109. Why We Decided to Rebuild our AI Tool Capsho from Scratch

00:00:00
Hello and welcome. This is Win the Content Game. I can't believe we're up to episode 109. Wow. Yeah.

00:00:06
And if you're watching this on YouTube, then you would see that Bonna and I are twinsing again. We've both got. Oh, which way am I going? This way. Yeah.

00:00:15
We've both got our Monty and me shirts, which we actually gifted, personalized one to all of the speakers at Capshovians live. I actually saw Bonna put this on in the morning, as in not watch you put it on watching. I saw you wearing it and I was like, I'm actually going to deliberately twinsies with you. Yes. And isn't it.

00:00:35
It looks great. Yeah. It's so much fun. Yes. Anyway, onto this week's episode because I want to dive straight into it because we have some really, really cool things to talk about.

00:00:44
Yeah. So exciting. Some latest, what would you call it? Like, enhancements. Complete burned down rebuild.

00:00:51
Yeah. I would go more that than enhancements. Yeah. But enhancements is like a euphemism phrase. This is a completely different platform.

00:00:57
Yeah. That we have been working on with Capsho, because if you are a Capshovian, you probably noticed that we've been a little bit quiet on the new feature release front on, you know, really touching Capsho 2.0, like the software. And that's because we've actually been on a journey for the last few months of basically rebuilding. Yep. So this episode is all about that journey.

00:01:20
I want this, basically. Bona and I are here not to talk about implementation so much, which I know that you might be used to us talking about when we do an episode together. This is really about, as entrepreneurs, what we found throughout our journey so far over the last. Gosh, it's been 18. More than 18 months now since we've launched, coming up to almost two years.

00:01:40
Yeah, yeah. And kind of some of the hard decisions that we've had to make, some of the mistakes we've made along the way, and some of the learnings as well. So that's what this episode is all about. So strap in. We've got a good one.

00:01:51
My name's Deirdre Tshien. I'm Bona Rai. And this is win the content game.

00:01:58
Hey, you all right? So we're gonna just jump straight into it. So, anyone who's been following our journey, we just. To recap, we launched cap show in July of 2022. I'm losing track of the number.

00:02:12
Yeah. The years just start to meld together. Exactly. So, you know, if you think about that, we were definitely in the AI game, before, you know, the likes of chat, GPT, et cetera, came along and really, you know, accelerated, I guess, how everyone's knowledge, even of what AI is and what it can do. And we were also, we went along for that ride.

00:02:35
And I would say that it's been, it's, it was good. There's good and bad with everything. It was good because I feel like with the hype of AI and everyone's understanding of it made our jobs easier in terms of not having to educate people on what AI is and how it can help. But on the flip side, with how quickly AI has accelerated and stuff, like we've had to make decisions. We made decisions in the business and for the software that maybe we could have benefited from not making them know.

00:03:08
But, like, maybe keeping that whole stage, just having, like, seen a little bit of, like, just kind of paused a little bit, I guess, on our end. And so there was a lot of learnings, I think, that we went through over the last, you know, 18 to 218 months or two years. And so I want to talk about, let's start there around some of the things that maybe we've learned and our journey, even with Capsho. So if we start from the beginning of, like, you know, July 2022, we actually launched our beta a month before that. So in June, and even before we launched our beta, we had gone to podfest and basically was speaking to a ton of podcasters about what it was that, you know, what their specific acute pain points were.

00:03:49
And time and time again, we heard show notes. Show notes, show notes. Show notes was like the one thing that people, you know, because, you know, you have to create them in order to publish. And it was like that and title, I guess, title and the show notes. And so when we launched, that was kind of our, pretty much our number one focus area was like, okay, let's at least try to make this process of helping podcasters create show notes really, really simple, which I believe we did do.

00:04:15
Yeah, people love the show notes. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then, but, you know, you can probably tell even from the content of this podcast that, you know, my, what I love and what I nerd out about is the content marketing side. So very quickly, I wanted to shift from just like, you know, publishing, publishing to, hey, how do we actually get it out there and market your podcast?

00:04:34
And the way that I thought about it was, you know, because we have a very, even here at capture, we have a very specific strategy that we followed. Now, before that, we had to go through the learning curve as well. When we had our coaching business, I remember that there was a point where we were literally on trying to be on every single platform every single day, sometimes even multiple times a day, like, to the point where we burnt our team out, ourselves and our team out trying to just. We were just on this content creation hamster wheel, and I. Yeah, I kind of feel like maybe we brought some of that into the first iteration of capture.

00:05:10
When we went from show notes to more content marketing, it was just like, let's just give everyone everything, and then, you know, they can kind of pick and choose from there. And I think there was also, now that I look back on it, obviously, hindsight is such a gift, and it's so annoying as well when you look at yourself doing this. But I think when we first started, there was also really big. I remember, you know, our tagline was really about, like, amplifying the content, and it was a very promotion heavy angle to it, because, I mean, marketing promotion is part of marketing, but I think we were probably not thinking about it too holistically either. It was very much like, stay front of mind with people's podcasts and really encouraging our people to do everything they can to really amplify their podcast content, their YouTube content, whatever it was, but probably less of an emphasis on how do we make sure that they're not just contributing to the noise out there, even though their content's amazing?

00:06:04
How do we make sure that we don't actually just help them in wanting to amplify? All you can really do is just get louder, and that's not always the best way to reach the people that you want to reach. 100%. Yeah, that's a good point. And I talk about this now all the time, but it was like, you know, we.

00:06:19
I know, definitely here at cap show, and therefore, what we would love all cap show means to do is to stop creating content for content's sake. Yep. And I know that that sounds a bit counter intuitive, but hang with us. We're gonna talk you through what that actually means. But I think that's what we were doing, right?

00:06:34
We were just like, yeah. How do we just shout louder and louder and louder? More things to put out there. Yeah. And so, and that was kind of a misstep that we made and how that kind of.

00:06:45
So, in our minds, theoretically, we were like, at the time, well, okay, this makes a lot of sense. We want to help people amplify their voices and their messages. And what actually happened in reality was that when people came in to use capture, they would see, like, I think again, theoretically, they were like, oh, my gosh, you can help me create all of this so I can be, like, everywhere all at once at the same time right now. And we're like, yeah, go for it.

00:07:12
And that was one of our, one of the big mistakes that we made was because the thing is that for people who have been in the content game for a while, you know, a. They're probably a little bit more well versed on, actually. I don't want to be everywhere all at once at the same time right now. But. But also, even if they were a little bit, like, they'd be a little bit more attuned to.

00:07:35
Well, no, I know that I only do Facebook and, you know, I only have my blog and I only do these. So they'll be able to actually cherry pick from what it is that we created. Yes. So those are people who are probably more on the, I'd say on the content marketing sophisticated side, but I think there were a lot of people who we were serving and this, we're counting ourselves in this bucket as well, who hadn't really come up the curve of that as much. And so we were a little less sophisticated on, well, let's be really, really, like, let's focus down and be really targeted and be really intentional with the content that we were creating.

00:08:15
And what that led to was people would come into our platform, they would see all this stuff that they could create and then they would very, very quickly become overwhelmed. Because it's one thing to have the content, like at least a draft of the content, but it's another thing to edit it, to optimize it, to make sure that you have all of the images and then to publish it and track, like, yeah, there's actually so much more to that workflow than just drafting the thing. Totally. And I think that to your point, that overwhelm. Sorry, the excitement to overwhelm pipeline was just pretty much 90% of our users, probably.

00:08:53
And it happened so rapidly. One little story I think that brings us to life is when we were. Because we were doing a lot of onboarding emails and, you know, putting different things out there to really help people in that trial period. And one of the emails we sent out was how capture creates, I think, 2482 marketing drafts. And we were so proud of that.

00:09:10
We did the maths and we like all of these different combinations and that's crazy, right? Like, we look back on that version of Bonna in Deirdre where we were so proud of that but to your point, for people who have the discernment and they have the systems in place, they're like, amazing. From this, I know what I need. I know what my customer likes. I have a buffet of things to choose from.

00:09:29
But for the poor person who just is trying to get consistent with this and trying to learn the ropes, it's a lot. It's a lot. And it's, and there's also a better way to. Because again, like, we don't want to just be creating. Like we, hopefully, you've been hearing along our journey, we matured as entrepreneurs, as marketers, as hopefully as founders.

00:09:51
I wouldn't say we have a long, long way to go, I think, as we all do in this journey of life and entrepreneurship. But, you know, we've definitely come up that curve a lot more. And yes, you know, and we can definitely say, like, again, and I would encourage everyone to do this because we do this probably not as strategically as we should in terms of like, putting it in the calendars, like in a structured way, but we do quite more often than not sort of try to pause, step back and go, okay, well, why are we doing what it is that we're doing and that we had one of those, it feels like a come to Jesus moment, like kind of end of last year, pretty much just before we decided to completely rebuild to around, like, okay, well, who are we trying to serve and what are we trying to help them do? And if you listen to episode, gosh, 100, 101, like, 101 around, like, you know, even why we renamed this podcast to win the content game, we are just, so we decided, made the very, very conscious decision to commit ourselves to entrepreneurs. So coaches, consultants, service providers win the content game.

00:10:56
Right. And what does winning the content game actually mean and look like it actually means we're putting content out there for a reason. And that reason ultimately, is to get clients, right. It's to make money or some sort. And clients might not be the clients that actually pay you.

00:11:13
Clients could actually be if you're like a speaker or something, like, it could actually be someone who books you for their event. Right. But essentially that's our end goal, is how do we help people make money get clients from their content. And so when we, when we get really, really focused on that, then everything kind of falls into place on the back of that, right. So we look at, we looked at our, even our current version of Capsho because we're still to talk about what's, what's here.

00:11:44
Yeah, but, like, the current version wasn't helping people do that. Right. And that was a big, big mistake that we made in our journey, was that we kind of just went along. Like, we just went with the flow and we kind of kept building things that we thought that would be helpful to people, and it just ended up not being. Because when we then looked at what, how we wanted to help people, that wasn't it.

00:12:09
It wasn't doing what. It was what it was meant to. Right. So when we, when we think about, okay, how do we actually use our content to get clients?

00:12:20
Immediately, in my mind, I'm like, oh, there's an intention. There's an intention to why it is that we're creating content? Why any of us at capture, but also, you listening to this, like, why is it that you're creating content and what is that content actually designed to do? Right. Like, we want our content to do something, even if at a very, very base level, all it does is to have people laugh or, you know, like, feel some kind of emotion like that in and of itself, you're actually at least doing something.

00:12:57
When we put content out there, that's just about like, oh, did you know that I just dropped an episode like that? What does that do? Like, literally nothing. It doesn't even serve you, to be honest. Yeah, right.

00:13:09
And so much of the content that I realized that we were creating and that we were helping our Capsho, Vians create wasn't actually doing any of that. It wasn't actually helping people feel anything. And it was definitely not helping, like, our Captchovians get a result out of that, which we take, by the way, full accountability for. And that really, really kind of, I guess, hit us hard when we really look at ourselves and be like, we are not serving our purpose. We are not doing the thing that we really want to help people do.

00:13:40
Right. So, and I'll just kind of caveat this. Well, actually, it's not even, like, even if you're an influencer and you're not an entrepreneur influencer being like, look, you just want to build an audience on a platform, and at some point, maybe you're monetized. You don't know how. Maybe it'll be through sponsorships or maybe it'll be through affiliate marketing.

00:13:58
But even with influencers, regardless. Yeah. Right. It's still the same thing. Totally.

00:14:02
And it's an even more saturated space. So you actually have to be probably even more mindful with a very different purpose in mind. Yes. But not just putting stuff out there that's just gonna, people will just scroll right by. Yeah, because it's not adding any value to them.

00:14:15
Yeah. So that's kind of like the frame that we went into rebuilding capture with. And so essentially, if you are in our group, in our Facebook group, then you would have seen that we did a live on Friday, last Friday that just happened. Soft launching, what we're calling capture next gen. Yes.

00:14:35
Which is basically the very beginning of the rebuild. So it's not everything, obviously. And if anyone's in the software game, you know that the building never ends. Right. So we have, like, on our roadmap, so many exciting things coming.

00:14:50
But we decided to actually soft launch with a very, very focused area, which is social media title, description and social media, because we wanted to actually start to get this thought, like this concept of creating content with intention out there and start building upon that. And so if you are in the group, you would have seen that I did an interview with Katie Brinkley, who we love, who created essentially the four post social media strategy, and that when in the live that we did. So that was last Thursday that we did that in the group. It was. I actually interviewed her and I got her to talk about why do those posts actually work?

00:15:31
Right. Like, what is it about them that gets attention? That drives emotion, which as we all know, emotion drives action. And also because of all of that, how that actually wraps up with the social media algorithm, like, how that actually drives the algorithm for you. And it's so powerful because it wasn't until we started doing it that we were like, oh, now we get what it means to actually create content with intention rather than for content's sake.

00:16:00
Just out there. Yep. And also, I think the sequence in which, cause I know my big epiphany in learning Katy's strategy and implementing it is, I mean, the current version of capture wasn't entirely without strategy, but we, what we were doing in the way that, with social media, the way that we had structured our posts for our Captchovians, was that you make the ask first and then you try to stay top of mind versus Katie's strategy. And the four post strategy is very much about inviting them into a conversation, figuring out what's relevant to them, giving and then making the ask at the end. But you're doing the of first three things, the with the end in mind, so you're not just kind of randomly doing it.

00:16:34
And I was like, oh, even just the sequence was so powerful and the sequence in which we would make these assets available for our Capsho Vins on capture, very small tweak but even some of the feedback we've had, they're like, wow, this is, not only is it AI writing it for me, that's great. Using my content, that's great. But just, you've just stepped it out for me and that's how I like to consume content. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

00:16:56
I'm so much more likely to now take the action that you asking me to in your social media posts. Yeah. Such a simple but just transformational thing. Yeah. And by the way, we wouldn't lean so heavily into a strategy and definitely build it into a product without having actually done it ourselves and having done it ourselves and seeing the results that it's gotten.

00:17:14
Like I used, I'm gonna be honest, I probably hid a little bit from social media. Cause I was like, what is the point? Every time I post, no one sees it, no one engages. I only have bonner on their liking. Thumbs up if you want any content, send hearts sometimes.

00:17:32
But, like, it got me so down on what it is that social media could do that. I was just like, you know what? Not even worth it. I'm just gonna get off it. And ever since implementing this strategy eight, it not only gives you just that roadmap, so, you know, okay, great.

00:17:48
This is all I have to do and I just follow it. But it actually gets the results. Like, now I actually want to be on social media because I'm like, oh, people actually are commenting. Like, I should probably get back to them. Like, oh, I haven't got back to have a conversation.

00:18:00
Right. It makes such a difference. And I think in that sort of previous world where, you know, you're just kind of maybe chasing the quantum of things. Like, you're like, oh, it's really not getting the engagement, it's not getting the reach, which is still important. I feel like with this strategy now, you're really focusing on the quality of, say, engagement or reactions, you know, because we talked about it could be customers or potential customers, you know, commenting on things, but it could also be partners.

00:18:23
It could be, you know, it sparks off dm conversations instead. So it's less about, yeah, chasing the social media vanity numbers, but because the quality of engagement and visibility, even if on absolute terms, it's not in the millions, maybe it is for some people, but that's not the goal. So I think that's also been what's really empowering, where you're like, oh, even if there's like twelve comments, it's like, these are twelve real people that I can start a conversation with and convert in some way. Whether that's to use capture, whether that's to collaborate on something. Exactly.

00:18:53
Yeah. I've had people who've reached out to be like, hey, why don't you come be on our podcast? And we've started collaborations and partnerships. You know, even in terms of getting. If you ever feel like this is guest or this is someone that you really want to work with, and they're just, like, out of your league, let's say.

00:19:09
Like, this breaks down those barriers. Right. Because you're talking about something that they care about. Like, that's the only reason why they're engaging. Right.

00:19:16
They actually care about that topic. So it's a very. It's a very what? Like, what's a word? I'm doing this with my hands and Bona's like, I don't know what you're around with.

00:19:23
It's a very. I don't know, target. I'm targeted. Targeted? Is that.

00:19:27
It's a very targeted audience. No, it's like an audience that opts in to what it is that you're talking about. Oh, okay. It's like a not curated, but it's self selected in. Right.

00:19:37
And so, you know, so then self selected. Yes, self selected. Is this. So then you, like, so then you. You have confidence that, hey, this is something that they want to have a conversation about, and then you can just move that into the DM's or whatever it is.

00:19:51
Yep. So there's just so many angles that we've seen. We've been surprised with the types of conversations and the types of actions that people have taken with us off the back of this strategy that we're like, we have to. We have to share this. So, you know, we've had Katie on this podcast multiple times.

00:20:07
I've had her on, you know, in the Facebook group. So definitely go catch that session in the Facebook group if you're not there already. We'll leave the link for to join our community in the show notes because we then followed that live up with another one, which happened just last week, which was basically a soft launch of Capsho. Yeah, it's kind of. It's pretty.

00:20:31
It's exciting, but also really scary as well. At the same time, like, so much nervousness, because this is kind of like, you know, we always say and we always stand behind the product is not you. You know, don't take things personally, but sometimes you feel. I feel a butt coming on. Yeah.

00:20:46
You can't just kind of help it, right? It totally is not a reflection on us, but at the same time, there's so much pride in, you know, what we're putting out to the world that so everyone has to love it, because I will take it personally. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But we did a ton of testing with this iteration, as in with Capshovians and stuff.

00:21:07
And the reason why we soft launched it in the way that we did with a very, very focused, very small subset of the features, is because we want to get more feedback now and see how people are using it before we continue to build on it. So again, we're not making the same mistake that we did last time, which is we're changed. We're changed individuals. We really are. And which means that.

00:21:29
But the great thing is for you listening to this, if you're listening to it at the right time, small window of window of time is that we actually launched it. We soft launched it with a crazy, stupid founding member offer. I still don't know why we're doing that. Yeah, crazy stupid. And we capped it at the first 100 spots because it's crazy stupid.

00:21:52
So if you're interested and you're listening to this at the right time, we'll leave the link in the show notes to read more about Capsho Club at this basement founding member prize, which you will be grandfathered in again, if you get a non founding member and or come join the community. Come join the group and we'll look after, like, we'll figure it out. Yeah. So get in touch. But see, watch that light.

00:22:15
Watch what we have essentially launched because we're not going to go into it right now. And also what we have coming because not only like, we've launched something really, really cool, because the reason why it's called next gen is because the software the product has, is built with the purpose of intelligence. Purpose. Is that the right word or the. Yeah, yeah.

00:22:42
Of intelligence. And I know that everyone's like, well, AI is already intelligent. It is to an extent, at least, the way that we know and use it, if you use a chat, GPT, et cetera. But like, the way that we're building it is intelligence by way of like it is actually. Oh, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give it away.

00:22:58
You've gotta come, you gotta come watch, you gotta come watch the live in the group in our community. So we will leave the link to that in the show notes. Nice. Anything else you wanna add? No, I think that was, you know, it's kind of emotional to think about all of that.

00:23:10
So it's super. I'm just super excited. Definitely join the community because alongside obviously sharing more about Nextgen, that's kind of where we'll be sharing all of our software updates as well as all of the things, cool things that we're working on. It's the community where we kind of go first. So definitely come join us there.

00:23:25
Yeah, you'll find out all of the latest things that we drop, all of the features, everything in that community. So go to the show notes, come join the group and have some with us. And again, if you're listening to this, then we want you to join. We're going to have, if we're soft launching, does that mean that the next one is a hard launch? Is that what they call it?

00:23:42
I think so, yeah. Okay, so we're going to have a hard launch party. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And you're all invited. Okay?

00:23:48
So come join the community so you can get your personal invites and we're going to have some fun. Awesome. My name's Deirdre. I'm Bona. And as always, stay intelligently lazy.