should i post every day? record daily, post the good ones

document daily. publish when it's worth it.

should i post every day? no. record every day and post when it's worth it. in underway the episode is made daily whether or not anyone sees it, and each one has its own switch for going public.

that line is on the underway site for a reason: the diary and the feed are not the same job, and treating them as one is how most people stop.

the diary is the daily part. at the time you chose, the app asks about your day, out loud, one question at a time, and a few minutes later the episode exists: cut, numbered, captioned, in your archive. it happens whether or not anyone will ever see it. this is the habit, and it is the only thing that has to be daily.

the feed is a separate decision, made per episode. every episode has its own switch. the series can be private, public, or private with the good ones posted. nothing goes out unless you send it, and the text for each channel is written for you when you do. going public is a real action; it is never a default and never a side effect of recording.

why separate them? because the moment recording and posting are the same act, every recording becomes a performance. you start asking whether today was interesting enough, and the honest answer most days is no, and then you don't film, and the archive has a hole in it that no amount of interesting days later can fill. the footage from today is the only footage of today there will ever be. the decision about whether it is worth showing can wait until tomorrow, or a year. the decision about whether to film it cannot.

it also means you do not have to wait until the company is finished, or presentable, or public, to start the tape. plenty of founders will not put a new build in public on day one: a stealth product, an unannounced pivot, a job they have not left yet. record anyway. the vault keeps it in order, dated, and the day you go public the whole archive lands at once, on your page, as a playlist, on the podcast feed. that origin story cannot be reconstructed afterwards, by anyone, at any budget.

and it means a bad episode is fine. the unremarkable tuesday, the one where nothing broke and nothing shipped, gets filmed and kept and never posted, and the week's recap can still draw on it. the good ones go out. the count carries on regardless, because episodes are counted, not posts and not days.

in practice it looks like this: the prompt arrives, you talk for three minutes, the episode is on your phone. some days you make it public before you put the phone down. some you hold back for good. most sit in the vault until a compilation or a launch finds a use for them. the archive gets longer every day; the feed gets whatever you decide it deserves.

the first half is the discipline. the second half is the permission that makes the discipline survivable.

document daily. publish when it's worth it.