your ads, films and graphics, kept in the vault

the short version

the vault has a new shelf: assets. it is where the marketing you make around your build lives, the ad for the launch, a product demo, a trailer cut in another tool, the graphic for an announcement.

upload a film or an image, give it a title and a line about what it is, and say whether it was made with ai. post it to youtube, x, linkedin, tiktok or instagram from the same buttons as an episode. choose whether it shows on your page, in a row of its own below your episodes.

it is never an episode. it is never numbered, never counts towards your streak, and nothing in it reaches your interviews.

why it exists

building in public makes two kinds of thing. there is the diary, which underway already films, numbers and keeps. and there is everything around it: the ad, the launch film, the demo, the screenshot with a headline on it.

the second kind had no home. it lived in a downloads folder on one computer, a camera roll on the phone, a desktop on the other laptop. nobody could say which one went out on linkedin last tuesday, or whether the good cut ever made it to youtube. the best piece got used once, and the rest got lost.

the first underway ad was made exactly like that, with a model, this month. within a week it was on three machines and nobody knew where it had been posted. the shelf is the fix for that, and nothing more ambitious than that.

what you can do with it

• upload: in the vault, choose assets, then drop films or images onto the shelf or press upload a film or image. mp4, mov and webm films, jpeg, png, webp and gif images, up to 500 mb each, sent straight to storage with a bar while they go
• describe it: a title, a line about what it is, and one question, made with ai, asked as soon as it lands
• post it: the same five buttons as an episode, with the words in the box, which start as its title and description and are yours to change. youtube and tiktok take films; x, linkedin and instagram take films and images. tiktok asks its own questions first, every time
• see where it has gone: every tile shows posted or not on each platform, so the shelf doubles as the record of what went out where
• show it on your page: one switch puts it in the films and images row, below your episodes
• download it again, edit the words, or delete it. a post already made stays where it was posted

the phone has the same shelf. open the vault, choose assets, and upload from your camera roll, which is where most of these files are made anyway.

made with ai, said out loud

plenty of ads are made with a model now. that is marketing, and marketing is allowed. what is not allowed is a generated film sitting where the diary sits with nothing to say it is different.

so the tick matters. an asset marked made with ai says so on its tile in the vault, on the row on your page, and at the end of every post. youtube is told through its own altered or synthetic content setting, and tiktok through its ai-generated label. you cannot type the line away from the words in the box: if the asset was made with ai, the post says it.

beside the diary, never inside it

the whole promise of an underway series is that the episodes are honest: your words, in the order you said them, numbered, dated. an ad is allowed to be anything. that is exactly why it must never be mistaken for an episode.

so an asset lives in its own table, not among the episodes. it has no episode number and no season. it does not count towards your streak or your episode count, it is not in the directory's counts or rankings, and the interviewer, your series memory and the threads you are offered never see it. on your page it is in its own labelled row, below the episodes, never mixed into them. a tile says film or image in its corner, never an episode label, and never in gold.

nothing in underway makes an asset either. this is a shelf, not a generator. the ritual is still the interview.

private until you say so

everything on the shelf is private when it lands. the files sit in private storage and are shown by links that expire. show on your page is off until you turn it on, and the row only appears once your series is public, so a stealth founder's unreleased ad stays unreleased.

the assets shelf is in the vault, on the web and the phone. start a series.