Deirdre Tshien's Journey to Capsho: Automated Content Creation to Grow Your Podcast

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Alright, everybody. We are doing something a little bit different on the show today than we have done in a long time. We are going to be interviewing someone out there who has built something fantastic for the podcasting universe. And if you pay attention at all to what is happening in podcasting, you read Pod News, you're part of the Facebook group. You may have already heard about this, but if not, you are definitely in for a treat.

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Today we are chatting with Deirdre Tshien. She's the CEO and co founder of Capture. And Capture is this fantastic product that takes your podcast content and helps you to create show notes, transcripts, and all sorts of promotional copy really, really fast. Shaving off tons and tons of time doing this. I'm not going to bore you with the details.

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I'm going to let Deirdre tell us all about it. So Deirdre, thank you for joining us here on podcast. Maybe a thank you so much for having me on here, Mathew. I am honored to be a part of your community. Well, we are honored to have you on.

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So Capture was first created earlier this year, July 2022. Before we get into the platform itself, what was the impetus, what led to creating this product? Yeah, like all many good software products out there, it stemmed from really a need that we had a couple of years ago. I had my first podcast. It was back when I was doing something very different.

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I was actually coaching ecommerce business owners around how to grow their business through digital marketing. And one of my mentors was like, oh, you should start a podcast. And I was like, to me, podcasting was this really technical. I was like, I don't know what to do. How do I start a podcast?

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So I figured it out. I got myself this $53 microphone. I had no idea what I was doing and I just went ahead and started polishing. And that was great. It felt like a win to get my first episode out there and my second and my third.

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And then very quickly I was like, why am I doing this again? I'm not really increasing my listeners, I'm not really able to monetize. I was like, why am I spending time on this thing? So I'm quite economically minded that way. So I was like, there's got to be an ROI on this time that I'm spending on this podcast.

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And I sort of started to really go down this rabbit hole then of working out how I can make this great content asset work for me and for my business, because I just didn't know at that time how it was it was going to do that. And so I started really nerding out on, OK, I have this cornerstone content that I was creating. How can I now use this in a way that can get me more leads and importantly, actually get me money in the door, get me income, get conversions. And that led me down this whole trial and error journey of what I now call content dripping. So how do I use this podcast content to actually create all of these different other assets that not only hook people in and have them join my community, but actually spend a good amount of time with me?

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Coming? To know, like and trust me, so that it becomes a no brainer for them to open their wallet up to me at the point when they're ready. I know you have this ecommerce background and so you see there's something there and you're like, maybe I'll solve a problem. Do you start coding? Like, do you have that background experience or how does that work?

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I do not I do not know. So we got this idea, obviously from the experience that we had and working out what actually worked to grow my listeners and to actually get them buying from me. And so that was when we were like, okay, I think there's, and we started speaking to other podcasts and there was a need, there's a need here for people to be able to create more content off their podcast efficiently, easily and effectively. And so I was like, we had this idea how we could actually bring it to life. So the very first iteration of it, it was totally MVP.

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We actually got an agency, we used a development agency to help us just get something up and to test it. And then once we kind of got feedback from that to be, this is the way that we're going to go with it. We then actually started we brought on a developer fulltime into the business. So that's where we're at now. So I don't have any coding.

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I definitely have the strategy, I know how to think logically and systematically through requirements and things like that. But really from a technical perspective, I'm really relying on a trusted actually, he's not even an employee anymore. He's actually part of the business now, partnering the business to do that, to bring that to life. So you start to think about all this auxiliary content that you want to create from the podcast. You start implementing it, does it start working?

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Are you seeing that ROI on the podcast now that you're hoping for? Because you start to create this extra piece of material that you can put out there. No, it didn't work. Definitely not immediately, I should say. Everything takes time.

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We should definitely have it. Exactly. Everything takes time. But ultimately, yes, it started getting more reach. I started growing my listeners.

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I started actually very intentionally taking them through what I call like a show notes funnel. And yeah, in that first year of podcasting, we did over $220,000 in our coaching business. So it became a very effective form of monetizing. Very cool. All right, so now let's get back to capture what was the early iteration.

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What were some of the early features when you first really put it out there for beta testing or public consumption? Yeah, so beta we actually launched June 1. So four to six weeks before we actually went live with the product. And it was a mess. I'm going to tell you that we were very excited about it.

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We had this big waitlist of people, I think we had over 350 people, it might have been on that list, wanting to try baita. And we launched it and it didn't work. As in people could not actually even log into the thing. It was a painful, painful I distinctly remember that weekend of just like, trying to get this thing to just we just need people to come in and then they'd be let in. And the UI was just abysmal.

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I'm really, really thankful and grateful for those early members who actually stuck through it. We actually had actually interviewed him for my podcast, Adam Lamb, who is an OG user of ours, and he even mentioned when I interviewed him, he was like, yeah, I remember when we first got on and I was on these calls with Bonner, who's one of my cofounders. And he's like, we spend so many like, we cleared his cage, he downloaded new browsers. He was like, doing all of the things to try to get capture to work. And thankfully, he stuck around and he's been loving it since then.

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So, yeah, it's been quite a journey. All right, so let's fast forward through the turbulent times and let's take us to today. Now, for those who are listening to this, in a few minutes, we're also going to be addressing and kind of take us through the platform itself. But before we get to that piece of it, for everybody just listening and watching right now, tell us exactly how you define the capture platform and what it is supposed to do for podcasters. Yeah, so we call capture the fastest way to market and grow your podcast.

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That's essentially what it is and what it does. And it does that through my framework of content dripping, which is what I kind of figured out the 18 to two years ago, 18 months or two years ago when I created this framework for my own podcast. And it's really how do we I call it trap and delight. So how do we hook a potential listener in to actually want to listen to our podcast episode? And then from there, how do we delight them through other pieces of content where we give we just give them all this value from there on.

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So that's kind of what I call content dripping. And that's what capture does. It creates all of that copy content for you to drip over two, three, four weeks just of one of your podcast episodes. Podcast episode. What it does is it creates in under ten minutes, you upload your audio file and it creates your episode title player description, show notes, social media captions, promotional email, blog post, LinkedIn article, YouTube description, quotes, sootables, and a full transcript as well.

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And then what we teach is that you drip some of that, you drip that content over, as I said, two to four weeks. Very cool. Very cool. All right, so for those who are listening, we're going to jump ahead of this demonstration and we'll obviously put a link in where you can check out. There's a video online for Capture and we'll put you a link here you can check out.

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But for those who are watching, you want to go ahead and share your screen and kind of take us through what it looks like, what those final results can look like, and how we can best maximize this content that you're going to be giving us to the platform. Yes. Awesome. I'm so excited about this. OK, so this is capture.

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It's very simple. You upload your podcast episode, as the instructions say on the screen. You can also import from Dropbox or Google and then I'm going to fast forward. So once you do that, it takes, as I said, under ten minutes, literally like I would say five minutes for it to sort of process. It will actually ask you what topics.

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So Capture will actually then go, hey, here are three topics that we've sort of uncovered. So do you want to choose one of these or do you want to actually create your own so that you can actually focus Capture on the particular topic that you want it to generate these outputs for? And then it will land on this page where it will actually give you an episode title, as I said, a player description and you can refresh it as well. So it gives you three options that you can refresh though it's all editable. So for example, this should be grow my podcast show so fully editable, auto, saves, and then yeah, it's as simple as that.

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And the show notes give you. So I should also carry out that when I say show notes, I mean for my podcast website. This is how we show notes. You can use them for the podcast player as well, but we generally stick to the shorter form description for the podcast player. What are the elements that you found were most useful for Show Notes for that website page for your episode versus what you thought was useful in the description that would go through your podcast hosting and therefore to the podcast platforms?

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As in why do I do something different for both? Well, it looks like you've got like bullet points and quotes and questions. So I'm just curious, what were the things that you found were most useful for websites, which I assume it's all about SEO readability, making it something that is easier to consume, versus the description where it's like, yeah, we're going to tell you what the show is about and maybe throw some notes in there. But we're not going to get too in depth. Yes, definitely for the description.

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I want to keep it deliberately short because when people are on the podcast player, I just want them to start to listen. So how can I again trap them? And I have this framework called Content Honey traps. So how do I use Content Honey Traps to very quickly get them to see really to hook them in, to be like, oh, I need to listen to this episode without giving anything away because we want them to listen to it. Now, the Show Notes similarly does the same thing because we still want people to listen to the podcast episode from the Show Notes, but we also want to give them more because and this goes now into my Show Notes funnel that I mentioned before, which is I'm dropping Content Honey Traps all throughout.

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So what I do is when I promote my podcast episode, I'm like, I want to hook them in. I want them to listen to my podcast episode. When I am actually recording my podcast episode, I'm still using Content Honey Traps to be like, oh, you want to go to my Show Notes because I'm going to actually put examples of this. Or I have a bonus clip that I'm going to make available through my Show Notes. So you want to go to my Show Notes to actually go in and see those.

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The reason why I want them to go to my Show Notes is because that's where I can actually give them a bit more value to your point there's like quotes there's, dot points there's, a little bit more content that I can give them. I can also because it sits on a website and not in my podcast player, I can also put rich media so that's where SEO kind of considerations come in. So I can put my YouTube video on there. I can images, links to my social media elements, to particular reels, et cetera, that I want to embed. All of that designed to then to have people go to my call to action.

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That's really what I want people to do. And it comes to life in the Show Notes. So do me a favor, just really slowly just scroll from the top to the bottom of the Show Notes. Just going to take us through what we're seeing on this page right now. All the different elements you have.

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Yeah. So obviously this is because this is the copy and all the things that I've just mentioned, I layer on top of this. And we actually have training that goes into that as well and how people can do that. But basically this gives you the base copy that you can always add to. But essentially what it does is this is kind of my Content Honey Trap in terms of like, this is what you're going to get by listening.

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And this is a quote that it's pulled out. It goes into the story. So it starts to connect with the audience about why, how I discovered this and what I'm going to be talking about. And then it goes into what it is that you're going to learn from listening to this podcast episode. So all the things I mention about the rich media, so adding my YouTube videos and things like that, I actually embed as part of the story generally to flesh that out.

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And then it goes into my resources. Two questions. One, I noticed there were a bunch of links already in your show notes. I assume since you already had a chance to clean this up, like you added those later. Or is that like templated stuff that will just pop up now for every episode?

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Yeah, it's actually templated. Once you set that up, it will be there for later and then you make a correction. Let's say earlier in this you were showing it showed grammar, show podcast versus grow my show podcast. So when you correct grow my grammar to grow my, does that kind of proliferate out through all the other steps or is there like one place like if I change in the transcript, will it kind of update everywhere? Or am I going to have to make that change across each component as I see it?

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Yeah, so right now you do have to make the change across each component.

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We do have some rules. So when you set up inside capture, when you set your show up, it will ask for things like the host name, the show name, and even when you upload a new episode, it will ask if you have a guest on there. It will ask for the guest name as well. Save you some time with having to change the spelling. Yeah, exactly.

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So we do have some smarts at the very beginning to like try to change all of those. But sometimes those smarts because of filters and thresholds and things like that, it might not update and that's why it always does still need a human to look through it and make those edits. So we're never going to profess to be like, you know, this is a handsoff machine and it does everything for you. It can't. And as a user and actually the creator of it, I wouldn't want it to.

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I firmly believe in the intersection of machines and humans coming together. Does it really create magic? That's really worse. This is machine assisted technology, right? The machine is just saving us a bunch of time, giving us a head start on all this, getting the ball rolling.

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So that now and listen, I'm one of those people, I stare at a blank paper and I have no idea what to do with it. But if you give me a bunch of content, it's a lot easier for me to be like, okay, let me fix this, rewrite this, change that. But a lot of us need that starting point. And what Capture is doing is doing a great job of giving us a fairly accurate and a fairly poignant starting point, even though it will need some sort of copy editing to go through to just again, give it that more personal touch, right? Give it that authenticity that you want.

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Yes, 100%. You nailed it. Okay, so this is an example of the Grammar podcast show website. So, grammarpodcasho.com. So as I mentioned, a YouTube video, and this is kind of what I call like a content hungry trap.

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So this is the first thing that you see. It's kind of meant to be a hook. We then have the podcast player. Is that the captivate player? Yes, we use Captivate and then it goes into the story.

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And this episode was about social media and how I actually don't repurpose my content for social media. I actually do something else, which is what I call content hacking. And so when I was recording this podcast episode, I actually mentioned what I'm going to do is I'm going to put an example of how I content hacked a particular post for my own. And so that was again a content hunting trap to get people to my show notes. And so this is where it goes into the example.

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So this is the example and this is actually my version, what I use as inspiration to create my own post. And so that's what I mean by really intentionally using the show notes to get people on there, hooking them with something so that they come and they then come in to the call to action. This is really where you want them to be going to. So that's an example of how I use show notes. All right, so beyond the title description and the show notes, and I know some of this is dependent on what plan of Capture you are going to use, but what are some of the other pieces of content that Capture is going to create for us that we can use to help grow and market ourselves?

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Yeah, sure. Okay. So then we go into the social media captions, which are pretty selfexplanatory. We are actually imminently. So right now how we design these captions was very much from a promotional perspective, but we are actually adding engagement captions as well to this.

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So there's going to be a drop down box that will be like promotional or engagement captions. So you can choose. And again, this is part of the content dripping exercise. We have emails as well in the subject line email body, we do a blog post. And again, the blog post is designed to really and this is again back to the intersection of machine and humans.

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How the blog post workflow actually starts is that and it doesn't show here because we've already gone through it. But before you even see the outputs you will be asked. These are the five questions that were actually answered in your podcast episode. Which one do you want the blog post to be generated for? And so you can actually take those questions and you can plug them into a moz or a keyword and just see what actually ranks well from a keyword perspective, from an SEO perspective.

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And then you can choose the one that you want it to generate for. And this will, it will generate a blog post for you. Like it's a full blog post, a LinkedIn article as well, and a YouTube description for those that want to leverage. Now the big thing is use YouTube for your video podcast. So that's for that.

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And then we have quotes and we have different sort of categories that we've currently put our quotes under. So if you wanted something that was a little bit more maybe based on epiphany, so what are some quotes where the AI will actually choose, will pick out the ones that seem to be where you had epiphanies about something or for example, or something specifically about the topic that you're talking about. So that's what capture creates. That's pretty nifty that it can differentiate one, not just identify quotes that it believes are useful, but also differentiate the kinds of quotes that they are because we might want to use them in different ways during our presentation.

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When we get these quotes right. I'm looking at it on the screen right now and it just shows the quotes. But if we need to, let's say, pull that audio clip or pull that video clip, where do we if we click on that, like, does it pull it up or we have to still go find that and we can kind of just search it through the transcript. Yeah. So currently that is how it would work.

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But we are actually going to be working on the next phase of this, which is to point like we can go from quotes to than actual clips or quote cards as well. So that is something that's coming inside capture. So capture is always evolving. Always growing, yes. So the way capture works right now, you've got three different monthly plans that are available out there.

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And basically for all the plans, it's how much of the content assets you would get access to. But what else should we know? So if I sign up for, let's say, just the $29 a month, the starter plan, how many episodes can I do? Is there a limit on the length or how much content? How does that pricing work for us?

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Yeah, so it's all credit based. So all of those plans, you get four credits a month, which is four episodes, equivalent to four episodes. If people do more than you can buy additional episodes. And if you do at least twelve a month, then we can talk about volume, discount, pricing. So that's how that currently works.

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Your other question was length. So there's no limit to how long an episode needs to be. We do generally recommend that and how capture works best is for a 30 minutes down episode is generally the best that it works for, but there's actually no limit to how long an episode has to be. Okay, so for most of us, that weekly podcast that we're going to get our four episodes each month and then write the starter plan, you get the title, description, show notes, and transcript. You move up to the growth plan, you start to get the captions for social media and an email.

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And then when you move on to the pro plan, that's when you start getting the blog posts and the articles and the YouTubes. And it looks like you even have a monthly Live Master class. Yeah, so we actually had one this morning. We had Justin Shankan this morning talking about how to create your in demand stage through podcasting. So every month I get an expert on in the industry, and they share about something that will help you grow your podcast and monetize it.

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So next week, we're going to have John from Podbean on to talk about monetization, actually. But we've had Kelsey from AWeber talk about emails and how to grow your show through emailing. We've had Patchiong from Pond Box talking about how to create Raving fans. So, yeah, it's just a really great way to access an expert in the podcasting space. And they do a presentation, and there's live Q and A, and it's a lot of fun.

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Very, very cool. All right, so folks, as a reminder, it is Capshow.com Capsho.com. We'll obviously have a link to that in our show notes and everywhere we find the podcast. We also want you to encourage you to check out the Growmypodcast Show. That is The Grow, mypodcast show that Deirdre is the host of and has been much inspiration for this fantastic product that we hope you're going to check out and see if it works for you.

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Anything else that our audience should be thinking about or anything else that you'd want them to check out as they're thinking about growing their show and adding all these great promotional components to it. Yeah, look, definitely the podcast is probably the best place to start. I talk about content, honey. Traps. So even if you just start with episode one, that goes into when I say Content Honey traps, like, what do I mean?

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And what are the models, the mental models and the frameworks I talk about. So even if you didn't want to use capture, which it's a no brainer, you guys, you got to use it. But if you didn't want to, then you at least have a starting point to think through. How do you create those hooks to get for your marketing content to actually get people to want to listen to your episode so, yeah, definitely start the episode one of Grammar Podcast Show. Grammar Podcast show.

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Yeah, that's the best place to start. Perfect. So, again, we'll put a link to growmupodcast show.com in the show notes and check out Capshow.com. And if you're one of the folks who I know, if you have The Podcast Consultant, Deirdre did a fantastic more in depth presentation with Steve Stewart on the platform and how it works. So we encourage you to go check that out.

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And, yeah, I can't say it enough. This is not going to replace the need to do all this work, but it's certainly going to cut down on that time, on that length, on all that effort dramatically, and give you a lot of early ideas, early inspiration, and a lot of motivation to help you get it done. Plus, you really get to tap into Deirdre's ecommerce brain, that growth brain that will probably help you do a better job of selling what it is that you're trying to put out into the world through your podcast. So, Deirdre Tshien, co founder, CEO of Capture, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much, Mathew.

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It so much fun. Bye.