Marriage Inspires Theatre Captioning App & Service

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey there, greetings. What's up and welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School, bringing you story after story of regular people who have jobs and lots of other responsibilities, but still find a way to make more money for themselves. And it's not just about making more money, it's actually about creating an asset, a way to make money when you sleep, a way to make money so that you have options to do whatever is important to you, whether that is to eventually quit your job or just to feel more secure or to express your creativity in a different way. Today's story reminds me somewhat of a recent episode, number 536, movie industry friends rewrite their credits and earn $20,000 a month.

In that episode, two guys set out to solve the problem of compiling the credits that play at the end of movies. Now, apparently this really was a big problem. It used to be a manual process that took hours upon hours, sometimes days, and they created a service that made it much easier. In today's story, you'll hear about another guy who, through marriage to a woman who is deaf, sets out to provide captions for theaters. His business isn't as far along as the people in that previous story, but it follows a similar pattern.

There's a noticeable problem that affects a specific group of people. And this noticeable problem meets a solution that the hero of our story is qualified to provide and in a way that connects to revenue. Revenue is also known as income. Income is also known as money. There has to be something bought or sold for it to be a side hustle school story.

Now, a lot of our stories follow this pattern in one way or another. And I believe it's something you should pay attention to as you go through your day and as you think about what you can do to chart your own story. Where is the noticeable problem? What is the potential solution? And where will the revenue come from?

More on that at the end of the episode. [Music]

When he's not working as a developer, Matthew Bivens has been an actor and musician all his life. While on tour with the band One Night in Chicago, his bass player came backstage and couldn't stop raving about the hot deaf girl he had just met at the merch booth. This girl, let's call her a woman who had been deaf since birth, 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 they were going to be playing a gig in Chicago, she figured she'd go. Looking back, it seems 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, the marriage presented some challenges 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. That began to change in 2010 when President Obama signed the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act into law.

This law requires public places to provide services to patrons, including captions for theaters, movies, and speeches. On the movie side of things, AMC Theaters was one of the first big corporations to start offering individualized captioning screens to the deaf and hard of hearing. For the first time, Matthew and his wife could go to the cinema together and both have a satisfying experience. But sadly, plays produced by independent theater companies have not been quick to adopt captioning technology. Even though it's a national law, there are some exceptions for smaller venues and some venues just haven't been great about compliance.

Some hand out full scripts that are hard to read in the dark, but most don't do anything at all. This meant Matthew still couldn't share his passion for theater with his wife and he wanted to do something about it. He 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. He 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. The closed captioning app would function a lot like AMC's 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 created a website, captionpoint.com, and started trying to raise money for his app idea. He already had some skills as a web developer, but he thought he would need a bigger team to really make the app become all it needed to be. Turns out fundraising can be tough. After a few months, he realized it just wasn't his strong suit. So instead of giving up, he decided to caption his first play all by himself.

He started with what seemed like an obvious tool, PowerPoint. It was tedious, just like PowerPoint in general, but I digress. It took nearly 40 hours to caption that first play. PowerPoint just wasn't designed for creating thousands of slides. It was too slow and clunky.

Matthew displayed those captions using open captioning in August 2016 during a show he wasn't acting in. He used a $20 HDMI cable, his laptop, and a TV owned by the theater that was stationed on the side of the stage. It was one of the first times his wife had seen caption theater, and she loved it. The satisfaction Matthew felt by providing that experience for his wife drove him to continue working on a faster solution to captioning. By now, he had other theaters asking for the service, and he knew that if he didn't find a way to streamline the process, he would go insane.

His shift was to approach captions in a totally new way. Instead of fighting his way through PowerPoint again, he created a basic website with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that could display slide-like screens he could more quickly fill with captions just using text alone. This way he wouldn't have to fiddle with thousands of individual slides. It took some time to figure out the coding, but the next play only took 20 hours to caption. He literally chopped the required time in half.

And as he went along, he got faster still. Matthew soon found himself booking one or two shows a month. At first, he just charged $100 per show, but quickly realized he would need to raise his rates. Now he has a sliding scale that ranges depending on theater size. So by late 2017, Caption Point had become two distinct things.

The first is Caption Point the service, where Matthew or a contractor goes to shows and provides open captioning to audiences. The second is Caption Point the product, which is the closed captioning app Matthew's been working on this whole time. He says he's finally cracked closed captioning for theaters and is thrilled to start offering the service soon. He sees the app, not the service, as the long-term scalable solution to captioning. So far he's earning up to $1,000 a month, but he hopes to do more.

With that in mind, Matthew recently brought someone on board who's gonna help him do real fundraising, this time with some real focus and strategy. And with that extra money, he's gonna find more help to refine the app and start promoting the product to theaters nationwide. He's excited about the monetary rewards of creating a much needed product, but he's clear that the biggest reward is being able to help 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. [Music]

So let's look more at that pattern I mentioned in the beginning.

A noticeable problem means a potential solution that the hero of the story is qualified to provide and in a way that connects to revenue. Okay, so part of what you have to solve right from the start is how will this idea make money? You could have a noticeable problem and you could provide a solution to it, but if there's not a connection to a product or a service, then there's no way to get paid. And this is actually a very common situation, common scenario where someone's like, "Oh, look, I found a problem, I've got the solution." And they spend a lot of time working on that, but they don't really think about like, "Okay, well, where is the money gonna come from?" And that's why you need to ask, "Where's the money from?" in the beginning. Otherwise, you get into that situation where you might be making an improvement somehow, but it's not really gonna help you achieve your goal of a new source of income.

So for Matthew, his revenue source is independent theater productions. He's making life better for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but they aren't the ones who pay. So he essentially has two groups of customers, the end users and the buyers. And by thinking about the needs of each group, he'll have a better chance of getting his tool out to more people. And perhaps for more money, just as we see in his recent decision to raise his prices and now he's thinking about scaling through this app, which of course is gonna serve a lot more people too.

And just for the record, I do realize his primary motivation is to make theater more accessible for people, and that's a wonderful motivation. I'm just talking more about the money-making side of things because that's what we do here on Satasil School. When it comes to improving the state of the world and making money, if you can only do one of those things, then I think you should improve the state of the world, but if there's a way to do both, then why not do both? That's my perspective, and wherever you fall in that line, I'm so glad you're able to join us for this episode. I hope you will continue to listen.

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can download all 543 episodes in the archives on SatasilSchool.com. If you'd like to check out the show notes for today's episode in particular, those are at SatasilSchool.com/543. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. This is Chris Guillebeau for Satasil School.