This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, thank you for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School, the daily podcast for more than 1,750 days and counting. All about helping you create a new source of income without quitting your job. Now today's episode is going out on Friday.
So it is failure Friday, our collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Just like our throwback Thursday segment, you'll hear from Side Hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground or have otherwise encountered a big challenge. Now today's short story features Matt Bivens from Chicago. We told the successful story of his business, Caption Point, on episode 543. Marriage inspires theater captioning app and service.
He'll tell you a bit more about that in his update. And in the spring of 2020, they were beginning an all new phase of operations. This phase of operations would be bigger and better and well, not at all compatible with a global pandemic. So Matt can tell the story better than me. I'll give us a brief wrap up at the end.
[Music]
My name is Matt and I'm the co-founder and lead developer of Caption Point. Caption Point is a team that provides captions for scripted theater and other live events to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. We're based in Chicago. I started Caption Point because I wanted my wife, Lindsay, who is profoundly deaf, to be able to enjoy live theater as much as I do. We believe that any theater, large or small, should have the tools necessary to make their performances as inclusive to everyone as possible.
Captioning of any kind is difficult work, and especially in live theater, where the scripts being performed aren't always followed to the letter. It's hard to charge enough for our work to make it sustainable. Some theaters pay for captioning when they can't even pay their actors. And we really don't like turning anyone away. In three years, we had more work than we could handle.
It felt good to see real changes being made to the amount of accessibility in the Chicago theater scene, but we were overwhelmed and underpaid. In January of 2020, we got together with a marketing person and decided to make some big changes. We came up with a new elevator pitch, and we rebranded ourselves, and moved the focus to teaching people how to build and run their own captions. This way, instead of only having captions for a single night or weekend of performances, as is typical, theaters could now use our captions for any performance that they wanted on demand. With this new plan, we could charge more for our work, but work less ourselves.
Smarter, not harder. We were also ready to branch out from Chicago. In February of 2020, we paid for a booth at the Southeastern Theater Conference, or SETC. SETC is an organization that brings schools, vendors, regional theaters, students, and professional actors together. It's pretty great.
The conference was a big win for us. We had a new banner emblazoned with a new logo, and it was beautiful, and we were one of the few vendors there that were focused on accessibility in the arts. We talked to a lot of schools and theaters that were interested in working with us on their upcoming 2020 seasons. So the entire Captain Point team left SETC really excited about what was to come. By April of 2020, of course, there were no live events, and therefore no live captioning.
Every single gig that we had for the year was canceled, and rightly so. For the most part, Captain Point was dead, or at least on the back burner. As many people have experienced, it's really strange to have a job be such an enormous part of your life, and then basically vanish in a weekend. Luckily, we all had other work to pivot to, but we missed the sense of purpose that Captain Point brought us. I don't know if there's a happy ending to this story, but I know that I don't have any regrets, and that's what is most important to me about this experience.
Captain Point did not become my full-time job like I wanted. In fact, we were kind of kicked down when we were really getting going, which feels bad, but I can't take that as a sign. If it's important to you, you gotta try it, gotta do it. Captain Point is on a hiatus now, but whatever live theater becomes, we'll probably still need to be more inclusive of everyone, and I'll be ready to help with that if I can. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
That is the theme of Failure Friday. Thank you so much, Matt, for sharing that story, the transparent and truthful story, I should say, check out his website at captionpoint.com. Live theater is returning in some places already. Not all, of course, depends on where you are, but hopefully there'll be lots of live theater up and running in some fashion soon, and I also really admire Matt's work-smarter, not-harder mindset. I've been trying to do more of that myself.
If you have a question or an update for us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Wherever you are in the world, whatever you're up to, I hope you'll take some time to do something for yourself. I also hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School.
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- From the Onward Project.
