54. The Realities of Tech Entrepreneurship: Lessons Learned from the Capsho 2.0 Launch

00:00:00 Hey, you. It's Deirdre Tshien here, seer, and co founder of Capsho and the host of this podcast, Grow my podcast show. And we're going to change it up a little bit on this episode. I have actually invited Bona, my co founder, who you've heard from before. Hello.

00:00:16 And also my other co founder and actually husband, Ash Clark. Great to be here. And what we decided to do for this episode is you may or may not have heard that we went live, finally with Capshow 2.0. And it's a bit of a journey, let's just say. And I'm sure that if you've been receiving my emails, you've kind of been keyed into some of the things that we've been doing, some of the things that we've been having going on.

00:00:45 And I really, actually just wanted to, in a way, have a cathartic experience with this particular episode to almost recap on that journey on what we as entrepreneurs, what we kind of experienced and went through, and almost some of our learnings. Because if nothing else, hopefully as entrepreneurs yourself, you would know, even know some of these things, but also, hopefully some of our own learnings can help you out as well. Hopefully, that's the aim. And, yeah, it's going to be pretty fluid. It's a very not edited episode.

00:01:23 Off the cuff. Off the cuff, yes. I'm flood for sure. So I wanted to maybe Bonna, if you wouldn't mind helping set the scene for Gosh, all the things that have happened, like the journey, and it started really mid Jan, I think it was just a week before Podfest that we were like, okay, this is now the direction that we want to be going in. And if you haven't listened to my episode on the humanity era on the humans, how humans and AI should be, I guess as humans, we should be leveraging AI or need to be leveraging AI, I should say.

00:02:02 Then go and listen to that episode. Because that will give you a lot of context around what prompted our decision to actually create 2.0. And then we hit Podfest. And that was just crazy. That was a crazy time we had in our mind.

00:02:18 So that would have been what was the date of Podfest? Late Jan. Late Jan? Yeah. And we were like February 14 was when at least for Beta, we were going to go live for Beta.

00:02:29 Yes. We thought happy Valentine's Day to all of our community. We're going to go live with Beta, at least to our Capsho collective community. So it was going to be one of those things where we'll be like, you're my Valentine, and here's Capsho two Beta as my Valentine. But that didn't happen.

00:02:45 Definitely not. No. That got pushed by a couple of weeks. And we thought podcast movement evolutions was it. It was going to be when we would launch instead.

00:02:55 Yes. So when was Pme? That was the first week of March. Wow. Okay, March 6, I think was the date.

00:03:01 Yeah. And that did not happen. Did not happen because I think I had my first mini meltdown just before that because we were running really hard for that date and we realized you're probably not going to make it. Yes. Okay, so we're already telling you, but let's step back a little bit.

00:03:16 Obviously, I've pointed you, if you want to hear the philosophy behind 2.0, definitely go and listen to that episode. But I did want to just talk a little bit about some of these changes that we had decided to make with 2.0. And it really does center first and foremost on the editing and how do we make it super, way more customizable, way more flexible, put more control in the human, in the creator's hands. That was our whole ethos, our whole philosophy behind it. And obviously as part of because we're going to upgrade the editor, we decided to make a ton of other upgrades as well, like parallel processing and tone of voice and the whole UI, which is also we should touch.

00:03:54 On that story as well, what happened there, which let's just say we've had a lot of learnings on this journey and we did want to delve a little bit deeper and give you insight into what it is. That's how this works. And if you are also a tech entrepreneur, you would probably know a lot of these things and you're like, yeah, this sounds really familiar. This is actually our first go at I've been an entrepreneur for almost pretty much a decade now. First time that it's been in software, in tech.

00:04:25 So a lot of the things that I'm experiencing and learning is like the first time that we're learning and experiencing all of these things, which is fun, but it's also a little bit like, wow, I really wish we had known that before we made that decision. So case in point was going dark mode, which I did not realize was going to happen when we launched guest beta for the first time, which by the way, we've kind of rolled back and we will relaunch that soon. But I didn't know that. It was like we just weren't clear enough with our requirements with the developer. Developer.

00:04:59 It had to be a requirement. We just thought, surely that's not going to happen. Of all things. Yeah, that was not going to get delivered. It was all going to go into a bonus, basically for 2.0, bonus, one request.

00:05:10 She was like, we cannot go live with 2.0 unless we have light mode. Look, I was getting it from everyone. Those of you who are listening and were advocates of light mode, you know this, that everyone's saying, I'm not going to sign up to your product till you have light mode to write through the people saying, hey, I can't read. If you could please switch it back to light mode. That would be great.

00:05:29 So that was you're, right? My one non negotiable one no negotiable. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that that was what pushed us back to two weeks. I'm just going to put that out there.

00:05:37 You're welcome. Okay. A ton of changes that we had coming. 2.0 we knew it was like a full redesign of the UI, the interface, like how you as a Capsho user would be interacting with Capsho was going to completely change. So it was a really big undertaking.

00:05:58 And anyone who's been following our journey knows that we don't back away from a big undertaking. In fact, we embrace it wholeheartedly and we sprint full steam ahead with the speed at which we iterate and drop new features, et cetera. You know that this is just part of our DNA. And so you can probably imagine how hard it is, what a difficult pill it is to swallow when we do have to make the decision to delay. It's really, really hard.

00:06:31 And this goes back to definitely for me, my overachiever Asian have to get straight as, have to get the things, do all be perfect at everything. For me, it's really hard to have to be like, oh, we're not going to hit the deadlines. We're not going to be able to deliver the things that we had expected to. That's really difficult. Anyway, that was the sidebar to make it about me, of course.

00:06:58 And where was I even what was I even talking about? We're talking about, I guess, the huge into undertaking that we very naively thought was going to take us two to three, maybe three weeks. Yes. And realizing it was at least triple that time, which is still a phenomenally short amount of time in software. Yes.

00:07:15 Okay, so we hit Podfest. We were super excited because we were like, yep. February 14, it was going to be two to three weeks until we go live with Beta out. We had lined up Capsho collective the collective guy. Our team, our community was like, they're like, yep, we're ready for it.

00:07:30 And then we're like, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen for pull another couple of weeks. And when we did finally launch Beta to them, it was a pretty half baked for sure. Lots of bugs. We had only opened a couple of the assets for them to try, but troopers, because they forged ahead anyway, gave us a ton of good feedback.

00:07:52 And then we hit and so Beta was going to go for about four weeks. So March 14 was going to be our actual go live date. And that was going to tie in with we would come back from Pme from podcast Movement Evolutions. I think originally it was going to be we were going to try to just do it the week of and then I think that wasn't going to happen. So okay, that's fine.

00:08:15 We'll give ourselves an extra week and we'll launch when we're back, and that didn't happen either. And so, again, by this point, when that didn't happen, I'm, like, exhausted. I'm mentally tapped out. I'm like, I don't know if this is ever going to it's totally rational, but these are the thoughts, right, that are going through my mind for sure to be like, how do we make this happen? And meanwhile, again, those of you have we've been very open with the fact that there are competitors now, like, direct competitors coming to the space who has essentially read or seen what we had in mind for 2.0, and they were launching similar things, similar ideas to that.

00:09:00 And I'm like, oh, my gosh, we've been beaten to the punch with this, which, again, is just gut wrenching. Totally. And then what happened? Well, I mean, it eventually launched two weeks after that, I think, after our second milestone, but really, I think those are probably two of the hardest weeks, I have to say. After we decided, okay, to your point, we kind of said, this feels like we missed it the second time around.

00:09:27 It felt like direct competitors I mean, stealing would be a very strong word to use here, but very similar language, very similar features were getting dropped. And it really did feel like, to your point, it was really hard to focus, but we knew we had to complete this somehow. I think there was that final push that felt really hard, but I think it's always darkest before the dawn. And we had a couple of breakthroughs with some beta feedback coming through where we just took a step back and said, what are we actually trying to do here? And let's just really get clear about what we're looking to launch and then kind of really made that decision.

00:10:00 And I do want to delve into the realities of because I want to be as transparent as possible. We talk about competitors, and I'd like to be that person, and I think I was for a while, where it's like, it's fine. There's enough room, there's enough space. And I do actually, I think, to my core, believe that there are times when I'm, like, really frustrating like, that there are so many so many competitors. And then to your point, and again, we know that there are competitors, and that's fine.

00:10:30 But then when we do see them emailing things out that are pretty much copying our exact message, like our messages, that's when it gets really it's hard then, mentally to be like, okay, we're running our own race, and we know that. But also, in the back of my mind, it's like, wow, that's really underhanded. And I think there's a bit of a disconnect here that I feel where part of me is wants to play dirty as well, because if everyone else is playing dirty, far out, why are we always taking the higher road? Yeah, but then I know also that that's just not who we are. And I do fundamentally want to be in integrity, to operate that way.

00:11:16 So it's just a reality, right? Like, none of us are perfect. And I do have these darker moments in my mind when I'm like, oh, this is really frustrating. But at the end of the day, we are we are genuinely running our own race. And so, again, if anyone else is listening to this and everyone has competitors, right?

00:11:36 There's no such thing as not having competitors, then, yeah, definitely. Let us know what your experience has been. Trying to struggle with the same thing. How do you feel or deal with having those competitors maybe doing some slightly underhanded or not ideal things that definitely you wouldn't do that sometimes you wish you could just get down and dirt and play that game. Reciprocate, let's say.

00:12:03 Yeah, but anyway, we just really wanted to open this up for a conversation between us to be like, okay, let's really talk about the realities, not the shiny, instagram, filtered oh, tada. The end result. Yeah. Everything's life and it's perfect. And this is the gritty stuff that we have definitely been through.

00:12:25 And I know, Bona, you went through your own moments as well, so I'd love you to share. Yes. I guess as the, let's say, externalizer in the group, in the team, obviously, we have a very resilient and strong team as co founders, but also the rest of our team. Everyone's very resilient and very strong and just get stuff done. I would say I'm definitely, like I said, the externalizer who.

00:12:46 And I had a specific moment. I had many moments. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I am good at kind of being perfect with that stuff, but definitely one moment stuck out to me. I think it was in that phase that I just spoke about those two weeks after we'd pushed it for the second time. And I personally could not see the end of the list of things that we had to do.

00:13:05 It felt like to go live. And the feeling was I thought this was a sprint. I ran accordingly, but turns out it's a marathon. And no one told me that. And no one can tell me where the finish is.

00:13:17 Do I have 50 km left? Sorry, miles? Or do I have 2 miles left? Do I need to rest? Do I need to sleep?

00:13:24 Or should I just sprint this out? I think that was the frustration. And I got to a point on one fine Saturday afternoon while we were waiting to test, I think I found myself alone with my thoughts and I just burst into tears. I couldn't stop crying. I think I even mentioned this to our office hours where I said, this is what happened over the weekend.

00:13:40 I tried to hold it in and this is usually how I deal with my stress relief. And I just couldn't I couldn't get a hold of myself, and I think because we were going to get ready to test again in an hour or so. So I was like, okay, I like to give myself just time to say, okay, next 15 minutes, just go all out and then we're going to put our big girl pants on. And I couldn't do it, so I think I collected myself and I said, okay, cool, I'm going to get ready to get out of my room now. And then I saw you guys, and then I could what is going on?

00:14:10 And I said, I don't know. I'm just gonna you know. And I think I put you guys in a very awkward position because you're like, what do we do? Bonner knows how awkward I am when people are crying, either, like, I feel like I'm about to cry myself and you don't even know why, or I'm just, like, awkwardly patting her, going like, they're there, they're there. Do you want some ice cream?

00:14:32 And in your defense, you see some people who are elegant criers. It's just like, oh, you see the release of emotion and you can feel something. I'm not that I'm like, my nose is running, I'm probably dry heaving. I'm an ugly crier, and it's a bit of a spectacle and especially fully grown person. And to make it worse, I'm trying to stop it as well.

00:14:52 I'm saying I'm I'm fine, fine, I'm fine. I'm laughing a little bit, but I'm crying. And it's just this maniacal situation. So I think that for me was just I think that exhaustion just trying to leave my body in some healthy way, hopefully. And it just me just genuinely not feeling like, usually I'm pretty good at being resourceful emotionally to say maybe it's this, maybe it's that.

00:15:11 But I think it was just me feeling at my wits end to say, I don't know. And I think honestly, I think we all were. And I definitely want Ash to chime in here as well and talk about his own experience. But in a way, when Bonnie started crying and was like, this is how I'm feeling, it was kind of another form of it was somewhat cathartic as well. That because it was like, oh, okay, I thought and I'm much more of an internalizer, of course.

00:15:37 So it was all happening in my head, and it's like, actually, we aren't alone. And that's the great thing about actually being vulnerable and open, is that you realize more and more that A, you're giving. So in that moment, Bonna was without unintentionally giving to us in terms of, hey, this is how I'm feeling. And in a way, her sharing that was like, oh, I'm not alone in thinking this. For me, I'm like, I have to be strong for the team.

00:16:08 There's all the things that are going through my head. So I'm like, trying to it's this struggle of let's motivate and push the team forward and stuff. And then here I am inside my mind going like, what the hell? How are we going to do this? And we do this, which is a really scary thought.

00:16:26 So it was a really great way for, I think, us as the co founding team to come together as well. But Ash, please share us some of your experiences. Yeah, I mean, I think when Bonna kind of had that kind of moment, it's just a reflection of how we'd all been like, well, we might not have all been feeling that way at that moment. It was just bonner. It's how we'd been feeling for the previous week, the week before that.

00:16:50 I guess at that point, we'd been maybe eight to nine weeks into it. So at some point in that two month journey, we'd all experienced that probably multiple times. And again, as a kind of a co founding group, a team here, ourselves as well as our wider team, being able to kind of share that and kind of come together just to, again, galvanize at that moment, it also helps to galvanize. Okay, this is what we now need to do, the next steps to kind of get through because, yeah, as I said, it had been an eight week kind of journey that to Bonner's point, it felt like every two weeks that we were going to sprint and complete it. But then you kind of have those emotions during that period because you always put the pressure on yourself to your task that you need to do, and everyone would be feeling that within their business.

00:17:37 Again, I need to do this so that I can go live, and this is the expectation of someone else is relying on me. And then when we kind of didn't deliver again these kind of arbitrary timelines that we're placing on ourselves that it's not truly the end of the world for our users. Like, they're still out there. They're using Capsho, they're still having a you know, they're getting benefit and value from it. But we just set ourselves up to kind of just be so stressed out at times the whole way through.

00:18:06 So I think that was probably the feeling that the last eight to ten weeks, in terms of us setting that desire for a 2.0 in late January and then kind of delivering it in late March, just the peaks. And the troughs of emotion just kind of came at sometimes definitely from the external and the product and other times just internally putting that pressure on ourselves. And I think we all do that, and it's getting better at managing that because that's not helpful to deliver the best outcome for the team, your own work, et cetera. So it's just that was definitely, again, not having experienced it for, again, a number of months, it was good to kind of almost not relearn it, but yeah, kind of retrain that muscle, essentially. Yeah.

00:18:52 And honestly, we do want to share some learnings as well in this episode. And this is going to probably segue into one of the learnings. But how do I say this? So I'm an introvert and all my life I didn't really how I framed this. It's not that I didn't believe in it, but I guess it wasn't top of mind for me to think about communities and things like that.

00:19:18 I know that people have different experiences of this. Growing up, I grew up in a very secular family, so we didn't go to church. And I know that a lot of people from a very young age felt that's their community, first community at least. I wasn't really allowed to do team based things. So I didn't play team sports until I was high school and university.

00:19:41 So even that I wasn't really part of a lot of teams. I didn't build community muscle there. My parents were quite introverted themselves. They didn't really love making friends. And so I didn't really have a big community by way of even family friends and stuff.

00:20:00 All of our family, we obviously migrated to Australia, but all of my immediate in terms of cousins and uncle and aunts were all still in Malaysia. So again, didn't really have a family community. So for me, the the concept of community was never really something that I had ever known or desired or it was just something I didn't really know or feel about. And so I think for me one of the great things and what honestly probably pulled us through the really hard times over the last few weeks was our community, the captchovians. You listening to this right now.

00:20:39 Literally, you are the ones who pulled us through. And I do want to shout out a few people and I think I might hand over to Bonnie because we got some amazing emails and I got some DMs on Instagram and Facebook and stuff because we have been very transparent with as we are now with where we're up to. And even so, we're recording this on the Sunday after we went live. We went live on Friday and we had originally planned to go live on Wednesday and we even shut the you would know again, we shut the website down. No one could log in on the Tuesday night because we didn't want that to impact anyone's workflow tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

00:21:28 And I had to make the really hard decision that we just couldn't we just couldn't go live. And that was really, really tough. That was a really hard decision to make because everything, every nerve ending in my body was like, we need to go live. We've told everyone that we are and then here I am going. We can't deliver.

00:21:49 This is not going to help our captobians at all. And so we had to walk that back, I guess. The Wednesday morning worst feeling in the world. Yeah, I remember I think we were up until three, four a. M.

00:22:03 And I actually had a mastermind for our Capsho collective members at 10:00 A.m. Central. And I remember going on and I think by then, we hadn't actually even actually emailed out to say that we hadn't gone live with 2.0. And so it was the first time that a lot of our collective members had heard that we didn't actually go live. And I'm like, not that I wasn't mortified, but it was close to that where I'm like I don't know how to say this in a way, because I just felt really bad.

00:22:32 And it was almost in a way, when I said it was almost received as, like, an afterthought. I don't know if this is a bad thing, by the way, but it was almost like, oh, okay, cool. Are we getting into the session? Thanks for the intro and update. Yeah, but yeah, so that was tough.

00:22:47 Apart from that. So I know that the people on there likes of jerry and Diane and kara and buzz and gosh, so many people that brent you guys know who you are who were on that call and heard it, I guess first for me that we hadn't gone live. And the fact that you were even non plus, I mean, now looking back at it, I'm like, oh, maybe that was actually not a good thing. But the fact that it wasn't a big deal, I think helped to be like, oh, okay, it's actually not a big deal. It's just in our heads, as Ashley said, it's this internal that was really driving this.

00:23:22 And actually people care, but they understand. Yeah, or we found anyway, I think I just remember coming online and seeing my face on Zoom and immediately turning the camera off because just had zero sleep, looking like, not very good. But really, I think the messages we got at that time, the concern or the care, was more about how we're doing and to encourage us versus when this goes live in however long. We don't care about that so much. We just care about that you guys are doing what feels right, and we would rather not test the bug the product, if that's okay.

00:23:56 And I think that was a distinction where we're like, wow, we've really built a human exchange here versus just a transactional software exchange, which I thought was awesome. And I think what you kind of see with that, and again, it is that idea of with all of our kind of products, whether it's physical product or you got a kind of coaching business, you always are trying to, I guess everyone's iterating to the next kind of cool new thing. And you think that that's amazing. And you kind of start to discount and disregard what you've already built. And that's where we're kind of thinking, okay, this 2.0 is going to be amazing.

00:24:28 It's going to be another level. But what we see there is that what we have built up until that point is very impactful. It's useful to our captchovians. So therefore, that's why that non plus kind of behavior is there. Because, hey, it's not like we're sitting here waiting for this thing that doesn't exist and we can't wait for it.

00:24:47 We're playing with and daily using what you've delivered and you're just making it better. So we're happy to wait. Our life is still good right now, whereas I think we have this tendency to always now just go, okay, we're building the latest thing. It's all or nothing for this. Clearly I'm building this because the other thing must be bad.

00:25:06 Is it broken? It's never the case, which just what we tell ourselves. And it's in those moments, which is why community is so important, is that they kind of help check you and reset and then you start to realize that, okay, I do have those two days up my sleeve and it was a good decision. While it feels like failure on our end and we're like, you don't want to make that call at four in the morning and then go to sleep because then you don't go to sleep because you're thinking about the failure. You've just basically put on yourself, your team, the poor users, like, they're going to feel the failure and they're just like, cool.

00:25:40 Thank you for turning the site back on so I can use captcho. That's true. Yeah, that was a good learning. So I do want Bonnet to share some of the messages that we've been getting back and shout out some of the amazing captchovians who've been supporting us in this journey. Yeah, I kind of had to work really hard to just pick some.

00:25:59 So please know that every message we got was so encouraging. I shared this with all of the team. One of my favorite ones was from Kim where she said, don't worry, I will be here when 2.0 is ready. I'm personally blown away with what you have accomplished. So remember, grit and grace will win the race.

00:26:15 So I thought that was a great thing, I think, to wake up to in that morning when you're feeling very, very bleary eyed. We have Sandra say, I just wanted to know that I personally appreciate all the hard work you and the team are putting in for Capsho 2.0. Here's to better days, of course, jerry, our favorite. Jerry, I love your tenacity and drive. There's no doubt that you're all high achievers and I love it.

00:26:34 Thank you for your candor, humility and vulnerability. So I think that was really great for us because you said we're being transparent and open. This was actually really lovely because we've talked a lot about our existing captchovians, but crystal. Hi, Crystal. If you're listening, as a new Capsho user, I wanted to let you know that your communication through this transition has been wonderful.

00:26:53 I greatly respect. And admire your transparency and vulnerability in this process. That was pretty cool, I thought. Yeah. And a final couple of ones.

00:27:02 Leon. Hi Leon. Keep pressing on and don't let your pain go to waste. I love that because it was painful. Painful when you're trying to stay awake at 03:00 A.m.

00:27:12 And your eyes just won't cooperate. That's right. There was a purpose behind that. And finally, James, eat some chocolate, drink some wine, take a breath and work it. James, if you're listening to this, can you please reply with what exactly we're meant to be working when you wrote that message?

00:27:32 Just life. Just life advice there from James. He is the dad of the Capstrobes with the dad jokes and everything. And Jays did send a lovely DM as well, following on the Friday, I think when we did finally go live just with it, sharing his love for us and the whole team. So, you guys, we appreciate each and every one of you.

00:27:54 We read all of your emails legitimately and we are constantly touched by your support. You're cheering us along on this journey, your patience, we take none of that for granted. I really, really hope you know that. And that kind of leads into, I think, our first team learning when we're kind of like, what did we learn from this experience? That learning for me, for all of us, I should say, but definitely for me, because again, now that community was just never a thing for me, just how important it is to have this community that you can lean on.

00:28:32 And the only reason why we can lean on you as part of the Capsho and community is because we have been intentionally or otherwise unintentionally, just open. And that goes a long way, which I didn't realize. It's not one of those things that you kind of know, you just do it and then it actually gives back way more than what I feel like we put out, if that makes sense. Absolutely. I think we all feel this.

00:29:06 We are always on the lookout for authenticity and it's definitely imperfect, for sure. And I think when you for me, I've realized that as long as you are sharing and I think that goes with also sharing successes, I think we've been pretty good at sharing that as well. Because then people feel like they're part of something and I think that's been what's so wonderful and it doesn't work with everyone because some people are just like, just shut up and make the software good. And that's totally fine as well. There's some people who are just more transactional in nature, but you find, I think, a really awesome group of people who believe they can see the vision with you.

00:29:40 I think that's really huge because as we know right now, even 2.0 isn't even we have so much, I guess, such a big vision behind it that we're just getting started. And I think it's so amazing to have people who are going to be in the trenches with you, reminding you on the days that are really tough, but also celebrating with you because celebrating alone is not very fun. For sure. Yeah. So that was our first learning.

00:30:03 And again, we do want to make this very applicable to you as well. Hopefully you're learning as we're learning. If you do not yet have a community for whatever service, product, consulting, coaching, whatever, it is key. And we found that the only, I'm going to say the only way that you can build a community is by being incredibly authentic, open, transparent. There's none of this.

00:30:34 

We're on this pedestal and look up to us. That's not at all how we operate. As you can probably tell. It is very much like we are in the trenches with each and every one of you. And our whole aim is that if we can help our community succeed, we know that we'll succeed.

00:30:52 So it's almost putting each and every one of you first because by doing that is when, again, we'll get back a lot, almost a lot more than we give, it feels like. And the practical implementation step around that I know that we've had to think about this is to really think about, you have to have to be very careful and cognizant of what level of access you can actually meaningfully give to your community. So for us, I think it came down to, okay, we're really going to double down on email because that's really something that we are very, very actively nurture in terms of our list. But we also decided we would make ourselves available for office hours and that's another way that we can build a more physical and I'm doing the quotation mark. So I think it's really thinking about what you can actually meaningfully afford in terms of your own limited bandwidth and time and just really doing that well, versus trying to be everywhere, building community everywhere.

00:31:41 Yes, for sure. So that's the first learning is the importance of community and how to really build that strong community around you. And once again, thank you to our captchovians for being that for us. The second thing was, gosh, this was a struggle for me and anyone who hasn't read. I was actually speaking to J Kron, who was the CEO of Kajabi.

00:32:05 Now he's just on the board of directors. He sold out and he was introduced we were introduced by Alex Santa Lippo, but he had recommended a book that I read, this book called I'm trying to remember if that was the right one or if it was the Star Principle. Anyway, we'll link those both in the show. Yes. And so I just come up, I think I'm pretty sure simplify.

00:32:24 And there's two ways that you can kind of be a market leader. It's either you simplify from a pricing perspective or you simplify from a proposition perspective. And the example that always gets touted from the proposition perspective is the likes of Apple and just how really they won because of how intuitive they made their product, just how easy. And so I became obsessed with this idea of like, how do we build a product that is just so easy for people to use? And what happened, actually, was that I was like, oh, there's all these UI things that we need to do.

00:33:05 We got stuck with this drag and drop thing that we had in our minds. It was going to be beautiful. It was going to be like this mix of Asana in editor form where you can really smoothly drag and drop content into the editor and move it around inside the editor and things like that. And it wasn't quite as intuitive as I had liked it. And in my mind, I had this like a whole Apple thing.

00:33:32 And it's like, oh, okay, we have to make it super, just beautiful, just a joy for people to use and gosh again. I take full accountability for taking us down that path and really making that a big deal. Because in a way, I think that was and I didn't realize that this was happening, but I think that was almost that perfectionist side of me also coming out to be like, oh, okay, well, I read this book and I read about this principle where we have to make this thing a joy to use. Like, we are going to make the joy you will enjoy. And what that means is that we are going to have this amazing drag and drop functionality.

00:34:13 And then I was like, on our development team to be like, we have to have this shadow animation. We have to have all of these things that was going to make it a joy, and we could not go live. I was like, we cannot go live without this because my perfectionism was really rearing its ugly head. Do you want to tell the story of the feedback from beta? Yes.

00:34:38 For those of you who are looking to build a drag and drop, let's just say it's not as easy as it probably looks. And yes. So we were on this path to have all of these animations done. So the drag and drop was a joy to use in Didrey's words. And it got to a point where we said, look, let's just get out what we do have and beta testing out awesome collective members were beta testing for us.

00:34:56 So let's just get it out there and see what they think and let's get their feedback. And I remember thinking, oh gosh, how are they finding the drag and drop? Let's get the feedback. And we had one of our weekly office hours. And before that, I had seen that there was a live chat message I didn't get a chance to and it was one of our collective members kara, who'd messaged me and said, oh, I want to see you on the office hours.

00:35:14 Let me just pick it up then. And she said, oh, Bonn, I'm so sorry, but there's like a really big bug in your software in beta. It's not working. I thought oh, my gosh. What's not working?

00:35:23 And Ash was on this call, too. It was just the most hilarious moment. Said, see this thing on the right? I love all the content that's been created, but no matter how many times I click on it, it's not moving to the editor. She's like, I'm so sorry.

00:35:34 And the poor thing was trying for, I think, half an hour. And then I said, It's a drag and drop. You got to pick it up. And she's like, the whole group went, oh, we all thought this wasn't working. We didn't want to say anything.

00:35:48 And Ash and I were just like, I have no idea how long we were working on this dragon drop. Did you see the shadow that it leaves when you pick it up? No, because he never thought to drag and drop it. So I just thought it was one of those hilarious moments where just the ridiculousness of it, where we had been obsessing about this thing that was firstly not intuitive at all, which was the thing we wanted it to be, intuitive. It was not a joy to use.

00:36:16 But the great thing about that, after just I laughed, and then I was laughing at them. I was like, no, I'm laughing at us. You are not the fool in this situation. It is us. The countless meetings we had about this drag and drop editor, but that led us down a really good path to say, actually, Karen, tell me about that.

00:36:35 So you clicked on that. That's what was and she was like, yeah, clicked on it. Even double click. Now that is a joy when you click it once and it pops up where you want it to be. Joy, unlocked.

00:36:46 And it was so easy to develop. Easy. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so really the bottom line for this learning, there's probably a couple. One is obviously always include the community that you're building from the learning.

00:37:00 One, include them in the process, because that is how you get to this point of, oh, that's how you want to use it. Okay, that makes so much sense. Build that instead. But also, I think, not needing it to be perfect, because ultimately your perfection is not other people's perfection. So that's the thing.

00:37:17 We all going to build it to our mold. And if you are the minority and the outlier, then literally no one is going to know how to use your product, eat your product, enjoy your product. And so almost, you may as well put out in your mind what is an imperfect product, and then listen to the feedback that's always been so key. It's how we've approached prior businesses, the early kind of Capsho Capsho 1.0. So it's kind of just rerouting yourself back in the principles that you've always followed and just making sure you don't get too far away with it again because you have the new shiny thing that you want to deliver out of the box.

00:37:55 Amazing. And that's what we found out. And again, it comes back to that point, one community, it was amazing to be on that call, even though I'm very much in the shadows just listening. And that's the beauty of it is to hear those great nuggets. And even as she said it, I was like, look, actually, when I'm demoing, I have a tendency to click before I drag.

00:38:12 That is very intuitive. Start clicking. Point made. Yeah. And that's where we started.

00:38:17 We've done all this work to go from click to drag to just go back to click again. Then eventually when we ship, we feel a lot better about it and we just kind of then can't wait to see what the next round of feedback is. And I do want to make this particular learning because I think everyone can 100% learn from this, even if it's in your business for us, but even for your podcast. Because I know that there are a ton of people who don't want to launch a podcast until it's absolutely perfect, until all the audio sounds is amazing and it's all fully edited. I know that there are people even now who have a podcast going and there's some things holding them back from creating content or getting their blog up or their podcast website up.

00:39:00 Because again, it needs to be perfectly designed and everything on there needs to be just, again, perfect. And I would just highly encourage, definitely take a leaf from our book around the fact that we all struggle with this, right? I 100% struggled with it. I made some just bad decisions and probably delayed us a little bit because of that. But ultimately, hopefully, this gives you permission if you need it, to just be completely imperfect.

00:39:30 We did launch on Friday with a completely imperfect product. It is so imperfect. And right now we are going through and adding and fixing the things that we know. Again, I had to make a call on to be like, actually we're just going to wear that because it's fine. We can fix that very quickly, soon after.

00:39:55 And so do not 100% let your perfection hold you back. You have an important message to share. You have important things that you're doing for clients and the people who are going to be better off because of you. And if you don't put that out there, then you're actually doing the world a disservice. So definitely do not let your perfection hold you back.

00:40:23 So that was learning number two and learning number three, I guess, was very much linked to that, which is how do we not overcomplicate things I'm not going to say it's a gender thing, but I feel like definitely Bonnie and I, I'm at odds. I'm like, I don't know how to not do this. Yeah, how do you ash put this up? How do we not overcomplicate everything? My preferred mode of being in an overcomplicated state.

00:40:50 No, I don't think it's a gender thing at all. I mean, I think I'm just as guilty of probably bringing again, it's when you become too detailed and every little thing then is being broken down. Then you build a product that is trying to account for every single thing and then you start to over engineer. I always just think back. I mean, like when we first business, everyone would know in the chalkpot.

00:41:14 So me being in the kitchen cooking desserts, made some amazing desserts that no one ever ate because they were too complicated. That was not what the people wanted. It was not what they kind of were familiar with. And sometimes you have to start with the familiar things and then slowly build on to the interesting greater things. It's too big a jump.

00:41:34 And that's where I think sometimes when you overcomplicate it, it's a hard task to kind of build internally ourselves. And it delays you as well as you deliver something that people don't understand how to use because they didn't know they want it yet. So start simple and then layer everything on. I think that was definitely something that we have learned through this. But we got there and again, it always goes back to those top two points of kind of going, hey, we don't need to be perfect and listen to your community that you've built because a lot of that came from that feedback.

00:42:08 Some amazing kind of people playing with the tool and just opening our eyes again because we were too close to it. Yeah. And gosh. So yes, overcomplication. Do not overcomplicate.

00:42:19 And even if I bring that back to even from a podcasting perspective, in a way, we cut us to ask in a way, ever since starting emailing podcasting, we were very imperfect. 100%. Like, oh my goodness. Yeah. Did not do any editing.

00:42:33 Didn't do I'm surprised anyone actually even listened to that podcast. And we kept it very simple to begin with. It was literally a conversation between us for the first podcast. And yes, this particular one is a little bit more complicated. We have more editing.

00:42:48 I do way more around from a production perspective, the narrations and things like that. But we built to that. We built to that, right? Like, we didn't start there. And so I think, if nothing else, hopefully again, if you're in this boat where you feel like maybe you're overcomplicating it, for example, maybe you have too many funnels in your business, or you have two products or too many offers, or too many whatever it is because you're not getting traction, then this might be the message you needed to hear.

00:43:14 Which is, how do you simplify, simplify, simplify. Do not overcomplicate it and really just nail the one thing that you can get done, which I say that like I'm an expert on that. I hope you don't. I am not. I'm staying silent in the segment, as you can see.

00:43:30 I'm happy to follow direction on this one. I'm still trying to work work through this. But it has been a learning and we're going to continue to try to work on this bit. So I think those are our three main learnings, really, from this last gosh. Feels like about two years.

00:43:47 But in reality, the hard part was about the last two weeks, really. And one, build your community and let them in. Let them in to truly into your business. Really let them in. Do not let perfection hold you back.

00:44:04 Just be loud and proud with how imperfect you are and how imperfect your product is. We are very loud and proud about that, about how imperfect it is. And do not overcomplicate what you don't need to in fact, that's anything you don't need to overcomplicate anything because that actually makes it harder for people to buy from you, I think ultimately at the end of the day. And that's as entrepreneurs, that's what we want, right? So those were definitely our three collective team learnings.

00:44:34 But we are so excited because we literally when this goes live, we would have been live with 2.0 for four days. I would have said five. But Friday was a little bit of a write off. Anyone who was logged on Friday morning and we still had our 2.0 is loading side up pretty much all the way until the afternoon. That was not our intention, but that's what happened anyway.

00:45:00 So we do apologize and we have a treat for hopefully a treat for you as well. Listening to this. First of all, I did want to say thank you to each and every one of you. I do also want to say a big thank you to people like James Cridland who wrote about us on Friday's edition of Pod News. That was a very I'm not going to lie, it was a bit jarring to see my name literally in the headline.

00:45:28 It's dangerous Capsho. Exactly. I was like, oh, I know. James, if you're listening to this, can you tell me if that was meant to be a joke? Everyone just having a laugh at me.

00:45:38 I do want to say even the likes of Dave Jackson, I think today as well, his episode, his episode is going to go live where he interviewed me and we spoke a little bit about AI and competition and all the things and just thank you to even I think Larry is going to do for Podfest. He's going to be doing a piece on Capsho 2.0 from the bottom of our hearts. Anyone who is just helping us spread the word. I hope you know how much we appreciate that and how much we just want to acknowledge you. Even if we haven't said you by name, just know that we 100% appreciate everything that you are doing to help us get the word out there about what it is that we're trying to do and who we're trying to serve.

00:46:25 Because ultimately, if we can help you, the podcaster, the entrepreneur who podcasts amplify your message, get it to the people who need to hear it, that is what success means to us. So thank you for believing in that mission. Thank you for going along this journey. Thank you for just believing in us to help you do it. Oh, my gosh.

00:46:45 Huge privilege. Huge privilege. So thank you. So what we are going to do is by the time this goes live, we are going to send an email out as well. But just to celebrate the launch of Capsho 2.0, to just have everyone, I don't know, just bask it is amazingness and hopefully it works for you when you log on, the bleeds out of Nova Doesn't.

00:47:07 Yeah. We are going to put a free credit into your account if you're already a captchovian, just because we appreciate you. I've already said thank you so many times on this episode. I think you probably are sick of hearing it, but genuinely, we appreciate you. We could not have done any of this without you.

00:47:25 And so it's just a small way for us to say thanks to each and every one of you. So that's it from us today. Yes, I know this was a super long episode, so apologies about that, but hopefully it was helpful for you as well. Please leave us a message. If you go to the episode description, there's a link that says read the full show notes that will take you to our podcast website page.

00:47:49 Go to leave us a message and I think you can do it either typing or voice. We would love to hear from you. Was there anything in this episode that you were able to take away from it or just generally any thoughts that you had about this episode? Did you hate it because you're like, you guys went for way too long, you rambled too much. I learned nothing from this.

00:48:08 Please let us know. But if you leave a voice message, I'd love to start actually playing some of your thoughts on in this podcast. So, yeah, please go ahead and do that. That's it from us. That's it.

00:48:22 We appreciate you. This is deidre. I'm joined by Bonna Ash. We are the Capsho founding team. Thank you for being here and I'll see you in the emails.

00:48:35 Bye and stay awesome.