The obvious temptation
Nobody would have checked. We could have opened with three years on the counter and the only people who would have known are us.
Why that would have destroyed the product
The entire claim is that a record cannot be revised after the fact. Every check is sealed against the one before it, and the value of the whole thing rests on that being true.
A company selling unbackdatable records, whose own record was backdated on launch day, has no product. It has a monitoring tool and a lie, and the lie is the more memorable of the two.
So there is no mechanism
Not a policy we intend to follow. There is no code path that creates an entry with a past date, and there will not be. If we ever need one for our own convenience, that is the moment the product has stopped being what it says it is.
What one day actually demonstrates
That every record starts at one day, including ours. The only way to have a long one is to have kept it, which is inconvenient at the beginning and is the entire value later.
It also demonstrates the thing we cannot say as effectively in any other way: a competitor with more money cannot hand a new customer a three-year history either. Time is the one input that does not respond to funding.
The inconvenient part
For roughly the first year, our record is a weak advertisement. We are asking people to value something we cannot yet demonstrate ourselves. That is uncomfortable and it is also the honest position, and we would rather sit in it than open with a number we made up.