828 Deirdre Tshien:

Deirdre Tshien:

Raw curiosity is the only way to be able to hook someone in and have them stay. So I was like,

How do I create real raw curiosity on social media, for example, to get someone to want to listen to an episode? Then how on that episode do I create curiosity to get them onto, for example, my email list? Then how do I create curiosity in my email list to get them onto a challenge, or a launch, or something that I’m doing so that want to buy?

I created these eight mental models that I kind of pulled together into what I call content honey traps.

What makes you curious enough to want to read more? Listen on? Click a link? Today we talk about honey pot marketing with Deirdre Tshien, who is busy applying her marketing expertise to the world of podcasting with platform called Capsho that increasingly uses AI and generative AI to save a lot of marketing time and hassle for podcasters.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is innovating in podcast marketing with generative AI.

Deirdre Tshien wrote the book Honey Trap Marketing and now she’s capturing her marketing strategies on an AI powered platform called Capsho. Today we talk podcasting, AI, marketing and what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Deirdre will be here in a moment, and first,

I know you love podcasts as much as I do, so what if you had an app that magically connected you to the exact right listens around what interests and inspires you and your friends – without having to lift a finger?  Podopolo’s AI powered recommendations and social clip sharing are just a few things that make it different from all the other podcast apps out there. Download Podopolo now – it’s free in both app stores – and if you have a podcast, get it featured on our home discover screen for free and access time-saving ways to grow your reach and revenue. That’s Podopolo.

I know when I launched this podcast more than 6 years ago that it took me more time to market my show than to produce it – a reality I had not expected. Most podcasters put their heart and soul into their shows only to soon get overwhelmed by what can seem like a fruitless and never-ending effort to get discovered and grow their audience.

What if it took far less time to get all those posts out on each social media channel?

That’s why Podopolo this week launched our viral clip creation and sharing feature – allowing any listener or podcaster to create a short snippet of a favorite podcast moment and share it with one click to TikTok, Reels, any social media platform, messenger app, email, text, you name it.

It’s also why Deirdre Tshien founded Capsho, a platform that helps you repurpose podcast promo content, saving you hours and helping you grow your show.

Deirdre and I have a lot in common – a shared mission to help podcasters grow their reach and engagement and a nerdy obsession with all things AI.

So let’s get into it and put on our wings with the inspiring Deirdre Tshien and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Deirdre, welcome to Wings.

Deirdre Tshien:

Thank you so much for having me, Melinda. I am so excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, it’s so great for a podcaster and a podcaster with a podcast business to talk to another female founder with podcast business as well, especially seeing as we’re both kind of in the AI space also. So tell me, what was it that led you to co-found Capsho?

Deirdre Tshien:

Yeah, so the somewhat short story is that like a lot of good founders, I struggled with this exact same thing. I started my first podcast three years ago. I had a coaching business at that time. A mentor told me to start a podcast, and I had no idea what I was doing. By the end, I just had to go all in on trying to figure things out. I had to figure things out, how to edit the dang thing and how to publish it.

But it didn’t stop there because what I noticed was that it wasn’t growing. My podcast wasn’t growing and my business wasn’t growing. So I kind of had to figure out what I had to do to actually grow this thing. That’s kind of what I nerded out on. When I got to the end of it, because I managed to figure it out, figured out a lot of things to the point where my coaching business, actually, in my first year podcasting did multiple six figures, which is great. But it got there.

My podcast was a big, big piece. It was almost the anchor of making that happen. But for it to do that, it kind of sucked. The work, the amount of stuff that we had to do to market it, to create this content generation machine was really, really painful. To the point where my team burnt out, we had someone leave because she was just like, this is too much. I can’t. I almost can’t handle this. So we knew that we had to figure that bit out.

How do we make it sustainable for us? Then for other people? This was at the end of. 2021, when we decided to work on this. I had a knowledge of AI from eight-ish years ago, in my past life in the banking industry. I was like, I think there’s a use case here. There’s a way that we can actually really leverage this powerful technology to solve this particular problem of how do we create content marketing assets based off a podcast? So that’s what we did, and that’s how Capsho came to be.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so similar to my story, really with Podopolo as well, I launched my podcast, back in 2017. You’re right, it was so hard to figure out how to grow an audience or how to be discovered. Back then Apple was really the only game in town. I remember I was struggling to get into New and Noteworthy. That was the thing. Then I found out that New and Noteworthy only had about two employees in this trillion dollar company called Apple. Some of the podcasts that were New and Noteworthy had faded. They weren’t even podcasting anymore.

So it was like, wait, why am I trying so hard to get on this thing? This doesn’t make any sense. Then I started talking to other podcasters and everybody was having the same problem. So you and I have a very similar story of podcasting led to these businesses to help other podcasters. That’s so cool.

Deirdre Tshien:

Yeah, and that’s why I kind of say every good founder, because the great thing is that you know it. You know the problem and the pain point. What I’ve been finding out, I’m like, I don’t know how people can do this, where they don’t … For example, I have, quote unquote, competitors in the industry and none of them have podcasts. None of them have ever had podcasts.

I’m like, how are you building this thing without intimately knowing the pain point or the problem that you are actually helping solve for? Yeah, it just baffles me. I’m sure it’s totally possible to do that. But I think definitely from our experience, Melinda, it’s one of those things where to be truly authentic to helping solve for this, it just makes sense that we experienced it ourselves.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. If you haven’t lived through, that’s what we always say about Podopolo. Just like you, it’s built by podcasters for podcasters, and by extension listeners, because podcasters really care about their listeners. They also care about making sure that just even in terms of the monetization that they have advertisers, if they can get advertising on their podcast, which is hard to get. 98% of people don’t get advertising on their podcast because their audiences are too small, is something that we’re solving with the AI and that matchmaking piece of it. So podcasters can make money.

But podcasters want to serve their listeners, so they want to make sure the ads are relevant to their listeners. So I’m just looking at this whole industry, it’s the fastest growing media of all time, and there’s so many areas where innovation can take place. It feels like it’s actually kind of in its early days. So with that, I want you to tell me more about Capsho, what it’s doing right now to help podcasters and where it’s going from there? Where do you see the real innovation in the space?

Deirdre Tshien:

So Capsho, in short, is the fastest way to repurpose and market expert content. So basically our [inaudible 00:06:00], our users, they upload their audio or video file, and in under 10 minutes, we create all of their content marketing assets for them. So that’s title and description, that’s social media captions for all platforms. That’s emails, that’s a blog. That’s blog posts, actually multiple blog posts, types of blog posts we do. A LinkedIn newsletter, we play out quotes. We’re also going into identifying soundbites based on what audience action you want them to take.

We’re going to identify segments for YouTube. So three to five minute videos that will work on YouTube. We are doing script generator. We’re doing a ton of things that will just help a podcaster’s life, we’re helping to make their lives so much easier from a marketing perspective, because at the end of the day, we’re marketers. That’s me and my co-founding team. So we deliberately, intentionally built Capsho to be a marketing assistant, a marketing tool in your pocket.

Melinda Wittstock:

So I suppose there’s a lot of potential in the generative AI piece, you guys are-

Deirdre Tshien:

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s all generative AI, but based on the anchor content of a podcast, or a long form video, or live stream, or virtual summit, for example. Where we’re going, we’re actually more and more building a lot of machine learning smarts into what it is that we do. So when our Capshovians are making edits, et cetera, in the platform we’re learning from that, Capsho is learning from that. So we will get so much better at things like tone of voice and writing styles, et cetera, because that’s what we’re passionate about.

Melinda Wittstock:

So interesting. So tell me about your background. Because AI, it’s a big leap. AI is everywhere, all of a sudden, all at once, kind of like the movie, right?

Deirdre Tshien:

Yes. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So coming at this with a background in, you started your podcast, you have a lot of marketing. Tell me about how you’ve set about really getting up to speed to the point of innovating in AI. Because I think for a lot of women listening, they’re like, oh man, how do I do that? Or that might feel like some sort of insurmountable thing. Of course, it’s not. But tell me a little bit about that journey. Did you have to overcome any fears or doubts about it to just jump into that space?

Deirdre Tshien:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I have a very, very strange journey, I should say, because this is actually the first tech business that I’m actually truly building. My entrepreneurship, so I’ve been in entrepreneurship now for a decade, and it started in hospitality actually. Then before that, as I mentioned, I was in banking as my corporate career. So it all kind of ties together. Should I just step us through that? Would that be helpful, Melinda?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, 100%. Well, I’d like to know the journey, and especially with the things that you’ve learned along the way from that journey. Because for younger women listening, I think a lot of people think, oh, if I commit to this one thing, I’m going to be doing that forever. Of course, that’s never true. There’s so many different paths to get to wherever you want to be. So yes, please.

Deirdre Tshien:

Okay, cool. Awesome. So as I mentioned, my corporate career was in banking. I did a law degree, and then I very quickly realized I didn’t want to go into law. So I was like, well, I guess banking is the next best option. So I started working at an investment bank in Sydney, which is where I grew up. Very quickly, I moved around in teams, climbing the corporate ladder, as they say.

I ended up in, it was a newly formed innovation team, so it was part of the central strategy team. My whole role in the innovation team was to explore emerging technology. So I was looking at things like blockchain and AI, for example, to work out how we, as a bank, could leverage these technologies. So that was my first sort of foray into really learning about the power of AI.

It wasn’t from a developer perspective, it was really from a business use case perspective. That was, gosh, yeah, almost 10 years ago. So you can imagine just how nascent the technology was. I mean, AI’s been around for a long, long time. But as you said, it’s only really become mainstream literally in the last six months, like eight months maybe. So not very long at all. But it’s been around for a while. So that was when I first found out and knew about AI, and I loved it. I think at the back of my mind, I knew that at some point I was going to come back to this. But it wasn’t just in that moment because meanwhile, I kind of hit my core life crisis, along with my then boyfriend, now husband. He was studying medicine and was miserable.

So we were kind of like, well, what’s next for us? We had just moved out together, or moved in together, I guess. He had started cooking because I wish I could call myself a domestic goddess, but I am so not, I’m terrible at all things cooking and baking, et cetera. But Ash loved cooking and especially baking. We just figured out, one day we were like, well, why not start a dessert bar? I mean, what do we have to lose? So that was our first foray into entrepreneurship.

We opened a dessert bar called the Chalk Pott. We grew that to five locations. We opened up burger restaurants alongside that. So we had two locations of that. Then basically end of 2018, we found out that one of our store managers had been stealing from us.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow.

Deirdre Tshien:

Hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was kind of the shakeup that I guess we needed, because I hadn’t been … We’d been running that for, what, five years at that point. When I look back at that, it was the decision that we had to make at that time, given what we knew and the resources that we had at our disposal. But I think for a while, my heart just had not been in that business, in building that business. Having something like that happen really made me realize that wasn’t what I wanted to be doing for the rest of, definitely not the rest of my life, not even for the next year, or two years, or five years of my life.

So we made the decision to move. What kind of prompted that as well, apart from this thing happening, this betrayal happening was at the same time I’d been exploring a fashion technology business with a friend of mine. So I was like, well, there’s no better place to keep exploring that idea of fashion and technology than New York City.

So we made the decision, well, I feel like I made the decision to make the move. My husband was totally on board. He was also not really feeling it. He was like, “Yeah, I’m so ready for a change.” Then when I was speaking to my co-founder, my other co-founder, I was like, well, we’re going to make the move to New York to do this. Do you want to just come? Do you want to just come as well? She was like, okay, why not? So 2019, we moved to New York City. I had my husband, my co-founder, and my cat in tow. So yeah, that was kind of the start of the next leg of my journey.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. When you mentioned the things that happen along the way, I look at the five businesses that I’ve built over the years, and just about everything that could happen has. I don’t even know what else. There’s so many things that you can’t control. But I also had an accountant that stole 50 grand from a business. In this really sophisticated thing, had she really focused on using her immense intelligence to grow the business, she would’ve made far more money. Instead, she ended up in jail. It was this really sophisticated thing she put all her energy into.

I was so shocked. You know, go through all the kind of, oh my God, how could I have not have known? I’m like, oh my God. So there’s all these different things that you learn along the way. It’s almost like when I’m talking to women who are thinking of becoming entrepreneurs or they’re early in the journey, it’s just kind of expect the unexpected, stuff’s going to happen. It’s like you can’t control it.

Deirdre Tshien:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, you can do your best, but it’s how you kind of react to those things that help you along the way. Don’t be afraid of trying something completely new because that’s what entrepreneurship is, it’s just basically learning.

Deirdre Tshien:

Oh, 100%. I would say, people always ask me, oh, do I regret anything along the way? I’m like, no way. All of these bad things, even at though the time when we found out that store manager had been stealing, oh my gosh, hundreds of … When I say it still makes me just react to it. But at the time it was terrible. But now looking back, I’m like, if that hadn’t happened for us, almost like, not even to us, but for us, we wouldn’t have learnt all the things that we have learnt since then. We wouldn’t have been able to build the resilience.

It’s so interesting when you asked me, I know I’m kind of jumping to the end somewhat, but you know, were like, what would I say to these young women maybe looking to get into entrepreneurship or to make a change? I think the one thing that I’ve definitely realized is that now, and especially when you said they might not have had tech background, or how does someone like me who don’t definitely does not have a tech background, how do I just suddenly create this AI powered software?

Honestly, if I was a lot younger, maybe if I was in my 20s or something, I probably would not have been able to. But having gone through the things that I have been and being knocked down time and time again, and having to pick myself up time and time again, and knowing at my core that whatever problem comes up, I know that I can solve it or get through it because I’ve done it so many times before and I’ve built the resilience all of those times. That’s honestly what gives me the confidence to be able to look at this problem and this potential opportunity and be like, you know what? I’m just going to figure it out.

I can back myself because I’ve just done it so many times in all of these other different ways. So that’s kind of what I would say is in fact, when you feel scared, when you feel like whatever your inner talk is telling you, that you can’t do it, that’s when you know have to do it. Because that’s the only way that you’re going to be able to, either way, whatever happens, get knocked down or find success. Either way, that’s how you build your confidence to know that whatever comes up, you’re going to be able to tackle it. You have the tools to tackle it.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Deirdre, I love that you call it a content honey trap. Okay, so let’s break this down. What is a content honey trap specifically? Talk to me about your process there, and specifically podcasters, but obviously it’s relevant to any business that has to market their business.

Deirdre Tshien:

Yes. So when I look back at that time when I had my podcast and nothing was working and nothing was growing, and I was like, what is going on? I was told to do this thing. At that time I was like, just blame everyone else. That’s never the answer. It’s never the problem and never the answer.

I started really nerding out on, okay, what are the marketing fundamentals? Going back to basics. At the time, I was listening to … Oh gosh, I was at an event and it was one that Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels was at as well. He was speaking. I remember him saying something that at the time I needed to hear, which was someone asked a question, actually, he was talking about webinars and how he gets people, A, to come to a webinar, but also to stay on a webinar.

He said this one thing, which was kind of a light bulb moment for me. He was like, raw curiosity. Raw curiosity is the only way to be able to hook someone in and have them stay. So I was like, oh, I mean, it’s nothing mind-blowing really, to be honest. But it was something that I needed to hear at that time. So it was mind-blowing for me in that moment because I was like, that’s what I think is missing is this concept of how do I create raw curiosity for everything that I’m doing?

How do I create real raw curiosity on social media, for example, to get someone to want to listen to an episode? Then how on that episode do I create curiosity to get them onto, for example, my email list? Then how do I create curiosity in my email list to get them onto a challenge, or a launch, or something that I’m doing so that they want to buy?

So I started actually just experimenting with things. I remember, basically out of that experimentation, I created these eight mental models that I kind of pulled together into what I call content honey traps. These eight mental models, it’s almost a shortcut for me to think about how I can create that curiosity. So depending on, for example, let’s say I did a podcast interview, it could be this one for example. There’s always the things, there’s the story part of it. So my journey about my entrepreneurship journey leading into Capsho and AI cetera is one. Then there could be value. So it could be something that I teach or knowledge that I’m part, like for example, content honey traps.

So there’s two, or there’s always two parts. There’s the story part and the value part to content that we create. So in the eight mental models that I sort of distilled, four is for stories and four is for value. So for example, even out of this interview, it could be like the cliffhanger is one of the most known, and trusted, and working most effective mental models that we know that can create curiosity off the back of a story.

So if you wanted to create a hook for this, it could just be the moment when Deidre found out that she had been stolen from a hundred thousand dollars. You won’t believe what happens next. Just something like that. Because people who are like, oh my gosh, this person got stolen from? I want to know more. How did that happen? What happened as a result? All those things. That is an example of creating curiosity.

Another one that I love, which is actually off the back of an event, another event that I went to. It had sort of a full agenda and one of those ones where you have to choose which track you want to go to, et cetera, et cetera. I remember looking at the agenda and I was like, there was one that really stood out to me where I was like, oh my gosh, I have to go to this one. It was titled How I made a Million Dollars with a $19 Product and a Toilet Seat. I was like, right? It was so much curiosity in that. I was like, I need to know what happens.

When I really thought about why that was so effective, I created a framework or a mental model out of it that I called Paradox. It was really because what you’re doing is you’re juxtaposing this big end result with this almost an unbelievable fact. So after that I decided to test it. I’d just done this interview with a lady called Angela Taylor Smith. Her whole story was about how she earns six figures, multiple six figures a year, but she only works 40 hours a month. So not a week, a month.

So I was like, what in the world? There’s like this end result, this making multiple six figures with this almost unbelievable fact of but you only work 40 hours a month in order to do that. So I tested that hook on social media. That episode, I think, it doubled in terms of the number of downloads versus the one before that. I had all of these people DM-ing me just being like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to listen to this episode and I’ve asked my team to queue this up for me, et cetera.” So it was so effective.

So that’s kind of the story behind the content Honey Traps. There are eight mental models there. I mentioned a couple, but there are six more. Yeah, the core of it creates curiosity.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, this is so important. So with podcasting, I know one of the things that really happens to podcasters is they have to content market beyond their podcast. You’re, of course, helping with the efficiency of all that. But it’s so time-consuming. A lot of people start out with a podcast thinking, oh, like I’ve got this great story, I want to tell, I’ve got this. It can be really, really wonderful. It takes so much time to produce a podcast that they don’t really have a monetization strategy, or a marketing strategy, or they’re not necessarily experts at all things marketing from SEO, to social, to all these things, and content honey trap, or all the kinds of things.

So Capsho, it seems to me, is set up to make that much easier. So save a lot of time and such. So tell me about the before and after with show in terms of just getting all those marketing assets and such kind of done.

Deirdre Tshien:

I’m a very intentional marketer. What that means is that I can be quite, like I don’t love being on a platform or publishing something for the sake of it. I know that there are people out there who don’t really care what they put on social media, they don’t care what they put on YouTube.

But I’m like, if I’m going to be on a platform, I want to do it in a way that platform was built for, I want to use it intentionally. So that’s core, that kind of mindset is core to how we’ve built Capsho. The content honey traps that I’ve just walked through that is inbuilt into Capsho so that there is actual content honey trap blocks that we create that you can edit it, you can really do whatever you want with it for your content marketing.

So for me, when I had this content generating machine before Capsho, it was literally like my team and I would probably be spending at least six hours a week, if not more. I mean my team would definitely spending more. I, personally, was probably only spending maybe a couple of hours a week, but my team was spending per episode, per platform, probably close to four to six hours a week.

The reason why was because it was like, okay, well, on Facebook, this is how we’re going to approach the content that we do then. That’s going to be different to LinkedIn and that’s going to be different to blogging and how we approach SEO. That’s obviously going to be different to YouTube. So you can imagine the time stacks when you are trying to be very intentional for each platform that you’re on and actually do things the right way so it can be discovered or found.

So yeah, it was taking us, and that’s why I said at the very beginning, it sucked. It sucked by way of time, and effort, and just like it sucked my soul. So now with Capsho, literally we can do the same things. We can be on all those platforms, and we can do it in probably, again, my team and I are a little bit more, we split hairs a little bit more about it, but in under two hours a week now. We can do what we were doing before in way less time because we have Capsho.

Now that’s me as a particular type of marketer and entrepreneur. But I have clients, we have clients on Capsho who they can be published and completely marketed their episode in under 45 minutes a week, for example. Yeah, the time saving is incredible. But it’s not just time saving for the sake of time saving because the quality of what we do, that the marketing, the human intelligence, almost, that we’ve put into Capsho, that we’ve built into Capsho means that the quality of the assets are just that much higher.

When we talk about SEO, we are so intentional about ensuring that the content is created specific to the topic, to the keywords that you want it to rank for. Again, content honey trap. So how do we hook someone in and want them to keep reading or to listen to the episode? Just the way that we pull out key moments. It’s just even from a social media caption perspective, we don’t just create promotional social media captions. We also do engagement and educational ones because we know that on these platforms, more and more, that’s how you build community.

It’s not about promoting, it’s kind of like, I was talking about this analogy in another interview, but sometimes when we use social media, we just want to promote about the fact that we have this new podcast episode. Then we ghost, we post and ghost and we’re like, yeah, this is what social media’s for. But when you think about it, that’s almost like when you go to a party, and you get up on stage, and you just shout at people that you have this thing, and then you just leave the party. A, no one cares. People are like, who is this random person who just got up there and shouted about this thing that they’ve done?

Even if I wanted to talk to them more like, what do I do? Where do I go? Where are they? That’s kind of like what we do on social media. So again, we are very intentional with the types of content that we create inside Capsho to be able to help our Capshovians as much as possible really utilize these marketing platforms in the best way possible.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I can see so many ways in which we can collaborate, Deirdre. So I know that we’re going to do that because I really think in this podcast industry and the way women are wired to be able to really come from it from a place of abundance, and collaborate to lift everybody up, and kind of win-win. So I look forward to more of those conversations. It’s really exciting everything that you are doing.

So I want to make sure that all the podcasters out there not only listen to your podcast, invite them to listen on Podopolo, of course. Also, when this episode drops, we can keep the conversation going there as well about all things podcasting, and AI, and such. But I want to make sure that people know how to find you, work with you, and sign up to Capsho, and all the good things.

Deirdre Tshien:

Yeah, for sure. So anyone who does have a podcast or even if you create long form video content and you want to get that discovered and visible in either the … I would say definitely use Podopolo. But if you want to try to get discovered on the standard iTunes and Spotify, and as well get it discovered on search through search engines like Google, I have a free audio mini course that goes into some of the things that can help you with that. You get an extended free trial of Capsho as well. So that’s at freegift.Capsho.com.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. So freegift.Capsho.com and that will be in the show notes. freegift.Capsho.com.

Deirdre Tshien:

Yes, that’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, that’s very generous. Thank you so much for doing that. Deirdre, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Deirdre Tshien:

Thank you so much for helping me to do that. I love this conversation and I love everything that you’re doing, Melinda.