123. Uprising Series: The Capsho NextGen Story

[00:00:00 - 00:15:47]If you hadn't heard, we recently went live with our completely rebuilt capture product called Capsho NextGen. And wow, it has been a journey. I feel like I have truly felt the whole gamut of emotions, from the frustration at having to make the initial hard decision to build from scratch, the excitement of what it can be, to the stress and frustrations of how long these things take, and the nervousness of finally launching a version of it. And all of that came to a head in the recent uprising event that we held. It was a completely live event, a full day, virtual event, actually, which I think it's safe to say that anyone who joined us live probably fully felt all of these emotions coming out at them from the screen as well. In that event, I told the cap show Uprising story, as well as featured a number of amazing seven figure entrepreneurs who have had their own uprising stories as well. It was incredible. So incredible and so inspiring and motivating that I had to share these stories on this podcast as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to carve out the next few episodes to create the uprising series and sharing these incredibly inspiring stories with you, too. Sound good? And what better place to start than with my own story? So, without further ado, let's get into it. Let's get into what has led us to this point right here, right now. My name is Deidre Shen SEO and co founder of Capsho. The fastest way to create content designed to help you get more leads. And this is win the content game. Oh, my gosh. Welcome to the cap show next gen uprising event. My name is Deirdre Tshien. I am the CEO and co founder of a Capsho. Fastest way to create content that gets you leads as you're hopping on and watching. Say hi in the comments. I see Brent's here. Hey, Doug. Hey, Sophie. Oh, yes. I am live. Okay, so say hi. Say hi. And where you're tuning in from, guys, this is the first ever time we are holding an all day event like this. This is crazy. My team and I, we have been, don't know, like, literally sleepless nights the last couple of nights pulling this together. And, you know, we have the huge support of the ecamm team as well, which I am using to live stream this right now. So thank you to everyone who was involved. I'm so, so excited about what is in store for you today. Hey, Sean. So good to see Yuan. We have literally been pouring our hearts and souls into this. Literally. We have handpicked a blockbuster lineup of speakers for you. You know, successful entrepreneurs who are pulling the curtain back and being incredibly transparent. It actually surprised me how transparent and honest they were about what they had to go through to make it to get to the other side. In fact, some things that they're going to talk about are things that they're still going through. So just seriously, watch out for it. It's going to be amazing. Hey, Dana. Hey, Gloria. Because finding success doesn't mean it actually all gets to be easy. Now, like, that's kind of what I definitely learned through speaking to these seven and eight figure entrepreneurs. It's actually pretty much the exact opposite. And I bet that some of you watching right now might be wondering when you might see the light at the end of your tunnel. When might things actually start to turn around for you? When will it all feel like it's clicking into place and finally happen? Right. If that's you, if that's something, if there's something maybe that you're currently struggling with right now, it could be maybe you're not hitting your revenue goals and you're wondering what that might actually mean, what that might mean for you to pay yourself, to pay your team, right? It could be that you're feeling drained or you're in a bit of a rut and you're lacking the motivation and inspiration to break out of it. Or it could even be that what you've been spending your time on, time building, doesn't actually feel like it's getting much traction. Those are just some examples that you might be going through right now, you know, examples that just kind of came to mind because I have not been through any of those myself at all. So if you are feeling anything like these things and you're trying to find the light at the end of your tunnel, then can you put a hashtag light in the comments? Hi, David. Hey, Melissa. Hey, Laquita. Good to see you on. Put a hashtag light in the comments if you are trying, or even the light bulb emoji, I don't know if it takes too long to find it. But, like, put that in because I want us to know that each and every one of us here, we're not alone in this, right? We're all feeling it in some way. This. And if you are feeling it, if you are feeling any of these things, then OMG, this is your event. This is your event. This capture next gen uprising event is kind of going to be a celebration of our collective moment, right? Each and every one of us, this is our moment to rise up. This is it. And if you're in and you're feeling it, then I see the lights coming through. You guys. Thank you. You are not alone. Like, we are all here. Laquita's dropped the light bulbs. I love it. So if you're in and you're feeling that this is your moment to rise up, then do me a favor. Can you put a hashtag uprise in the comments? You know, people have already identified, you know, they're looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. But now this is the moment, right, that we decide to rise up. And if that's you, put a hashtag uprise in the comments. Put a hashtag uprise in the comments right now. If you know, if you have the inner belief as well that what the rest of 2024 and the future brings is going to be so, so bright for you, I feel that for each and every one of us, when we will rise from the ashes, put a hashtag hash uprise. If you know this deep in your heart, and if you don't, for whatever reason, then just wait. Just wait until you hear what our speakers have to say about their own uprising moments. I know you will leave this event having full faith and full belief that it's going to happen for you, too. Now, I want to tell you about my own uprising joUrney. I love these uprises. Coming through. Thank you. You guys. I want to tell you about my own uprising JoUrney, if that's okay. Is that cool? Okay, so let me tell you about the word uprising and actually what this whole event, which we obviously called uprising, means to me, because as I said before, like, this whole day, this whole day is a celebration of each and every one of our uprising stories, all the past ones, because I know that each and every one of us have had plenty of those and all the future ones to come as well. And the reason why this means so much to me is because in this very moment, right here, right now, like, literally, as I'm speaking to you, Capsho is in its uprising moment. And before we get into it, I want to talk to our Capshovians right now, you and me, people on here who've been some of the biggest supporters. And if you. If you are current Capshovian, can you put a hashtag hash Capshovian in the comments? I want to know who I'm talking to right now because I want to talk directly to our Capshovians first and foremost. People have been on this journey with us over the last couple of years. I want to take this moment first of all, to thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means the absolute world to me and my co founders, Bono and Ash, that you believe in what it is that we're doing. And, you know, I did this in another live before, but I do want to, for anyone who missed that, I do want to also take this moment to apologize. To apologize. Because as first time software founders, we know now, we know that there were quite a few missteps that we made, there were quite a few design oversights that happened, and more than one bug that you had to deal with. And I hope you know that as a completely bootstrapped company, it seriously means the world to us that you've been on this journey with us. You believed in us. And even though. Even though you experienced some of the pain that you did, and I can tell you right now that the pain that you experienced through this process, my team and I felt, we felt it and we lived it ten times more in the background, I can tell you right now. And unfortunately, I'm, like, tearing up. Gosh. And unfortunately, updating code is not as simple as you might think. Again, me not knowing much about how to build software, I just thought, like, surely the team can just fix it, right? These are all easy fixes. And that is not actually how it works, which I know now, which is why for the last few months, have been super busy behind the scenes, actually completely rebuilding, rebuilding Capsho from the ground up, completely rebuilding it into what we're now calling Capsho NextGen. And it was not an easy decision for us to make, because if you know anything about building a SaaS platform, you know what it takes to have initially invested what we have into it. Burn it to the ground. Like, make the decision to burn it to the ground and then reinvest hundreds and of thousands of dollars into it again, almost like we're starting completely from scratch. And are you cool if I tell you about how all that came about? Actually, that, like, how this whole rebuild came about, is that okay? Are you guys in the comments? You rock. We are growing together. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so this is a little bit of the cap show story. So we launched the first version of Capsho just shy of two years ago. So it was July of 2022, in fact, when we launched the very, very first version of Capsho. Some of you, like, Rasean, you were one of our ogs, and you, like, you are amazing because you went through, you saw it all. And what we were doing, the problem that we were trying to solve, it was the first of its kind, right? Because remember, this is before even chat. GPT this was before the whole hype of AI, July 2022, right? And we launched it knowing that we were going to be able to help podcasters, entrepreneurs and content creators streamline their processes and keep their content creation going, right? Not quit what they were doing. Because I know firsthand how hard being consistent with creating content can be. And I was so, so invested in helping each and every one of you amplify your voices and your messages. Like, that's all we wanted to do, to the point where we were pushing new features so fast, almost daily, to be able to really uplevel how we were helping our Captchovians. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Speeding is actually dangerous, right? We learn that when we're driving. And I can tell you that speeding is dangerous not just in vehicles, speeding is dangerous when you're building software, or really any kind of business as well, but especially software. Because what happens with software, which I didn't realize, is that it leads to building really dirty code, right? Because we weren't giving our dev team enough time to code it properly and cleanly. So in the pursuit of getting, of putting new things out really quickly, we were building on really dirty code, which meant that it became really, really buggy, really buggy, to the point where we were getting feedback. And all of that culminated to October 31 of last year, you might remember. For those of you who have been actively reading my emails for a while, and I know I send out a lot of them, but there was a particular email that I sent out. Gosh, I think it was sometime in November or December, but I was kind of reflecting back on the day, I call it like the D day. It was October 31 of 2023. So a few months ago, that was the day that we actually, we made the really, really hard decision to pretty much let everyone in our team go. It was our whole development team at the time and also our marketing team too, right? We pretty much just let everyone go. And what you probably don't know is that at the same time, I was actually having a crisis in confidence. And I remember sitting on our bedroom floor speaking to Ash about this, who's not only my co founder, inside capture, but he's also my husband. And I was trying to articulate why I was suddenly feeling this way, right? I was in tears because I felt like I was just failing everyone. I felt like I was failing my co founders. I felt like I was failing all of my strategic partners, and I felt like I was failing you. And it's a heavy burden that us entrepreneurs place on ourselves. Right? And, you know, if you're human and you care deeply, which I hope all of us here do, it's no surprise that sometimes we do experience having a crisis in confidence. But it's in these moments that we get tested. Right? This is when our mettle as entrepreneurs get tested, because I know I had to find a way to battle through my own internal beliefs about myself and what I think or thought that we were capable of and focus on what really matters. And it's hard sometimes to see that particular light when you're so in it, when you're so in the pain of trying to get through to the next day. But the thing that we really, I knew that we needed to really focus on was you, our Capshovians. And that's why. That's why this moment right now feels like our uprising. Because we've just been through our version of the fire. You know, we speak about, and I hope you guys have been enjoying some of the social media videos and stuff that we've been putting out. It was very much about the theme of rising from the ashes and the Phoenix and stuff, because it literally feels like we have been through the fire, which isn't to say that there aren't more to come, because there's always going to be. This is just the fun of the journey of not only life, but entrepreneurship, right. But having gone through our own version of it makes me more and more confident that we can rise to any challenge that gets thrown our way, right? So Capsho NextGen is our uprising and this game that we play as entrepreneurs, because that's all we're doing at the end of the day, right? We're playing a game, like, every time that we think of it as us running onto a soccer pitch or onto a football field, like every day that we wake up and we sit at our desk or at a coffee shop or wherever to start our day, that's us starting to play this entrepreneurship game each and every day, right. It's always going to have these ups and downs. Always. It is literally like a snakes and ladders game, right? And I'm learning to try not to let them get me down, you know, trying, trying at least. But that's what's gonna happen. So let me know. Who wants to see what we have actually been building behind the scenes, right? Who wants to get a taste of cap show's uprising, what we're calling cap show next? Jen, who wants to see. Can you let me know in the comments if you want to see that? Put a hashtag, hash nextgen in there if you want to see what we've been up to, what the tears, the fears, the frustrations have been leading to. Oh, my gosh. I'm now, like, kind of reading these comments, and thank you so much, all you Capshovians. Like, you stuck with us, and it means so, so much to us. But, um, yes, we're the hashtag nextgen. Okay. All right, we are going to pull the curtain back a little bit on what we've been working on. Conventional wisdom tells us we can't have both quality and speed in anything we do. That one has to be sacrificed for the other. But not anymore. Not with Capsho NextGen built with true intelligence at its core.

[00:15:59 - 00:16:00]Are you guys trying to put chat.

[00:16:00 - 00:16:01]GPT out of business?

[00:16:02 - 00:16:06]Because, like, it's the next level?

[00:16:06 - 00:16:07]No.

[00:16:07 - 00:16:14]Oh, my God. Okay, yes, this, this is, this is. Oh, my God.

[00:16:16 - 00:16:29]Well, no, this is so good. I can't wait, cuz, like, everything that we've tried, it sucks. Can you, like, can you put, like a, just like, a beep, like, suck? So I'm excited because you guys built some quality stuff.

[00:16:29 - 00:16:41]Oh, my God. I've been wondering if this was possible. What? Hold on, hold on. Hold on a second. Oh, no, you didn't repeat that. So. No, no, no, hold on. I don't want to.

[00:16:41 - 00:16:56]Sue, repeat what you just said. Amazing. It solves a huge problem for us because our capacity, we talk a lot about those capacity and resources, right? So most of the people that we help, and including ourselves, we're pretty limited, right? So how can we maximize that? How can we be more effective?

[00:16:57 - 00:17:09]No way could we do all of these things all the time. But I have to train you the GPT and copy and paste upload content to the GPT or blah, blah, blah. This is such a time series.

[00:17:09 - 00:17:25]Now I can train the AI to pretty much be my best virtual assistant because it's going to embrace my brain, the way I talk, the way I write. And so now I can simply have it do the work for me, which is.

[00:17:26 - 00:17:30]Okay, you got it.

[00:17:35 - 00:17:46]Okay, fala. I can put that in there and it will reword all of the strategy like the best student ever. You totally understand the strategy.

[00:17:58 - 00:21:14]Oh, my gosh. OMG, that just gave me goosebumps. I've got goosebumps watching that. Put a hashtag goosebumps in the comments. Let me know what you think of what you just saw. And as that is just the beginning, okay? The assets themselves are just the beginning. As you watch throughout the day, we are going to be dropping even and cooler features that I know some of our capture club members have been using and testing and seeing amazing results with. And you know what? When I was talking to my coach about what we were doing and I told him that we were going to call it nextgen, he actually told me not to. That calling it next gen would actually raise expectations about what we were delivering. He was like, oh, I don't think you want to do that because people are going to really assume it's going to be next Gen, right? And do you want to be setting expectations that high? And I was like, you know what? Like, I, I do, I do. I want to be held accountable to what it is that we're delivering because we're gonna be delivering something that is going to be the first of its kind inside of caption xgen. And I want you to lean in on this. Like, can you just come closer to, to your screen? Because I want you to truly understand when I say next gen, like what that actually means. Because caption xgen is not just here to help you create content that we just quickly showed you, and content in an intentional way as well that actually gets you engagement and leads. But in a way, what the, I guess the basis of NextGen is it's built with intelligence at its core. It's going to automatically self learn from all of the edits that you make inside the platform. So you don't have to keep telling it the same thing over and over again. You don't have to keep telling it your brand and you know how you like to write. It actually learns that all along the way without you doing anything else. It will pick up the nuances in your tone of voice, it'll pick up how you like to structure content, it will know how you like to write. And on an ongoing basis, capture will automatically apply those learnings to the drafts that it creates for you so that you don't have to spend any more time trying to wrangle those AI outputs into submission to create your own version of quality. Right? Like anyone who uses Aih, Paulie knows what I'm talking about. And capture club members, you guys, like, I'd love to, for you to put in the comments, like how you've been finding the self learning, because I know that there's been some amazing, amazing feedback on that. So we are committing, we're committing to writing the most intelligent platform of its kind. So you're getting this right. So we are actually making history right now. We're actually making history. And if you understand this, put a hashtag making history in the comments if you understand just how revolutionary what it is that we're building is. And this is the thing, we want you. We want to invite you to be a part of it. I'd love for each and every one of you to be a part of this too. And so take this. Replay this episode as my personal invitation to you. Join us on our journey with Capsho NextGen and sign up for your free trial. Now you can go to captcha.com and find it and we will leave the link to that in the show notes too. I cannot wait to see you become our next capshovian and help us build the absolute best product for you. Help us with becoming our next testimonial maybe. My name is Deirdre Tshien and as always, stay intelligently lazy.