Notes from Chris

Episode 543

When he’s not working as a developer, Matthew Bivins has been an actor and musician all his life. While on tour with his band one night in Chicago, his bassist came backstage and couldn’t stop raving about the “hot deaf girl” he had met at the merch booth.

This woman had been deaf since birth and was just beginning to learn American Sign Language in college. One of her assignments for class was to “sign sing,” and she had picked one of Matthew’s band’s songs to perform in front of her classmates. When she discovered that they were going to be playing a gig in Chicago, she figured she’d go.

Looking back, it seems almost like fate that Matthew met his wife for the first time that night, and the two were married a few years later.

As you might imagine, a performer and a deaf woman being married presented some problems when it came to recreational activities. Matthew loved watching theater, but his wife had never really experienced it—mainly because most theaters didn’t offer any sort of accessibility services.

Around mid-2015, Matthew came up with an idea that could revolutionize entertainment experiences for deaf and hard of hearing people: an app that can deliver captions to a person’s phone or tablet in real-time during shows.

Matthew calls this idea “closed captioning,” which is different from “open captioning”—where the captions are available on a big screen for everyone in the audience to see. His closed captioning idea would function a lot like the current caption tablets, but it would be far less expensive for the theater since the captions would go to phones owned by the patrons, rather than tablets that had to be purchased by the theater.

Matthew soon found himself booking 1-2 shows per month through his new side hustle, CaptionPoint, and he’s kept that momentum for a couple years. At first, he just charged $100 per show, but he quickly realized it wasn't worth his time. Now he has a sliding scale from $350 to $600, depending on the theater size.

So by late 2017, CaptionPoint had become two distinct things. The first is CaptionPoint "The Service," where Matthew or a contractor goes to shows and provides open captioning to audiences. The second is CaptionPoint "The Product," which is the closed captioning app Matthew’s been working on this whole time.

In his own words, Matthew’s finally “cracked closed captioning” for theaters and is thrilled to start offering the service this Fall. He sees this app, not the service, as the long-term, scalable solution to captioning. He’s used that same website-based slides application he built a couple years ago to make viewing captions on personal screens a reality. He’s earning up to $1,000/month, but he wants to do more.

With that in mind, Matthew recently brought someone on-board who’s going to help him do real fundraising—this time with some real focus and strategy. With that extra money, he’s going to find more help to refine the app and start promoting the product to theaters nationwide.

Matthew’s excited about the monetary rewards of creating a much-needed product, but he’s very clear that the biggest reward is being able to enable people who are deaf or hard of hearing (and especially his wife) to enjoy theater the way he always has. In reading between the lines, he’s found a project that pays multiple dividends.

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• CaptionPoint: We don't mind spelling it out for you—learn more about Matthew's caption creating app over on his website!

SEE ALSO:

• Movie Industry Friends Rewrite the Credits, Earn $20,000/Month: Those long credit sequences at the ends of movies can include a LOT of names—and they also take a lot of time for producers to coordinate. When two industry friends team up to simplify the process, they crawl their way to a highly profitable side hustle
• Gmail Tool Generates $1 Million a Year: After looking for a way to send mass emails by Gmail, this web developer stumbles on more than a million dollars a year in recurring revenue
• Senior Center Director Creates Virtual Training Service: A director of operations at a senior center comes up with a way to improve training services—while building a sustainable side income

Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work!

Yours in the revolution,

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