The Kenny Interviews: Launching Buddy in Our Own Words
A few years back, when we were just launching the app, we sat down for a whole series of interviews with Kenny about building Buddy. Here's the full playlist — the early days, unfiltered.
By Alexis Jabbour3 min read
Lately I've been looking back at where we started and where we've come — and honestly, the best way I can show you is this series of interviews we did with Kenny Dyal.
We kicked them off right when we launched, back when Buddy was just a dive log app. That's it. No Buddy Radar. No content to search. No messaging. No adding your gear to your profile. We were building community, building our social channels, and figuring it out as we went.
Now we're a full ecosystem, and it's genuinely hard to showcase what that growth was like — what those beginning days actually felt like. But this series chronicles it. Our process, our growth, feature by feature, in real time. Kenny — host of The Scuba Diving Podcast, one of the best-known voices in the dive community, and someone whose whole mission is bringing the underwater world together — invited me on right at the start, and one conversation led to another. I visited him in Orlando. He came to Oahu, where we went diving and filmed interviews that built up episode after episode. Plenty we did remote. Nineteen episodes later, it's the most honest record of Buddy's early days that exists.
So let's start at the beginning.
Where we started
Our very first interview together, filmed after I visited Kenny in Orlando — the brand-new Buddy App rolling out for scuba divers and freedivers, when Buddy was a dive log and a community and a very big idea, and nothing else. Watching it now is a time capsule.
Your gear, on your profile
Remember when I said there was no adding your gear to your profile? Here's the episode where that changed — walking through gear in the app and how it works on your profile. This is what I mean about building feature by feature, in front of the community, with the community.
Kicking off Buddy Radar
The episode where we announced Radar going live — divers near you, chat, ask about a site, actually find someone to dive with. Divers talking to divers. You can hear how long we'd been waiting to ship this one.
Where it's all been leading: the booking platform
The latest episode — and really the reason I'm writing this. We talk about why the dive industry got left behind on online booking, and what we're building about it with BookWithBuddy. Everything above has been building to this. If you only watch one, watch this one.
Watch the full series
There are so many more — nineteen episodes covering just about everything we shipped along the way.
Looking back
It's not fun, exactly — it's rewarding. Seeing where we started, seeing where we are now, and seeing that we've held true to the same thing the whole way: listening to people, taking feedback, and building the best products we can. First for our community of divers, now for the businesses that serve them — and now we're linking the two together.
‘Listening to people, taking feedback, and building the best products we can.’
So consider this the home base for everything Kenny and I made together. Look back at it, share it, send it to someone who's just discovering Buddy.
And who knows — there may be a new podcast series coming soon.
You can find Kenny at sweetwaterscuba.com and The Scuba Diving Podcast wherever you listen. And you can find Buddy on the App Store, Google Play, and at bookwithbuddy.com.