How Capsho Became an AI Powerhouse and What It Takes to Win with Deirdre Tshien

In this conversation, Deirdre Tshien shares her entrepreneurial journey, discussing the evolution of her businesses, the challenges of maintaining product-market fit, and the creation of CapShow, an AI-powered tool for content creators. She emphasizes the importance of focus, collaboration, and customer service in navigating the competitive landscape of technology and entrepreneurship.

Key Takeaways

▶️ Product-market fit is an ongoing process, not a one-time achievement.

▶️ First mover advantage can lead to rapid growth but requires constant adaptation.

▶️ Transitioning from hospitality to tech entrepreneurship involves significant learning.

▶️ CapShow was born from the need to streamline content creation for podcasters.

▶️ Building a unique value proposition is crucial in a competitive market.

▶️ Collaboration with industry experts enhances product offerings and marketing strategies.

▶️ Customer service is a core value, ensuring users feel supported.

▶️ Navigating tech debt is a common challenge for startups.

▶️ Future projects depend on clear market strategies and audience identification.

▶️ Organic growth strategies can be effective, especially through partnerships.

Sound Bites

➥ "Product market fit isn't a one and done."

➥ "We were the first in the podcasting space."

➥ "We believe a lot in collaborations."

➥ "I always have really great ideas."

➥ "We never want to keep people in the lurch."

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Deirdre Shen and Her Journey

02:51 The Evolution of Product-Market Fit

05:50 From Hospitality to Entrepreneurship

09:07 The Birth of CapShow and First Mover Advantage

12:00 Navigating Competition and Market Changes

14:51 Building a Unique Value Proposition

18:00 Growth Strategies and Customer Engagement

21:06 Challenges in Software Development

23:49 Future Aspirations and Customer Service

Connect with Diedre Tshien

https://www.capsho.com
https://www.instagram.com/capshohq
https://www.instagram.com/deirdretshien

Episode Sponsor

LinkedIn Ghostwriting and Profile Management service: http://thedigitalwritingfirm.com

Transcript

Alrighty, talo falava, ola uingoa o, Faleulu, Ropati Nikolao, Mikaele Penoholo, Taulao Usofano, but you can call me Rob. It is nice to meet you, the behind the scenes stories of busy professionals. And I'm excited for Deidre Shen to be here to share her story. I've got a lot of questions, but before we get started, this episode is brought to you by Get Ghosted, a LinkedIn ghost writing and management service.

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All the questions I have for Deidre because she is a serial entrepreneur. She's built numerous businesses and has so much knowledge. I definitely welcome her, but I want to get started with our ignition question. That's going to kind of drive us and point us in the right direction. So the question I ask people is, in the last 12 months,

If you were to take that and turn it into a Netflix special, a movie, what would that movie be and what would you call it?

Deirdre Tshien (01:37.738)

my gosh. Wow. What a question. I always get so nervous about these. I think the theme of it would probably be something around, like we were talking about, especially the entrepreneurship journey. It would probably be something around like the realizations that, you know, product market fit, just because you have product market fit doesn't mean that you have it forever.

would probably be the theme. I'm not really sure what I would call it. unfit. That doesn't really.

Rob Pene (02:11.586)

I like that. That's good. Nice. I can see like a Shark Tank show like, okay, no, unfit. Yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (02:17.089)

Yeah, yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (02:25.77)

Yeah, that's definitely been a journey for us over the last 12 months. In terms of even like we'll talk about cap show, which is the business that, you know, me and my co founders are in right now. Yeah, we were the first of our kind to launch in 2022 mid 2022. And I think that gave us an advantage around being first, you know, gave us a first mover advantage. And we, you know,

we grew really quickly off the back of that. then what you don't realize is market changes really quickly, especially when you're in the AI space right now. You know, the so we had an influx of competitors, the market even from from a demand perspective from how our clients was changing. it was just it was just changing.

Rob Pene (03:12.132)

Mm-hmm.

Deirdre Tshien (03:15.37)

everywhere. And so I think that's definitely a big learning that we've had in the last 12 months, which is just because we had product market fit. It's not a one and done. It's a constant, constant thing to strive for. Yeah, anytime you have a business, it's just ongoing.

Rob Pene (03:33.73)

You've started so many different businesses in your career. Where did that passion and motivation come from? Did you always want to do different things when you were little?

Deirdre Tshien (03:46.19)

you know, I, I never really had the entrepreneurship thing when I was little, because you know how a lot of stories people are like, they were, you know, selling they would like doing lawn mowing when they were 10 years old, or they were, you know, I was never like that, because my upbringing was a little bit different. My parents were Asian from Malaysia, we I grew up in Australia. So they were first migrants in Australia. And so was very much

the mentality of, um, you've got to study hard, get good grades, become a doctor. That was like, so my whole upbringing was like, okay, I'm just going to become a doctor. was never, you know, entrepreneurship. It was never really a thing for me. Um, but it was, it was kind of interesting because when I actually had, you know, I was in 12th grade, which is like senior year here and, know, applying to universities and everything.

I realized very quickly when I was trying to think about what it is, if I didn't get into medicine, like what would I want to do? You know, none of the science like I realized I actually really didn't like science or anything to do with that realm. Like I really liked the, you know, and I found that like the types of books that I read were always around, you know, the theme was around business and, you know, and entrepreneurship and stuff. And I think I just really liked

the flexibility and the choice that came with going more down the business path. I actually did that instead. So I did a business and law degree instead went into banking. So that was my corporate career. And then I hit quarter life crisis, which you know, it was actually me, my partner and I both kind of at the same time, he that he was actually studying to become a doctor, he was studying medicine, but he was, he was not enjoying it.

And so was around the same time that we were both like, okay, well, what it is that we're doing is not what we want to be doing forever. And, you know, we just like, what does that mean? Like we're gonna have to, you know, make money and, also fulfill our, this, this creative need that we, that we had as well. And that was when we started thinking about our first business. And

Rob Pene (05:50.189)

Hmm.

Deirdre Tshien (06:10.154)

Interestingly enough, we didn't really have, you it's always a struggle when you're like, Okay, well, we want to do something but what is it? We didn't really have anything that just immediately came to mind. What happened was, as I said, Ash was studying medicine and and but we just kind of moved out together and I love my desserts. I'm like the biggest sweet tooth and he started just making me desserts at home.

Rob Pene (06:29.836)

Really nice.

Deirdre Tshien (06:37.608)

And he loved it. He enjoyed it. And he was experimenting and we were like, was like, this stuff is so good. And we're like, why don't we just do this? So I do not recommend this to anyone. But our first business was in hospitality. was a brick and mortar store. It was a dessert bar, actually in Sydney. it is one of the hardest, hospitality is one of the hardest businesses to actually grow and succeed in.

But we were able to just through sheer, I don't know, like naivety and will, was able to grow that brand to five locations. We had a burger restaurant as well alongside that. Yeah, so and then there's a whole nother journey that then took us away from hospitality as well.

Rob Pene (07:26.754)

Wow, and then you just got better at making decisions and kind of testing ideas as you went through the journey. And then you landed on this new one, right, CapShow. You mentioned the first mover advantage. We'll go a little bit deeper on what the first mover advantage was for you guys then and then how it kind of skyrocketed to now.

Deirdre Tshien (07:35.758)

100%.

Deirdre Tshien (07:41.688)

Yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (07:47.951)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. in between sort of having the businesses in Sydney, the hospitality businesses, actually, there were a sequence of events and we actually made the move over to the States, to New York. I was actually at the time exploring a fashion technology business with another co-founder. That didn't, we failed that one. It led us into...

kind of like an agency thing, which led us into a coaching business. And through that coaching business actually was when we started podcasting. and it was that experience of going, like, okay, we have this podcast, but it doesn't feel like it's growing. Like I'm not really getting it's not, you know, doing the back in the day, was like audiograms and you know, like episode just dropped posts. Like that was the thing. And that was not working at all. And I'm like,

This is ridiculous. Like this podcast is meant to be growing our business, but we're trying to spend so much time growing a podcast that anyway, it just didn't feel like we were getting any traction was spending way too much time, you know, publishing it and doing all the things. And so that was kind of like the seed of CAPsho because in short, what CAPsho does is it you upload your audio or video file. So for podcasters or YouTubers or coaches who maybe you do training or courses, you create courses.

you upload that into Capsho and basically it creates pretty much all your content marketing assets for you. So from a tech perspective, it does your show notes, your YouTube description, social media posts for all of the different platforms, blog posts, LinkedIn newsletters, it does a checklist lead magnet, it does a ton of marketing style assets. It also has an image generation tool as well. So you can create thumbnails for YouTube.

videos on their social media posts, and does also do some clipping as well some short form video clipping as well. And it when we launched, it didn't do all of that, obviously, because back then AI was quite, it was a relatively unknown technology, we're talking this is 2022. And I had so in my corporate job in my corporate career when I was in banking,

Deirdre Tshien (10:02.99)

I was fortunate because I was in the innovation team. And so we were actually exploring a lot of use cases for AI. And this we're talking about like, this is like, gosh, eight years ago. So it's not a new technology by any stretch of the imagination, but for how mainstream it's become, it was very new at the time. And so in April of 2022, we actually went to Podfest.

It was the first, the first podcast that we went to and we had, we were working on the very, very first iteration of capture. was like, was, we were literally like days at podcasts. We were days away from launching our beta program, but we went to podcast to, and just started speaking to podcasters. And we knew that the one pain point that they had around publishing was writing the show notes. And so that was kind of, we were like, okay, we're just going to really focus on.

on being able to write show notes. So upload your audio file and capsule spit out show notes. And people were amazed because remember this is before chat.jpg. This was before anything else came. And they're like, my gosh, I, that sounds like me. Those are the words that I said. And so that's kind of what first mover advantage means is because like, no, we were literally the first, definitely the first in the podcasting space to have created a tool.

like an AI powered tool like this. so and because it was it worked and it worked amazingly. We got a lot of people a signing up for beta for for when our beta launch, I think we had close to 400 people sign up for it. And then you know, when we launched, obviously, you know, like, come try it out. We actually had this moment when it crashed, like we had so many people, you know, getting onto the platform, it actually crashed it. But because it was like,

AI was not a thing at that time. Obviously, that changed when chat GPT launched then they did at the end of 2022, early 2023. And then obviously, at the back of that, we had a lot of competitors, enter into the space. that's kind of like what the first move advantage looked like for us.

Rob Pene (12:21.25)

Yeah. So how are you guys competing with these other companies that are doing exactly like, or very similar, it's space, you know?

Deirdre Tshien (12:28.194)

Very soon. Yeah.

Yeah, so we had to get, we had to get really, really disciplined around where we're focusing our efforts. And that was everything from who we were serving to what it is, what activities that we were actually doing. So, you know, again, at the time, now the shadow side of having that first move advantage was that because everyone wanted a piece of it, we were like, we started to find ourselves getting stretched, trying to meet the demands of

all different types of people. you we had a lot of agencies and producers who were like, I want to use this for, you know, my clients, do you have like bulk? And so we're like starting to build, you know, for them and we'll, we're losing sight of like, okay, what is and like, you know, who is it that we're trying to serve? And so we had to really go back to basics around redefining that and staying really true to who that was. So for us, it's

Rob Pene (13:14.756)

Hmm.

Deirdre Tshien (13:26.446)

you know, coaches, consultants, service providers, so expert based businesses who have a message that they want to share and just need a little bit of help to get get it out there. And you know, we, and so you'll notice on our website, we only have one plan, like we used to have agency plan, and we used to have all these other things. And it was like, we just carved all of that out, because it was just not serving us to reach the people that we needed to reach with, you know, with with

the message of CAPShow, because we were stretched over. it was getting really disciplined and focused, re-disciplined and refocused, I guess, on who else we were serving and what we were serving them with. you know, even in terms of how CAPShow is built, we really honed in because we were speaking to the behaviors. What's the most important thing for you? It's like, one, I just, don't want to be spending too much, like AI is meant to be saving time. I don't want to be spending too much time.

doing all the editing and blah, blah, blah, like, I think people know that they should have their eyes over, know, because you always want to be checking for accuracy and things like that. So but we spent a lot of time on our back end really making sure that we had this concept of self learning. So every time that people made edits to anything inside of cap show, captures engine would learn from that. And so then the more that you use capture, the more that you found that it actually wrote, it spoke it

sounded just like you. So that it really started to, you know, cut down the time that people would need to spend on their show notes on their social media posts on their blog posts, things like that. So we spent a lot of time, you know, making that happen. But the other thing too, was that we knew that the other thing that we're hearing was like, people were like, this is great that you create all these things. But I want, you know, at the end of the day, like I need to get results as in

end user, know, the client, like the client needs to get results. And so what that meant and look like was like, well, I'm on social media, but and I'm on social media, because I want to get leads or want to, you know, I want to get I want to get seen. Or I'm on YouTube, and I want to get my stuff discovered. Or I have a blog post, but and but and I want to get that found, I want to get that ranked, you know, so we started working with experts in social media in

Rob Pene (15:21.742)

It's nice.

Deirdre Tshien (15:49.902)

to actually to build in, we built into CAPTCHA marketing strategies. So, you know, our social media posts that get created isn't just a generic summarization or whatever of what was spoken about. It actually follows in this case, Katie Brinkley's for post social media strategy, which is designed to take someone from awareness of a problem to action. You know,

Rob Pene (15:56.632)

Wow.

Deirdre Tshien (16:16.61)

that we worked with people like Damon Burton on the SEO side with Roberto Blake on the YouTube side to kind of go, okay, well, what is important in a YouTube description or what's important in a blog post? What are those different elements? And that's what we built into. So we built marketing strategy into CAPShow to actually help our clients get results. And so that's what, when we talk about redistricting and refocus, it was like, who are we serving and what is it that they want and need?

and how can we just deliver that to them?

Rob Pene (16:48.824)

I think that's a huge differentiating factor too, where you actually have experts that contribute to the knowledge base of how it functions. Do people know that? Like is that on your side and like the messaging that, cause that's huge.

Deirdre Tshien (16:57.134)

Hmm.

Deirdre Tshien (17:04.814)

Yeah, yeah. So we did do it. We did a big campaign, you know, when we first like, like launched that side of it for sure. Making sure and we ran like a lot of joint like collaborations, like challenges and webinars and stuff with these experts to bring it to life. But you know, to your point, you know, we probably should relook at and making sure that we call it out more obviously, because yeah, that you're right, is. And we do call out the fact that it's marketing strategies inbuilt into CAPTCHA, but we probably don't go

Rob Pene (17:20.804)

Yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (17:34.764)

into the level of detail that I fully just spoke to you about.

Rob Pene (17:38.82)

Yeah, I think that'll definitely make it like, cause when you talk about the YouTube person and the SEO, I'm like, oh yeah, I know those guys. Okay, cool. But I also know that this other competitor don't do that or they don't have that specialty. I'm like, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would call it out. Yeah. And you know what? We can get more experts to contribute, you know, at least their knowledge and all that stuff. Cause that will certainly make a difference. With that.

Deirdre Tshien (17:52.974)

Mm.

Deirdre Tshien (17:57.197)

Yeah.

Mmm.

Rob Pene (18:08.366)

How are you guys, are you, how are people finding you? Are you guys like running paid ads or just all organic? And then how are you pushing?

Deirdre Tshien (18:16.064)

Yeah, right. Right now it has been all organic. So we believe a lot in collaborations. We have we've been fortunate to build some really, really great relationships with partners like E cam, know, with partners like, yeah, with and a whole host of other partners. And so a lot of it a lot of it has just been, you know,

you know, leveraging other people's audiences in the same way that they would leverage our audience, you know, we're leveraging their audience. So our, you know, very initially, our go to market strategy has always been partnership led. And we've always been very mindful of like, how do we create opportunities for us to be able to bring people together and share their expertise or their knowledge. So we we hold summits every year.

So, know, through podcasting, you know, we bring that to life and, and a whole host of other ways. So it has been organic mainly. Now we're really leaning heavily into sort of an affiliate strategy. So really going hard there as well. yeah, that's kind of right now it's been pretty organic.

Rob Pene (19:31.448)

Yeah, what's been the biggest challenge with Captio in terms of growing it or even building it? Like what did you have to overcome that was really, really, man, I can't believe we have to do this. I don't know if we can. Yeah, what.

Deirdre Tshien (19:43.086)

Yeah. So, gosh, I mean, I can talk about the external factors all day, obviously, in terms of competitors and market shifting. honestly, I would say the biggest is it because it's always when you like do it to yourself that you're like, like, why? But we you know, when we you know, everyone always talks about and I don't I don't disagree with this. But I think there's just always a better way of

being able to do that. you always talk about, especially in software, it's like, how do you just get to market quickly? So MVP, MVP. It's like, how do you just like quick and dirty? when we first launched, it was quick and dirty. was pretty like the code base was not pretty. It was a bit of a mess. And it kind of got us into a lot of tech debt, into a bit of a hole where we had to spend

a good amount of time rebuilding. you can imagine when you have to, when you rebuild, start to, because then the external factors then start to hit, right? Like when there are competitors and stuff coming to market and you're, you should you feel like you should be six months ahead, but you're actually just kind of still at the same point as. And so I, in that journey, that was probably the one thing that, you know, we, we found definitely we shot ourselves in the foot a little bit was

Yeah, it was in the rebuilding of what we had.

Rob Pene (21:11.652)

Mmm.

Because you've done a ton of different things in the past, do you anticipate other projects in the future? Or are you going to take this as far as you can go?

Deirdre Tshien (21:26.062)

Um, I, I, gosh, never say never. Like I really would like to say that I focus on, on one thing, but, um, I do know that I, I always have like, really, this is what I would say. Um, ideas is one thing. Like I was going to say, I always have really great ideas, but the thing that I always temper myself with, with those ideas is, is there a clear go to market strategy? I.

can I identify exactly who this is for? can I literally find them? Like, could I actually do whatever, whether it's a Google search or a, and find people who this, whatever that idea is I have can actually, like, it'll be like a no brainer for them. Kind of like what we did with when Capture first came out, right? It was like, we hit podfest, so we knew exactly, because podcasters and specifically experts who podcast, we hit podfest.

we found them, we spoke to them literally individually. And that was how we were able to get the initial traction with Capture. And I'm like, with, I have a lot of ideas, but there are lot of ideas that I'm just like, I just don't know. This sounds great. And it sounds like it'd be a lot of fun to work on, but I actually don't know who or how I would actually go and find these people. given that I'm like, I do want to take Capture to wherever like to the furthest it can go.

But I also know that because my brain's always thinking, you know, this way, I'm like, I think that there will probably be other things that I will want to work on too.

Rob Pene (22:54.958)

Yeah.

Rob Pene (22:59.926)

Yeah, that's cool. This might be a side kind of question, but this is always a problem for me with different software is customer service. Man, how can you get the help when like, how's your customer service?

Deirdre Tshien (23:10.51)

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Deirdre Tshien (23:20.108)

mean, I think it's, it's great. We do put a lot of like, that's always been one of our, you know, like, a a core ethos to us is like, we never want to keep people in the lurch. And so we do have like, SLAs around where we get back to people generally within 24 hours. But we generally get back to them like way before then anyway. But yeah, we have like,

We have someone dedicated to customer service. and we actually don't get a lot to be honest, because again, with our rebuild, we're very, very like a finicky around, Hey, let's like, let's make sure we build this thing as likes, we just need, we need this thing to work. And so we actually don't get a lot of, we get a lot of conversations around feedback around like, Hey, it'd be great if, know, capture could do this, or, you know, have you thought about this for, you know, future features.

But we actually don't battle much in terms of what's going wrong with the platform. so that's been part of our investment as well.

Rob Pene (24:28.676)

That's good. That's good. Okay. What's the best way for people to find you and then also find CAPsho?

Deirdre Tshien (24:35.318)

Yeah. So, I'd love to be able to offer anyone. so if you have, if you're podcasting or you're YouTube-ing or you create, you know, training videos, or even if you are willing to go on a walk and record two minutes into your phone and, know, your, your rambles and you want to upload it into a software that can automatically create content marketing assets for you. And I'd love you to try Capture out. it's just at capture.com. C A P S H O dot com.

And I'd love to offer everyone 50 % off the plan, the plan for life. So instead of paying $99 a month, which is what you'll see on the website, you'll pay only $49 a month for all that you get inside of CAPsho. Just put the code forever 50 in and $49 a month forever.

Rob Pene (25:27.544)

That's awesome. You guys will get a ton of people from that. Totally. Yeah, good for you.

Deirdre Tshien (25:28.852)

Hahaha

Yeah, yeah, so we're excited about that.

Rob Pene (25:37.388)

Yeah, and they can find Instagram, YouTube.

Deirdre Tshien (25:40.776)

personally, I'm probably on Facebook the most. Yeah, so just my full name. D E I R D R E T S H I E N. It's not a easy name to remember. But yeah, you can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn. I am also an Instagram. I'm just not on there like a lot monitoring my stuff. Yeah.

Rob Pene (25:45.143)

Okay.

Rob Pene (26:01.9)

Yeah, It's okay if we share the capture of Forever 50 with different people too. Yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (26:08.588)

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Please. Yeah. And as an aside, I don't know if you're going to, you don't, you don't really edit, but Rob, you can become an affiliate and you'll, you know, you can share, can make some money from it too. So maybe you can share. Yeah. Maybe you share that code.

Rob Pene (26:21.25)

I'll do that, yeah.

Because then you can track it. Yeah. Well, good. Good. So everybody listening, make sure to go to CapShow and then you got the forever 50 code and then reach out on Instagram, Facebook as well. They should have the handle CapShow, right? Cap and then HQ, HQ at the end. Very good. Well, I appreciate you. Thank you for the time. And I'm definitely going to sign up and share this bad boy. This is great. Yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (26:41.646)

Capture HQ. Yeah. Yeah.

Deirdre Tshien (26:53.326)

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

Rob Pene (26:55.618)

Cool. Okay.