Taking Your Video Editing For Enterprise To The Next Level (feat. Champ Bennett)

And today I'm super thrilled to have Champ from Capsule joining us.

The thing that changes all the time and that you have to adapt to is, well, what is actually the execution of that idea that people really want to show themselves and emerge in business video? So

in the startup game, I'm realizing that truly what matters is the craft and care. You know, everything else can like be done by somebody else. But you need the founder DNA for this. A lot of my audience are early-stage entrepreneurs, Cham, right? And so they might be listening to this or they might be watching this on YouTube someday. The primary question they all have is how do you pick a great idea to pour your time, energy, and effort into?

There were stars that were created in the last decade or so of consumer video, and there will be stars that are created in the next decade of business video. The thing that changes all the time and that you have to adapt to is, well, what is actually the execution of that idea that people really want to show themselves and emerge in business video? So we built an app called Photo, 3 H's, which some people know was the precursor to Boomerang.

Oh, that eventually Instagram, Instagram bought out or Instagram Hey everybody. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP. And on this show, I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildinpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of the Build in Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and today I'm super thrilled To have Champ from Capsule joining us. Champ, welcome to the show.

Dude, I'm psyched to be back talking to you. I think you might've been the very first podcast I ever did as the founder of Capsule 2 or 2 and a half years ago.

2 and a half years ago, yeah.

We did a very short one, but it was super fun and I loved the conversation. So I'm psyched to be talking to you again.

Me too. I felt like it was such a great conversation and that I could have extended for another hour, you know? And that's always a good sign. that you've met a great founder and you've met someone who really— not only like what I love about you is not only the fact that you're gritty and you're not doing it for the shine of it. You're slightly like— I'm 35 and you're in the 40s, like you said, early 40s. So you're not doing this for the cool factor, right? You passed it.

There's a lot cooler things I could be doing.

Right, exactly. And I've always admired both when I got to spend time with you, but also like afar. the craft, the level of detail that both the product has and the design. And it just— so I've always admired that about you. And I don't think I ever shared that with you, but it's just amazing to watch. As I'm getting to spend more time in the startup game, I'm realizing that truly what matters is the craft and care. Everything else can be done by somebody else, but you need the founder DNA for this. Thank

you. I appreciate that. And I totally agree. I think especially one of the challenging aspects of creative tools is you're building a tool that essentially people are going to use to feel more creative and more empowered. And so, yeah, to the extent that we build kind of creativity and, and detail and nuance and aesthetic into the product, it increases the likelihood that our users are going to make something interesting with it. So that's how we kind of think about it. And that's why, you know, I was always telling the team, even in beta like we are right now, like the details really matter. And, uh, we pay a lot of attention to that stuff.

Yeah, you gotta sweat the details. It's really hard. It's one of those things that they don't teach you in school, right? Like they don't teach you about Why that matters, you know, but it matters a lot more than looking professional or looking— I mean, than the looks. Like, you have to really get it. So I got one question for you to kick us off, which is a lot of my audience are early-stage entrepreneurs, champ, right? And so they might be listening to this or they might be watching this on YouTube someday. The primary question they all have is how do you pick a great idea to pour your time, energy, and effort into? And you stand out to me because, you know, you didn't like have this aha moment. Hopefully you didn't have this like, you know, lightning, like, um, I don't know, like sky parting, uh, clouds parting, and then had this idea that you're working on today. You had, you know, a version of this which is very different when I first met you, what it's evolved to become today, right? So actually, can you walk us through that journey and how many inflection points you had to go through to get there? To get here?

Yes. And I'll try to do a very short compressed version because literally the journey starts at like 5 years old. There's a line that you can draw from then to here that really makes a lot of sense. But it'll take a long time to tell. So, you know, I guess the short version is that I've just been obsessed with creative tools my entire life since I was very young. And the idea of using technology to empower others to create is something that I really identified with when I was really young. The first time I used Photoshop for the first time was a mind-blowing experience. And then even before that, like—

Yeah.

The Casio keyboard that, you know, I found my mom using, like, with the demo button on it and made something really cool that, like, I didn't know anything about music, but suddenly I felt like a musician. Those kinds of experience really formed me in my career. And thus I have then spent most of my career as a founder over the last 10 years building things that empower other people to create, especially in ways that they could not have done so before. And that's manifested in, like, you know, kind of social media, photo, video tools. It's manifested in audio tools. It's manifested in now like building video tools for marketers. And so there is definitely a thread there and an overall thesis and a vision and a mission, personal mission for me. The thing that changes all the time and that you have to adapt to is, well, what is actually the execution of that idea that people really want? Not just me, but—

What is the packaged version of that mission, right?

Yes. And in video, that's particularly hard because video means so many things to so many different people. And so you really have to find and laser in the use case that is going to work for a large enough audience that you can build a venture-scale business on it. And that often doesn't just like come to you in your head, right?

Yeah.

In fact, maybe never does. It more typically comes to you through like an experience that you've had or people that you've met that, you know, have told you the same thing over and over and over and over again. And you realize, holy cow, like there's something here that no one else has really solved. Maybe There's a few people that have tried or gotten close, but no one's truly solved it. And hey, I'm probably one of the best people in the world to work on this problem, given my background, right? So to give you a short answer to your question, it's like, find a big enough problem that you feel like you're one of the best people in the world to solve. And there's 2 advantages. One is you'll probably build something be close to the solution because you understand it so well. But 2, you'll have a ton of fun working on it because you care about it. Yes. And, you know, it's something that you yourself would use or somehow maps back to some life experience that you've had that you just really enjoy tinkering with. And so Capsule for me is that. I'm having the time of my life, even though startups are very, very hard and up and down all the time, as you well know. I'm still just really enjoying it because I care about the product and I care about the people who are using it.

Right. You said something about identifying something that, given your background and your life lived experience, you sort of see the gaps that most people may miss and then taking a leap and saying, why can't I solve this? That's such a high agency thing. And I think founders have, which is like they look at something and they're like, why not me? Right? And I think a lot of people write themselves off too often. And this is something I struggle with when I'm advising founders or coaching founders or working with them, is that they over-index on a competitor's strength in a particular market and under-index on their actual true insight and lived experience, right? So, and I wonder, like, because you're operating right now, Capsule's in a very noisy, contested market, which is this video tool market that's exploded since COVID Yeah. Um, and there's really big players like Descript and VEED, and I mean, there's many more. I mean, I'm losing track of some of these, right? And, and the fact that you, you're still operating— I mean, not just operating, executing at this finest level in terms of craft. Um, what's the narrative in your mind when you're going to work every day, when you're inspiring your teams? Like, what is the maxim you use, you know, often?

Well, I think it comes down to solving a real problem. And, you know, we didn't actually set out— you said it yourself— like, we didn't set out to be a competitor to Descript or VEED or Canva or Adobe or whoever else is out there. We did not start the company thinking, hey, that's who we're going to go after and we're going to build the best tool. What we did was we had a thesis, which is that, you know, kind of all of the behaviors that were, have been established over the last decade in consumer video would eventually start to show themselves and emerge in business video. So how marketers are starting to communicate is starting to transition from like written content and SEO into like video content. video SEO and how you see it on Twitter every single day, how every founder is starting to communicate is through video and even start from startups to like, you know, Brian Chesky, who's doing like these amazing product demo videos where he's the star of the show, right? And so I think, you know, our hypothesis was, you know, there are gonna, there were stars that were created in the last decade or so of consumer video and there'll be stars that are created in the next decade of business video. And there probably needs to be a tool that is purpose-built. Wow. for business video use cases. Because when you talk about business video, it's not just like what we're going to post on like TikTok or Reels that day. It's like, this has got to go to our website. We got to like our internal marketing channels, our internal comms. You know, HR teams are trying to create videos. Sales teams are doing like outbound videos. So like everybody within the company is starting to create videos through use cases that aren't just like publishing to social media. And so—

Right.

The more we started talking to these teams, The more we realized that there wasn't a really great tool for them. We would talk to people who were like, well, Adobe Premiere is too hard. So I've been using iMovie to create my product demos. And it's like, okay, iMovie, you know, not an ideal—

Not the greatest piece of software on the planet, right?

No. And, you know, what are the challenges with iMovie? One, it's not collaborative. So in a context of of a business where there's thousands of people potentially, and especially enterprise, the ability to collaborate is a really important one. Figma taught us that. Canva taught us that. What else is wrong with iMovie? Well, you can't really create branded titles and graphics within iMovie. You just got these really basic, boring templates that are kind of purpose-built for sharing videos with your friends and family. And so we kind of heard time and time again that marketers in particular were trying to create video, but they were finding Adobe Premiere and After Effects to just be enormously too complex for them. And even some of the easier tools that you mentioned, Descript, VEED, which both have some great attributes to them, were still too hard for them. And we started asking why. And a lot of the answers that came back were, well, when we create videos in our company, they have to look and feel a certain way. They have to be super professional and polished. And the graphics that we use have to be in the perfect font and the motion design has to be perfect. And it has to be consistent across every marketer in our company. And there wasn't a tool for that, right? There wasn't kind of like the design systems that we have in Figma or Canva that didn't yet exist for video. And so—

For video.

That was an area that we jumped into and built a whole sort of like stack around that just didn't exist before. And have now had a lot of success, particularly in enterprise, even though we've only been in the market for about 2 months now. A lot of success helping out enterprise companies create video content in a scalable way that's on-brand and consistent.

So the latest— give me the latest pitch with Capsule. And I want to go back to the original MVP pitch, but also I want to know if someone goes to capsule.video today, Which is the domain, if anyone's listening about wondering the domain, I'll include the show notes too, but who's the ICP today? Like who's the ideal customer profile and what is the sort of the pitch to them?

Yeah, the, uh, there's a couple of pitches, but I'll give you the profile. It's large enterprise companies, particularly B2B SaaS is one that we focused on. They're doing a lot of video, a lot of product.

HubSpot, Salesloft, Salesforce, that kind of thing. Okay.

Yep. Exactly all of those. And they've got a large number of people within the organization who want to create video today, and aren't really able to because they have to do one of two things. They either have to hire an agency to make a video for them, or they have to go to like a centralized in-house team to make those videos. And that team is usually like 5 or 6 people servicing like 5,000 to 10,000 people, right? Right. And they're trying to make more videos. So we pitched to two different people, we pitched to the video teams, We go to them and we say, hey, don't you wish that you could just like delegate some of these videos back to the marketing team? Like when they come to you and they say, hey, we need a little like short clip for LinkedIn. And, you know, somebody who's spent the last 30 years like doing stuff in After Effects and Premiere is like, really? Do I really have to make this clip? Like, can't you just do it? And the answer is no, because there's no tool for it. And so when we talked to the video teams, they're like, Yeah. Oh, Capsule is amazing because we can kind of delegate some of the easier content creation back to the marketing team, back to the sales team, back to the comms team, back to PR team. And that allows us as the pro video team within a large organization to focus on the really high production stuff like super polished ads or commercials or testimonials or stuff that's gonna be like highly visible within the company. Right. They are great at that stuff. They don't love doing kind of the shorter form stuff and increasingly Shorter form stuff is what marketers want, right? So

yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was gonna say the video teams and then we pitch, then we go pitch the marketing teams too and kind of like attack it from both angles.

That's fascinating. And I'm assuming the reaction has been positive. Like what's been like the overall enormously positive reaction so far?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I've kind of felt product market fit in my 10-year-ish career as a founder. Only one time before this. And then when we launched Capsule, relaunched Capsule, I should say, about 2 months ago, that was the second time. The messaging is just resonating extraordinarily well. The only frustrating part is that like, we still got a lot to build on the product. And so there is some friction where it's like, basically every enterprise marketing team that we talk to is like, yes, we want this, but we need like these 10 features really quickly. And so we're just like scrambling to build stuff for those teams as fast as we possibly But yeah, it's been enormously good response.

Yeah, that's so amazing to hear. And it's not easy, like you said, like it's, with enterprise, you can't really test out 5 or 6 styles of marketing messages. You have to just get it right. Like maybe you get second chance, but you don't get 5, 8, 9, 10 chances, right? Because these are busy people. I can't imagine trying to go to HubSpot and be like, you know what, today we have a new version of a pitch and then does it make sense? And then, Showing up a month later and saying, you know what, we have another version of the pitch, which is completely different. You can't do that. You have to respect their time. So you knew, you had this intuition yourself, seems like, about the problem and you just validated the thesis with them. So I'm curious, one of the big things that people talk about when it comes to enterprise sales, Champ, is that the sales cycles are long, right? How are you mitigating that, number one? And number two is they also talk about how product roadmaps are really tricky because enterprise customers typically love 20, 30, 40 features. You know, before they give it a shot, right? So how are you mitigating these 2 challenges?

Well, we're mitigating, you know, I guess from the comp— our company perspective, the question is, well, how quickly do you get to like serious revenue? And yes, the sales cycles are much longer in enterprise. And that can be a drag as an early stage startup, especially combined with the, oh, we need these 10 features, right? And you're limited on resources. And so like candidly, it is pretty tough to like as a seed stage startup, immediately go and sell to enterprise. That being said, the ticket sizes are huge, right? So you could land one enterprise company and that's like, you know, 2,000 self-service kind of PLG signups or paid customers, right? Right. So our strategy is kind of dual right now. We have a sales team who is responsible for the enterprise sales motion. And then we have a product that is responsible for kind of the product-led motion and just getting people into the product. It's free. You can sign up, you can play around with it. And we release in a couple of weeks, we're releasing some new features that make that experience even more robust around kind of creating and customizing your own brand and motion assets within the product itself in a self-service, right? Right now you have to do that with our team. So, you know, it is a dual-prong strategy, enterprise direct sales plus A product that's doing some of the selling and education on our behalf.

Right. I wonder if there could be some lessons to be learned and uncovered from like Figma's journey, because Figma went through the same thing essentially. Right. And a few others, maybe Canva, not so much. I don't know. Canva probably seems like a complete PLG story, right? It feels like they went, they went like bottoms up PLG, but they have now, they definitely have amazing enterprise adoption, right? Like every— big company has Canva, like they worship Canva. But I'm wondering, maybe Figma has the— I'm trying to think of what are some other really great products that had a great enterprise success story, you know, but still like had not that old school, like, you know, sales cycles, but like, yeah, I think Figma might be—

Figma is a good—

like, Figma is a really good one.

Yeah, there's a really great video that Uh, Lenny, I forget his last name, but he does that amazing product.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Right.

Uh, that'd be, I think the first go-to-market hire at Figma did a video with him and it was, uh, incredibly good. I'd recommend any founder who is building up. Yeah. Yeah. She's great. And also like, you can just tell how much they learned in that process. So getting that, like someone who went from zero to $20 billion exit. Um, in the creative tooling spaces, you know, that was probably the most valuable video I've watched in terms of Capsule's journey. So highly recommend that one.

I got, we got to link that. We got to link that definitely in the show notes. Um, I love Lenny's stuff. I mean, huge, huge fan, uh, with what he's being able to do. I also love that the, did you see the, I mean, the product market fit graphic that he had where, um, he was showing like a bunch of companies, right? Like, um, and I love how Figma took like 2 years to get to that MVP. And I was like, oh my God, this, that, that, that would've given me like, you know, some kind of ulcer or something to be like that. Like, you know, like you, you were building for 2 years that first product because you had to get it right. Right. It was a browser-based Photoshop essentially, which is a pretty high bar, you know, for all the features that Photoshop has. And you want to compete with Adobe and you spent 2 years trying to get that MVP out. Yeah. And then, I mean, you guys are similar too. You, how long is it? Really?

I think it might be longer than that. 3 or 4 years before.

4 years or something. Oh my God. I gotta Google this.

Wow. It's, it's really long. And, and there's, um, the reason why I liked that video so much was because it kind of made me feel a little less, um, crazy about how long it's taken us. It has taken a long time.

Yeah.

But doing video in the browser,

it does because, you know, yeah,

it's hard. It's really hard. And you're competing with desktop tools that are Like extraordinarily powerful and video in the browser is still pretty nascent as it was for, um, yeah, as graphics were for, for Figma back in the day when they were first creating a product, you were working around a lot of browser bugs and issues. And, and so yes, it is hard. It takes a long time and you're trying to replace something that's extraordinarily powerful and runs on desktop. So it's, you know, it's just not, it's not an easy thing, but—

Oh my God, dude, you were right. It's 5 years.

I'd say, yeah, 4 or 5 years.

Yeah. What, 5 years from idea to product market fit? That's the Figma is at the bottom of that list in terms of the time it took for them to feel, um, and live product is 3.5 years.

Yeah. So we're not that bad. Oh,

you're

not that bad, but it's

still

taking a long time.

Wow.

It's taking a long time. I mean, I, I've, I've

had investors and then I see, I see someone, something like Ramp and, and you see something like Ramp that took like 3 months for product. And Ram's like, 6 months for PMF, right? You're like, what? I know.

I'm like, why, why am I doing this?

Why did you have to choose the hardest possible mode of being a founder? Um, so, okay, so going back to the, to, to a couple of your previous startups, I want to extract a few lessons from those journeys, you know, you've had. You've done, I think Hypno is one I saw, which is the live events thing. I want to actually get to know Can you walk us through some of your startups you started before Capsule?

First startup was actually an agency, and I started it with 2 friends of mine, Omar and Russell. And Omar is one of the best product designers I know, and Russell's one of the best graphic designers I know, and I was a pretty good engineer. And the 3 of us together were like, hey, let's just start making stuff for other people. And that went really well. We immediately grew that to like, you know, like a 30-person company. And it was great, great lifestyle business. Didn't know anything about like—

Was it, was it a graphic design agency or was it a product design and app design agency?

Yeah, kind of a full stack product. So, you know, design UX and build. And that was really fun, but also not super rewarding because, you know, we'd build stuff, we'd ship it and we'd never get to work on it again. And oftentimes the stuff we were building and shipping weren't like things that we were in love with. And so we, we kind of like realized at some point that the goal was really more to build our own things and And we had the chops to do that in-house. And so we started kind of siphoning money off of the agency revenue into building our own. Basically, it was like, we didn't know what to call it this at this time, but it was almost like a venture studio at the time is kind of how we were running it. We would just like come up with ideas. We'd take a couple of people on the team. Hey, let's go work on this for 6 months. Let's build it. Let's see what sticks. And we probably did that for like 5 or 6 things before. Something started to work. And of course, the thing that started to work was like a complete and total accident, as is typical.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. We, so we, we built an app called Hhoto with 3 H's, which some people know was the precursor to Boomerang on Instagram, which is like kind of the looping.

Eventually Instagram bought out or Instagram Was it Instagram's own feature? It was a—

it was a copy and kill type scenario where they basically took the idea and put it in Instagram. And, you know, it ended up being, last I heard, it was like the 2nd most popular feature that Instagram ever launched. So, so the only claim to fame that we have from that is that we launched, we helped launch Instagram's 2nd most popular feature. So that was like a tough one because we actually did raise money on that and we were growing like crazy and we had all these like celebrities using it. You know, Beyoncé was using it and Diplo was in it.

No way.

Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a whole, it was a whole thing and it was so much fun.

Beyoncé was using your app? Who else was using your app? Like, give me a couple of big names.

Katy Perry. Katy Perry was a big user. Diplo was a big user. He actually invested in the company. This is what, 2013, '14 era?

What time was this?

'14 and '15. Yeah, '14, '15, '16 is how long that company existed for.

It was an iPhone app, I'm assuming. iPhone app.

iOS. Yep. And it was just, it was a really cool creative tool. This idea that the thesis was very simple. It's like, hey, we've got static photos and we've got videos. And everybody at the time was sharing GIFs, but nobody knew how to create a GIF. And there was a couple of apps that came out that allowed you to create GIFs, but they were harder than making videos. And it was like, shouldn't this just be like you push a button and something really cool comes out the other side? And so we did that. We just built like a very simple animated looping GIF thing. And then we built a social network behind it. And so people would download that.

And you were saying that this is the one, was this the one that took off by accident?

Yeah. Yeah. It was kind of a total accident. Yeah. Total accident.

Wait, give me the story of like, how did you go to market on this? Like, did you just tweet it out or? Or somebody just found it on Instagram, like you were talking about this, or like how did you get the first wave of users?

Yeah, that's a great question. Because we had the agency, we, well, first we were able to build the product, you know, kind of like on our own dime. We spent our own money to build it, which is, you know, most, and it was good right out of the gate because we had an awesome team working on it. We had like 6 people right out of the gate bootstrapping it. So the product, like on day 1 was awesome in terms of how it worked and how it looked. And actually, you know, we, the go-to-market was also kind of a mistake. We just started like sharing the beta version with friends of ours. And my brother Billy was a DJ and music producer, and he shared it with a bunch of his like DJ and music producer friends. Who all then were like, while it was in beta, so it wasn't even on the App Store yet. It's like TestFlight mode. And they started using it like every single day. It was like almost like this private social network for DJs, like world famous DJs. Like that's when Diplo first discovered the app and a bunch of other like pretty big names. And actually Katy Perry, I think, was dating Diplo at the time. And so she got on it through him and she was also using it. And so even before we got onto the App Store, we had all this kind of like Momentum of— there was probably maybe like 5, like, I don't know, 2,500 to 2,000 people were using the app. And like the DAU, MAU—

Some of the most influential people were in there.

Yes, very influential. And then like just sort of the stickiness of the app was really apparent even before we launched it. I mean, people were using it every single day and it was clearly, there was like a social component that was really different, differentiated from Instagram, mostly because the network I think was small, which is a good The challenge that a lot of new social networks face is when it's small, it's really easy to differentiate. And then the bigger it gets, it's pretty hard to differentiate from the Instagrams or the Facebooks of the world. I could talk about that for hours and hours and hours. But it was— yeah, so the go-to-market was also just frankly kind of lucky. I mean, we built a great product, which I think that is the thing that it always starts with. If you build a great product, Right. It will resonate with people and they will just use it and talk about it. And I think about that a lot now with Capsule too, which is like—

Actually, if you zero in on just that line alone, Champ, right? Like if you just build a great product and people think great product, you know, when they immediately brain goes to some of the founders listening or whoever, like even us, when you think about a product, you only think solely from the point of like how, like the physical manifestation of the product, right? but the app side of it, like product design of it, which I think is, yes, of course, part of it, right? Of course. But it's also like, what I'm hearing from you is just creating something that didn't exist. Like the way you said, like, how is this thing taking more time? Like, how is it taking more time to create that kind of a boomerang-ish GIF than creating a video? And so thinking, using that intuition and creating something that genuinely doesn't exist speaks to the greatness. And then of course the manifestation of it should also, you know, um, be, be amazing, right? Um, but yeah, I, I feel like there's something there in terms of like how you just like saw a gap and did

it. I think, yeah, there's definitely a framework there and it's one that I've kind of like fallen back on in, in terms of like thinking about my next startups after that one. And it is something, yeah, trying to find some unique insight that others may not have and then executing on it in a world-class way. And then the distribution, I think, comes from word of mouth initially, which should then be amplified by product. And a lot of people think about that the wrong way. They think, oh, I need to build in distribution like ahead of that. And I don't think that that's right. Build a really great product. Find that people are using it regularly, find that people are sharing it regularly. And then you can kind of work on what is distribution? Like, how do we amplify the existing distribution and really scale the thing?

Because if they're not the first wave, if they're not happy, then you don't really have anything. No, the first way—

You're wasting your time.

If they're not happy, not telling their friends, you're wasting their time and you're wasting your time too. Yeah.

Yeah. So don't spend money on marketing or any of that.

Walk through a few steps there. Right. Yeah.

No, sorry. I think there's like a slight delay.

Yeah, it's a bit of a delay. I was going to say like, walk us through a couple more steps from there. From that startup, what happened between that and Capsule, or was Capsule the next one?

No, we shut down that app after it was pretty clear that we weren't going to outcompete Boom, um, Instagram. And that was a pretty painful process, but We still had the agency operating in the background at the time. And so we actually, the most important thing that we did was we were able to keep the team together. And it was a huge learning lesson for me because we had some really not ideal exit opportunities for that company. They wouldn't have been ideal for us or really our investors. It would've just been like, hey, everyone will have jobs, whatever. And we chose not to take them because we really wanted to keep the team together. And we knew that like with the team that we had, we could go and make something else, that, that wasn't like our only idea ever. And so we brought that, we brought that team kind of back. We kept as many people as we could and we brought that team kind of back to the agency and basically just started over again. We were like, okay, here we are. We're back to square one. Like, We're now a startup studio again. Let's start working on new ideas. And one of the things that had been kind of working that the agency had created was this live events business around photo and video content. So think like, you know, photo booth experiences and think really high production value video content that's like shot and edited in real time. And we had come up with, have you ever seen at a party, Like the ring light with an iPad in the middle kind of photo booth?

Yeah.

Okay, so that was another thing that we created for the very first time. Wow. We sort of stumbled on that idea. We literally had a ring light in our office and one of our engineers grabbed it and was taking photos of people with it using an iPad. And the photos looked awesome. They were like really, really cool looking because of the way the lighting worked. We were like, oh, we should just like make a product out of that. And so we kind of like did it. And the next thing you know, Red Bull had bought it from us and we started to scale it out. And now you literally see those things everywhere. I was in Paris this weekend and I saw one at the airport and I was like, oh yeah, that was another like Hyper Hyper, which is the name of our agency. That was another Hyper Hyper invention that has sort of become ubiquitous. Another one, unfortunately, that like, you know, aside from the business that we started, Like didn't really capitalize on that in the best possible way. Probably you could have become a lot more wealthy from that one, but we did a good job with that business and all the way up until COVID. So COVID, because that was primarily an events business, we grew that to—

Yeah, events business, right.

Yeah, we grew that to really good, healthy revenue generating business.

And was that a, wait, was that a VC-backed business or was that a bootstrapped?

No, we totally bootstrapped that one too. Grew that to, I think we were like 45, 50 people at one point. Offices in 4 different cities. Just crushing it. And it was great. Not like a super thing that I was passionate about, but just a really solid business. And then COVID happened and it was like evaporated basically. It went from 100% of revenue to 10% of revenue in about 2 weeks. Wow. And so that was really tough. And that, but that was also the birth of Capsule, you know, and Capsule was kind of an idea that had been percolating in my head and my co-founder's head for a year or two. But COVID was sort of the forcing function that made it happen.

How much of the OG agency team is now with Capsule, or is there an overlap or?

Yeah, there is. Yeah. Our first, like probably, let's see, on our engineering team, there are, let's see, Jacob and Nate and Joseph. Like Joseph, my co-founder, I've been working with for close to 15 years. And then a couple of our engineers, probably close to like 8 or 9 years through multiple companies. And that's one of the learnings that I've had. It's just like, man, the team is everything. If you can just find your people. Everything. You know, and just whatever it is, just stick with them as long as you possibly can. It's like bands, you know, like there's some magic.

It's like bands. I was gonna say, right? I was just gonna say that, you know, it's kind of like bands and it's not about one album, it's about the, the whole journey, right?

1,000%. Well said.

That, that's so brilliant. And, um, so that brings us to sort of the early days of Capsule and What gave you the conviction to go all in on Capsule? I'm curious, like, what were some things that happened that made you realize that, you know what, I'm going to go all in on this? And this time, actually, you even raised money on this, right?

Yeah. I don't think we would have done it had it not been for COVID. So in a way, I don't feel like it was a brilliant risk-taking move that we made. We were forced to make it. It wasn't an easy one. Like a lot of our— a lot of the people who are kind of in that industry just They shut down their companies. And of course that just wasn't an option for us. And we said, well, what can we do? And it's like a moment of like, we've got a handful of months of runway. We've got an incredible team. We've got ideas. And we just kind of leaned on the thing that has always worked, which is like, let's just go build something. And we did exactly that, I think. And even like I got into like The first couple versions of the product, I was helping out building and designing, and we really just, as a team, put our heads together and tried to pull something out very quickly. I think within 4 weeks we had a prototype of it, and within 6 weeks we were selling it. Wow. And yeah, it speaks to the power of the team, just working with great people and people who are willing to, in those moments, just ride or die and go for it. And once it was clear that like, oh, this is like actually kind of working, there's something here. And we have a, we have a, we had developed a thesis about what it could be.

Right.

We decided it was time to raise some money. And so we went out and raised our first pre-seed in January of '21, I believe it was. And that was also very hard, but we got it done.

And now you're, you know, you raised another round, right? The seed round, I saw like $4.3 or $4.5 million recently, correct?

Yep. Ended up being a little more than that than we announced, but yeah, roughly around that much.

That's awesome. Awesome. So you're like now in the thick of it now, right? Between seed and Series A is where I think like the biggest, that's the biggest, I feel like litmus test for so many startups, you know? So really rooting for you, really wishing you well. You know, hoping for a lot more enterprise customers coming your way and, you know, creating a lot of waves in this, in the creator market. I have a few rapid-fire questions. Unless, do you have, did you have anything that you wanted to, because I was looking at you to react. Do you have anything you want to share or?

No, let's rock. Let's do rapid-fire. That sounds fun.

Awesome. Okay. I got this like really fun. This is a new thing I've been trying. I only had one other guest do this the last week. So you're my second guinea pig. All right, I got 8 questions. The point is it starts with the easier ones and then it goes to the deeper profound questions towards the end.

All right. Okay, here we go. I gotta take a sip of water.

Don't overthink it. Yeah, don't overthink it. And, and, um, here we go. I know like folks who are listening, Cham did not get a heads up on this, so this is absolutely completely raw, you know, uh, unfiltered stuff. All right, first question is favorite cuisine.

Oh my God, what's your favorite cuisine? I guess it would have to be Italian food.

Okay, what's your favorite book you wish you had read sooner? I'm trying to think

of like a— I have so many answers to this because I feel like every book that I like, I'm like, man, I wish I had read that like a lot earlier than I did. I'm reading Shoe Dog right now, which is Phil Knight's book about the creation of Nike. I am absolutely loving it.

Really loving it. Okay, great book.

Yeah, let's go with that.

It's on my list. I haven't read it, but I got it. I bought it, but I haven't read it. Okay. Favorite artist or musician that hypes you up?

This is also really tough for me because I I'm sure you have multiple, right? I have a really long list. You know what I'm gonna do? Am I allowed to like cheat? Can I like open up Spotify and just see what's—

You can cheat. You can look at it on Spotify. But you have to, you have to, you have to pick one as quickly as you see the name on there.

Oh, this is actually easy. Uh, there's a, there's a group called Overmono that I've been obsessively listening to over the last, uh,

really?

Okay. Last 6 months or so. Yeah. Overmono. Check 'em out. Really good.

The funny thing is like, it's always like we're discovering so many new— I'm discovering so many new artists just by this question. Right, Overmono. All right, now I'm gonna add it to my Spotify list. Uh, number 4, what's your favorite phase in your career, like period in your career?

Right now, this very moment.

Awesome, awesome. I— this is a very common entrepreneur question, like a lot of people have said the same thing. They're like, right now, right now. Okay, how would your parents describe what you do for a living?

I think if I'd asked them like at the beginning of Capsule, they would have no clue how to answer. And I think now they would say I work on video editing apps. That's

actually a pretty sophisticated answer, right? My parents, my mom can't get there. All right, number 6. If Jeff Bezos calls you and offers you unlimited supply of one item from Amazon, what are you buying? What are you picking? You could have endless supply of this item.

The thing that I buy the most, well, including like groceries.

Yeah, I guess. Because they own Whole Foods, so I guess you could just say, you

know. Yeah, endless supply. You know, I buy socks like pretty frequently. Yeah, I filter out my socks, so I'm just thinking let's go with socks, keep it simple. Every, every—

That's also a common answer.

Is it? Oh man.

Socks or razors. Yeah,

yeah,

most— the, the weird answer was the one guy was talking about buying a Pallet wrap, because he has a DTC business. Like, uh, you know, like he was talking about that. I was like, wow, that, that was very savvy and like very smart answer because you could buy a lot of it.

Um, anyway, aside from food, I don't buy a lot of recurring items on, on Amazon. So that was a tough one. All right, let's keep going.

Number 7, what's your definition of success?

Oh man, this is really easy. It is working on something that you just wake up thinking about and are excited to work on. with people that you wake up thinking, thinking about and are excited to work with, hopefully matched with some kind of successful business outcome. And I think that if you have the first 2, as you were saying in our conversation, uh, before we started hitting record, eventually the 3rd thing will come.

Yeah, the math will work itself out, right?

Um, I believe that's true.

I love that answer. Number 8, what's the proudest part of your story so far? The actual question, what's the proudest part of your bio? Because Most people have like, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm an investor, I'm this, I'm that, I'm this. So if you take your whole life story, what's the proudest part of it for you?

I think the thing that I'm most proud of is like the team, actually, that kind of building a team of people who are just top talent and also extremely loyal and trusting of me. And likewise, I'm extremely loyal and trusting of them. And I think that like If I, you know, going back to my story about the thread and the team kind of being one of the big threads, like that's probably been the most valuable asset that I've built along with my co-founders and them in many ways too, right? Because good team hires good team. And so that is like the thing that I think I'm most proud of. And then also like being able to give those people a livelihood is a pretty awesome feeling as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, that is definitely a new one, but that's awesome. That speaks to who you are, you know. It's such a great answer, you know. So anyway, that's it. That's my rapid fire. That was it. Thank you for indulging. Thank you for indulging me with this. But, uh, it's been a blast, man. Thank you so much for your time and for being here on the show. And also, like, you know, I, I love our online friendship, and, you know, I would love to meet you one day. And I know you're in Miami, correct? And anytime you're in Atlanta, hit me up. Vice versa, if I'm in Miami, I'll hit you up. Um, and yeah, so written for you in capsule.

Dude, thank you so much for having me on. And likewise, congrats on your journey this year. I've been watching and really enjoying seeing you succeed in your own path and creating your own thing. That's really, really cool. So congrats and good luck to you this year.

Thank you. Awesome. And that's a wrap.