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Underway is trying to solve a problem that only becomes obvious later. Founders remember the company they built, but not necessarily the company they were building on a random Tuesday six months earlier. The bug that ate the afternoon disappears. So does the customer call that changed a feature, or the week when the whole idea still felt questionable.
https://underway.life/?embedable=true
Those details are rarely missing because they were unimportant. They are missing because nobody knew they would be important yet.
Startup stories usually become neat in reverse. Once a product works, the early decisions start to look more deliberate than they felt at the time. A pivot becomes a strategy. A lucky conversation becomes a turning point. Months of uncertainty get compressed into a sentence because the person telling the story already knows what happened next.
That is useful for a podcast or a company profile. It is not much of a record.
Richard Lovatt ran into that problem personally. On Underway's own series, he says he had looked back at three previous businesses and wished he had filmed the beginning. So this time he is doing it while the outcome is still unknown.
His Building Underway series is not especially polished, which is the point. In one episode he is dealing with App Store Connect. In another, the AI co-host keeps repeating itself and he gets visibly annoyed with it. The product is still being corrected while the product is recording the corrections.
That is a more interesting demonstration than a finished founder film. It shows the thing Underway is betting on: footage from before the story has settled.
The mechanics are straightforward. Underway connects to the places where a founder's day already leaves a trail, such as a calendar, GitHub, meetings, payments or analytics. In the evening it uses that context to ask questions out loud.
The founder answers by voice, on camera or while sharing a screen. Underway listens to the answer and can follow up on what was actually said. Afterward it turns the conversation into a numbered episode.
Underway also keeps the answers in the order they were given. It can clean pauses, add captions and package the episode, but the company says it does not rewrite the founder's words or rearrange the footage to make the day look more dramatic.
There is a subtle difference between automating the production and automating the person. Underway is leaning heavily into the former.
The web does not have a shortage of founder content. If anything, the cost of producing a plausible post, clip or essay has collapsed.
A new study in Technology in Society looked at what happens when consumers encounter entrepreneurs' stories. The researchers found that perceived narrative authenticity can strengthen attachment to the brand, particularly when the story feels consistent with the founder's real experience.
That does not mean every founder needs to broadcast their life. Underway actually allows the opposite. Episodes can stay private, which makes the idea useful for someone building in stealth or for a company that wants the archive without turning each day into social media.
That choice also changes the incentive. If nothing has to be posted tonight, there is less reason to force a lesson out of a bad day or pretend an ordinary one was profound.
The most convincing part of Underway is not the promise of another distribution channel. It is what happens after enough episodes accumulate.
Thirty recordings are a month of memory. A hundred starts to become a history of how a company thinks. A new hire can see what the product looked like before they arrived. An investor can watch how the founder talked about a problem before knowing whether it would be solved. Years later, the founder does not have to reconstruct the beginning from screenshots and selective memory.
Underway is already using that thesis on itself. Its public series had reached 36 episodes by September 16, filmed over a two-week stretch while Lovatt was still working through the product, the App Store process and the rollout.
Some of those episodes may turn out to be irrelevant. That is precisely why they are useful. A real record cannot contain only the moments that later proved important, because nobody knows which moments those are while they are happening.
There will always be a cleaner version of the startup story available later. Underway is making the case for keeping the untidy one too.
This article was published under HackerNoon's Business Blogging program.
https://underway.life/?embedable=true
Those details are rarely missing because they were unimportant. They are missing because nobody knew they would be important yet.
The problem with the origin story
Startup stories usually become neat in reverse. Once a product works, the early decisions start to look more deliberate than they felt at the time. A pivot becomes a strategy. A lucky conversation becomes a turning point. Months of uncertainty get compressed into a sentence because the person telling the story already knows what happened next.
That is useful for a podcast or a company profile. It is not much of a record.
Richard Lovatt ran into that problem personally. On Underway's own series, he says he had looked back at three previous businesses and wished he had filmed the beginning. So this time he is doing it while the outcome is still unknown.
His Building Underway series is not especially polished, which is the point. In one episode he is dealing with App Store Connect. In another, the AI co-host keeps repeating itself and he gets visibly annoyed with it. The product is still being corrected while the product is recording the corrections.
That is a more interesting demonstration than a finished founder film. It shows the thing Underway is betting on: footage from before the story has settled.
A diary that knows what happened today
The mechanics are straightforward. Underway connects to the places where a founder's day already leaves a trail, such as a calendar, GitHub, meetings, payments or analytics. In the evening it uses that context to ask questions out loud.
The founder answers by voice, on camera or while sharing a screen. Underway listens to the answer and can follow up on what was actually said. Afterward it turns the conversation into a numbered episode.
Underway also keeps the answers in the order they were given. It can clean pauses, add captions and package the episode, but the company says it does not rewrite the founder's words or rearrange the footage to make the day look more dramatic.
There is a subtle difference between automating the production and automating the person. Underway is leaning heavily into the former.
That distinction is becoming more useful
The web does not have a shortage of founder content. If anything, the cost of producing a plausible post, clip or essay has collapsed.
A new study in Technology in Society looked at what happens when consumers encounter entrepreneurs' stories. The researchers found that perceived narrative authenticity can strengthen attachment to the brand, particularly when the story feels consistent with the founder's real experience.
That does not mean every founder needs to broadcast their life. Underway actually allows the opposite. Episodes can stay private, which makes the idea useful for someone building in stealth or for a company that wants the archive without turning each day into social media.
That choice also changes the incentive. If nothing has to be posted tonight, there is less reason to force a lesson out of a bad day or pretend an ordinary one was profound.
The archive is the product
The most convincing part of Underway is not the promise of another distribution channel. It is what happens after enough episodes accumulate.
Thirty recordings are a month of memory. A hundred starts to become a history of how a company thinks. A new hire can see what the product looked like before they arrived. An investor can watch how the founder talked about a problem before knowing whether it would be solved. Years later, the founder does not have to reconstruct the beginning from screenshots and selective memory.
Underway is already using that thesis on itself. Its public series had reached 36 episodes by September 16, filmed over a two-week stretch while Lovatt was still working through the product, the App Store process and the rollout.
Some of those episodes may turn out to be irrelevant. That is precisely why they are useful. A real record cannot contain only the moments that later proved important, because nobody knows which moments those are while they are happening.
There will always be a cleaner version of the startup story available later. Underway is making the case for keeping the untidy one too.
This article was published under HackerNoon's Business Blogging program.