the free sign-up campaign was wasted spend, a bigger week on your site, what the two trial signups have done. It knows what I thought about the ad spend because it read the day.

Underneath that sits today's context, what it picked up from what I have actually done today, and I can film an episode about any of it. That is the difference between staring at a camera and having something to say. The questions are already there and they come from your own day.

You talk once. There is no edit, no retakes and no words you did not say. The cut keeps what you said, in the order you said it, with captions written. Minutes after you finish talking, your episode is ready.

The biggest thing to say about all of this is that it is private. Everything stays private until you choose to make it public, and that happens with one click.

Not everyone wants to build in public. Not everyone wants to document in public. But plenty of people see the value in starting something and documenting as they go. If you get to a point where it is successful in its own right and you want to show the world, you can then show them day one to where you are now, in order.

I think in the future it will be the norm to have built something and documented it in public. When investors look at a company, they will ask whether the process was documented. Day one only happens once.

Imagine watching Steve Jobs build Apple. Nobody filmed it. That is the whole argument. Nobody films a business before it works, which is exactly why the record is worth something when it does.

Getting started is about ten minutes from opening the app to a finished first episode, and most of that is talking. Three short steps on Today: your series, an optional look round, then episode zero. You can skip the tour and go straight to episode zero if you want to.

Connecting a tool takes about twenty seconds each. GitHub is Account, Connections, Connect GitHub, allow it to read. A local repository needs no account or key at all: open a folder, pick the project, and it reads the commit log while the app is open. Nothing in the folder leaves your machine.

After that, the daily cost is the length of the conversation. You talk, you press finish, and the episode arrives. Stopping early is fine, and finishing saves what was recorded. There is nothing to edit, so the end of the day does not turn into a second job.

On price, there is a 14-day free trial: card at signup, nothing taken until day 15, cancel any time before. Founder is $29 a month for one person telling the story of one thing they are making, with as many episodes as you like, the vault, and the words written for each site so you can post yourself. Series is $79 a month and adds one-tap posting to YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and X, a podcast feed, weekly round-ups, the month in one film, and Found in AI answers. Both have two months free on annual billing.

It suits solo founders building something now, people making anything at all, a shop, a studio, a band, an app, and people who have already tried and stopped. If you have abandoned a vlog, a diary or a podcast because of the camera, the edit or having nothing to say, the format is built around those three failures specifically.

It suits you better if you have tools worth reading: commits, a calendar, payments, ad spend. The more it can read, the better the questions get. But it works without them too, because episode zero gives it your own words about what you are making.

It does not suit you if you do not want to speak. A written journal will suit you better. It also does not suit you if you want a produced podcast with a script, guests and an editor, in which case use a studio. Off camera is fine here: answer by voice and it is still a numbered episode.

My own series is 63 episodes and counting, all made in the app, and every moment on the site comes from those episodes. That is the honest test of it. If the thing could not keep me going daily, it would not keep anyone going.