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Design Better
Bonus Episode: Champ Bennett, co-founder of Capsule, on making motion design easy and scalable
00:50:15
We talk with Champ Bennett about his entrepreneurial journey, what motion design systems are and how they fit into more general design systems, and how motion design fits into branding.
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- [00:01]
Champ Bennett
If you're great on camera, there's a lot of things that that says about you. There's a certain level of confidence. If you're working remotely, it means you're probably a very good communicator. If you're a seller, it means you're going to be really good at selling. Some of the most valuable employees in the future will be creators. They'll be video creators. And I think what's exciting about that is the next generation that's about to enter the workforce. They're video native, they have zero problem getting on camera.
- [00:27]
Eli Woolery
We are living through a Cambrian explosion of new tools powered by generative AI. It can tough to wade through the sea of options in front of us and find platforms that actually help us in our workflow instead of being a distraction. That's why it was so refreshing to discover the tool Capsule a little over a year ago. We use it to create motion graphics and short videos for Design Better. And the experience is a thousand times easier and more rewarding than using arcane tools like After Effects.
- [00:52]
Aaron Walter
Today we're chatting with Champ Bennett, CEO and co founder of Capsule. We talk with him about his entrepreneurial journey, what motion design systems are and how they fit into more general design systems, and how motion design fits into branding. This is a sponsored bonus episode that we're excited to share as Capsule's a tool that we love and enjoy using. They believe that video storytelling should be easy and scalable. And if your team is doing more in video these days, their platform is definitely the place to go.
- [01:24]
Eli Woolery
This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I am Eli Woolery.
- [01:30]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. Champ Bennett. Welcome to Design Better.
- [01:39]
Champ Bennett
Thank you. I'm excited to be here, man.
- [01:41]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, we're excited to talk to you. We've been using Capsule for a while to do motion graphics in a number of our videos and you're the co founder and the CEO. So we want to talk about Capsule, motion, design, design systems, all of that. But maybe a good place to start would be a little bit of your background. I noticed that you have many startups on your resume and there's a theme there of starting new ventures, but also a theme that there's photo, video, there's like this visual kind of design and engineering component there. Maybe you could fill us in with what's happening in that thread.
- [02:19]
Champ Bennett
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, without going too far back, just give you the thread of how I ended up caring this much about design tools and creativity tools. It really goes Back to my childhood as a kid, just obsessed with both music and technology. And I was really a product of my parents. My dad works at an auto parts company as an executive. And my mother was super into music. She was a musician, she played music at church every Sunday. And so I was surrounded by my dad who loved building companies and my mom who loved art and then ultimately also really got into computers. My mother was really good at using the computer and she could work her way around DOS in, you know, the early 90s. My father had no clue what he was doing. But I also remember kind of getting my first computer at a very young age. My dad brought home a work computer and it was a dumb terminal, you couldn't actually do anything with it. But I vividly remember turning that thing on, typing random stuff into it as a child and it just coming back and spitting a response. And that moment was somehow very exciting to me. It didn't actually do anything, but it's very exciting to me. And that stuck with me for a very long time. So by the time we got a computer that I could use, I was obsessed with the thing. I mean, I was just night and day. My parents were very worried about me at one point because I just locked myself in the room and I would hack away on that thing. And that led me to my first job. I actually didn't go to college right out of high school. I had been using Photoshop, probably Photoshop version 1 or 2. I had learned HTML was using like Microsoft front page, I think was the product back then. Got my first job at a design agency in Richmond, Virginia and I wanted to be a designer. That was really my goal as a career. But they sat me down and they were like, okay, there's this thing called web development. Our customers are asking about it and they're like, do you know anything about that? And I'm like, yeah, I know HTML. And there wasn't even CSS at the time, but yeah, I know HTML. So I ended up being the web guy and that started my career as a developer. So I'm a self taught engineer, but really in my heart a designer. So I had this kind of strange career, you know, back in the day. I mean, you guys remember this. There wasn't a such thing as the design engineer, right? It was, you were either on the design team or you were on the engineering team and you had to kind of pick one. And I somehow managed throughout the course of my career as an ic, as a contributor to, to not have to pick one. And I always Just kind of straddled that line. And front end development was kind of emerging as this thing and so got really into that, got really into UI and the space between designing something and then a user actually interacting with it was where I really loved building software. So I focused my career on that and then spent a bunch of time in the early days of the Internet working on Internet video. And so that was kind of my parlay into video. My co founder and I met 20 years ago at an agency and their core competency was building Internet streaming players on the web. Before that really existed, there wasn't a Netflix. I think YouTube may have been like very, very early in its day. And so we did things like we put the first episode of hour long television on the Internet for the first time. My co founder Joseph was responsible for leading the video team that brought the Olympics on the Internet livestream for the very first time. And so we got very good at video stuff. And by the time we were done working at agencies, we were like, okay, let's start companies. You know, we had been building things for others for so long and there was an excitement to that. We got to work on some really big projects that kind of move the needle on the Internet. But we very quickly were like, let's do this for ourselves. We have our own ideas. And so we became startup founders together. Have been working together as startup founders for over 10 years, close to 12 now. And I guess the thread to finally get back to your question, you know, when we started doing startups, the thing that excited me the most was kind of bringing together together technology and design to help people create. And how do we use technology to enable people to make things that they had never made before, but maybe desperately wanted to make. And so that started as in consumer. We were making photo and video apps for the App Store, kind of like in the very early days of the photo video category. And we had some wild successes there, didn't ultimately become successful startups. Talked to the App Store a number of times with some really cool video and photo tools and then pivoted that company into a video company that was helping brands capture live video at events and then instantly do post production on that video and then share it out to social. So kind of like high production value, high speed social content grew that business to. We had over 40 people at one time. And then Covid happened and Covid was a huge blow to that business. We ultimately went from 100% of revenue to something like 4 or 5% in a matter of a couple weeks. And so we had to figure out what was next. And capsule had been kind of sitting in the back of my mind for a long time as an idea for kind of how to take this idea of instant video making but bring it to the masses. And we had seen this happen in consumer, you know, by the time this was happening four or five years ago, everybody had made videos on the iPhone in iMovie, TikTok, Cap Cut had become like very, very popular. And yet when we would go into large companies and we'd ask them, how many people are making video in your company? They'd say, well, we have one video person, a company of 10,000 people. We have one or two video people, and then we have a bunch of agencies that we spend a couple million dollars a year on. And that was the light bulb moment. It's like, okay, well if every consumer in the world can make video, then why is it that the average person in a large enterprise can't? Why can't a salesperson make great video? Why can't marketers? Shockingly, most marketers aren't making videos on their own. That was the insight. And then it was all about figuring out the product.
- [08:13]
Aaron Walter
I'm curious, Champ, what I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs. They say I had to start a company because I wasn't a good employee. I wouldn't have made a good employee. I'm curious if that resonates for you, the way that you think, the way that you approach work in general. Do you feel like you're, you're drawn to an entrepreneurial pathway versus going and working for someone because of the way that you think and approach things?
- [08:38]
Champ Bennett
I was a team player as an individual contributor and I liked being great at what I did. I think I was at the time, you know, one of the better front end developers throughout the course of my career. And I cared a lot about the detail and the craft of that. At some point though, I did feel as if I had ideas that were bigger than what could be realized in that context. And when I finally decided to leave 10 years into that and start my own company at that moment, I realized what you just said, which is like, I don't think I can go back to this because the freedom that I feel in building companies and the joy, ultimately, it's just so much fun. It's really scary and hard and the ups and downs are intense, but it really, at the end of the day is so much fun and it just gets me excited to wake up in the morning. So it'd be hard for me to.
- [09:30]
Unknown
Go back, I'm curious about how sort of in the ideation phase, when you're thinking about Capsule, how you thought about creating a really balanced product. And what I mean about that is, like, I have some video editing experience, and I've done a lot of that kind of content over the years, but I always struggled with things like After Effects and Motion design. I figured, like, I'm pretty good at learning new tools, but every time I tried to use After Effects, I just end up frustrated. And then I would end up, like, if I was working at Envision, and I'd lean on somebody who was really an expert to do that part of it for me or at least create a template that I could use, something like that. When I learned about Capsule, I was curious because I tried other tools that sort of had the intent to do, I think, what Capsule did, but none of them really executed on it in such a way that you could create something that felt like it wasn't fully canned and fully just, like, templated. It had enough customization to help you make it feel more original or at least a little bit more aligned with your brand. But it wasn't overwhelming. It wasn't in After Effects, where you got, like, 13 layers of menus and you end up lost. So, yeah, how'd you think about fine tuning that balance?
- [10:32]
Champ Bennett
In large part due to having the same exact experience to you? I'm the same. Like, I know how to work my way around professional creative tools. After Effects was, like, my Achilles heel. I could never figure it out. Some people are great at it, but I don't know, maybe it's just the way my brain works. I never quite got good at it. I was dangerous enough to, like, do little things, but I never got good at it. And when we would go and talk to customers, kind of in the early days of Capsule, there were two parts to the equation. It was like, well, video editing is really hard, and they're kind of talking about Premiere in that context. But then there's the whole brand part, which is me as an individual marketer. I'm not even allowed to publish a video even if I knew how to use Premiere, because the motion and the design aspect of it is all wrong. So anytime I even think about making a video, it has to go to my brand or creative team first, because they know After Effects. The one person in the company that knows After Effects has to touch every single video. And so, to your point, After Effects was, like, really the bottleneck to a lot of video creation within companies. And even in smaller companies, right. And even though we're very enterprise focused today, we have a lot of stuff coming down the pike that I think for companies that are smaller, small business or mid market, that lack an After Effects person, but want to do something really creative still in the design of their video, we have some stuff coming along the pipeline that's really exciting along those lines. And I guess the really hard thing is what's the balance of how much customization versus not? And I think that was the one thing we got really right about Capsule, at least resonated a lot, was essentially the power of After Effects. But all you need to know how to do is fill out a form, you just type some stuff in and upload some assets and we promise it's going to look great. That's really the design philosophy behind the entire product. And we think about that with every single button that we add. It's like, is this as easy as filling out a form or clicking a button? Or do you have to know something special about design in order to make something great?
- [12:34]
Aaron Walter
So you talked about an aha moment with the origin story of Capsule where you realize that one, there's pretty big total addressable market. Lots of companies have this bottleneck for this type of rich creative content that has to go through one person that has to have very deep technical skills. And so the throughput in that scenario is very constrained. But there's a lot of environmental things that happen simultaneously. So you got the disadvantage of COVID came in and wrecked your business. But at the same time, you know, there's just so many people producing video now. And it used to be that video was like experts would produce it and experts would edit and do the post. Now it's just like amateurs produce it. We all consume that and the amateurs are the ones who are leading the innovation in that space. So from a business perspective, you've got this kind of like top of the market opportunity. There's businesses. It's like we could sell this to businesses to democratize, but there's also just billions of people every day right now shooting countless hours of footage on their phones. How do you think about these different markets in terms of business strategy?
- [13:52]
Champ Bennett
We think a lot about this and talk a lot about it. One of the things that you learn after doing a couple of startups that failed is that market is almost as important as a good product, if not more so. When we set out to build Capsule, actually people thought it was sort of crazy, like, why would you build another video editing tool? There's literally hundreds of them and many of them are free. I have Imovie on my laptop, I've got it on my phone. I've got Cap Cut, I've got Imovie sucks. Imovie does suck. Yet it's there and it's free. So the general consensus when we were like, no, we're going to build a video editing tool was maybe that's not a great idea. And actually it was pretty hard to raise money on that idea in the early days. It's gotten easier more recently now that it's working, but it was pretty hard. And so when we thought about the video space and where the biggest gap was, it was specifically this scenario that we're talking about now where you've got teams of people who desperately want to use video to communicate at work, but they're bottlenecked by the one or two people in the company that are responsible for making it. That was the area we decided to focus on. And in fact, so much so that like today even you can't sign up to Capsule without having a business email address. So you can't even sign up with a Gmail, you can't sign up with Hotmail. Whatever you've got, you have to use your business email. And that's very deliberate. I think it's very important for startups in the early days to focus on where can you go where there's basically no competition. And in a space that's really noisy like video, you kind of have to get pretty narrow. Now, I don't think it's actually all that narrow, and we're starting to prove that out. But it looks narrow from the outside and that's an advantage to us today. But that being said, I mean, I think Capsule long term will be used by millions of people, even outside of the context of an enterprise company, all the way down to potentially prosumers or even consumers. It's just not a focus today.
- [15:47]
Unknown
So you mentioned learning about market size through these other startups. What are some of the other things that you learned? Building a company could be around hiring or fundraising.
- [15:56]
Champ Bennett
One of the more difficult lessons that I learned was to not be dependent on any other platform for growth. Find your own path to growth. We built tools in the early days where the viral loop was. This is back when we were working on consumer photo video tools. The viral loop was you take a photo in one of our apps and then you'd post it on Instagram or Facebook and then somebody on Instagram or Facebook would see that, and then you'd come back to Capsule or to whatever the app was at the time. And that worked incredibly well until Instagram started to lock down what kind of apps could publish to their platform. And in some ways, even we're targeting startups like ours. So a very difficult lesson was, it's good to have distribution hacks, but make sure that ultimately you're building your own vertically integrated platform that has no real dependency. So a lot of the stuff I learned, like, I've always been pretty good at production, that was my career. But a lot of the stuff I learned more just about business and having to get better at that over time, I had a lot of painful lessons along the way. Make sure you pick the right market. Make sure you don't depend on other platforms for growth that you don't control. Make sure that you get the right people. And if you don't, just move on. Because the wrong person in the early stage of your company can kill your company. So lots of little stuff like that, that adds up to a lot, I think, at the end of the day. And it's made Capsule a lot more fun to run because I don't have to deal with those things. I have the scar tissue on those lessons, and I can just focus on the things that I enjoy doing that we're good at.
- [17:32]
Aaron Walter
You recently raised a big round of funding, which gives you a lot more Runway to explore new things. What have you learned about fundraising? And just telling a story, it's hard. It is really hard to be succinct and clear and to get people excited and bought into an idea enough that they'll invest.
- [17:53]
Champ Bennett
It really gets back to design, ultimately, you know, design, I think a lot of people say design, they think aesthetics and how things look and feel. Design, I think, is a lot more about empathy for the person that's experiencing the thing. And so when I build the story for Capsule, and, you know, not that I was good at this in the beginning, but now I'm the other person in the room. I'm not champ, I'm not Capsule. What's it going to take to get the other person in the room to part ways with $10 million? And how can I narrate this to paint a vision that speaks to what that person is going through? You know, they have their own needs, they have their job. How do I design a story that speaks to that person? And I think that was a big unlock in my ability to fundraise. Fundraising used to be very, very difficult for me. I was a technical design person. I would not say that. I was a CEO in the early days of my founder career. I thought everything was just about, oh, well, if the pitch looks really cool and I just go in there and like, hit play, they're going to give me the money. Right. Does not work that way at all. It really is about storytelling. I mean, some of the things I've learned. A deck, in many ways, is a product itself. So you do your mvp, you put it out to people you trust, you get feedback, you iterate, you iterate, you iterate, you iterate. Go get more feedback. You go get more feedback. And then even when you think you're ready to go and pitch it to investors, one of the smartest things you could do is actually go to a few investors that you don't really care about so much. I mean, sounds kind of harsh, but just go to folks that are like, you know, it's okay if these people say, no, they're not at the top of your list. And go work it on them and work out all the objections that they come up with before you go and pitch the people that you really care about and you'd really want to work with. So it's all about preparation. I'll go through 40, 50 rounds of revisions on a story and a deck. Not just a story, but also the visuals that go along with it before I put it in front of someone that I really care about. Till the final day that you close the round, I am jamming on that story and trying to make it as crisp as possible.
- [20:02]
Unknown
So the stories key. Do you also find the reason I'm asking this question is because we had guest Dan Pink on the show a few years back, and he was talking about pitching and that they've done some research, and many successful pitches don't just rely on a great story or great visuals, but they rely on participation from the audience. So interactivity, participation, making them feel like they're involved in some way. Have you found any techniques or strategies around that that you found helpful?
- [20:32]
Champ Bennett
Yeah, a hard one is to stop talking. Yeah. I think maybe one of the most difficult things when you're pitching is to just shut up for a minute, let the room breathe for a second. I mean, I'm having a hard time doing it right now on this. You know, people, when they get nervous, they talk more. Right. The best thing you could do is pause, take a breath, and just don't say anything. Don't even say, like, any questions. Just make a point. That's good. And then stop talking. And I will literally put Moments like that in my pitch and sometimes it is almost a little awkward. I just stand there and I wait for a question. And the longer that you are willing to wait, like keep the silence gap going, the more likely it is that you're going to get a question. And then as soon as that first question comes out, then you're talking, right? And then it's interactive and now you're having a conversation. And I think that's what every pitch kind of ultimately you want to get to, at least with investors and probably too in sales. I think it's really important too is a conversation and a relationship ultimately at the end of the day. So that's like one of the tricks that I use.
- [21:36]
Aaron Walter
Do you think that that shapes the way people see you as an individual? We've had a number of VCs on the show and we number of friends in the space and they always say that they invest in people not in a product or a company and they're trying to like go for the founder, their conviction, their clarity, sometimes character, et cetera. And to just be a person who's standing in front of a room of people judging, evaluating, to stand there and be quiet and look at them, that says something about that person.
- [22:10]
Champ Bennett
It definitely shows a little bit of confidence, which can certainly help. But I think even more than that, once you get past that first awkward question and you start talking to them, it becomes more human. It's not this robot talking in front of an audience. It's like, oh, you're a person. We could go out and have dinner together and maybe it could be really fun. And I do think that when you cross that barrier with people in sales, they start to think about you more as a person and they start to get excited about, well, what would it be like to work with this person over time? And I do think that that influences investors. I think there are different stages where that matters more. Early days, it matters a lot. If you've got a sketch, then it's really going to come down to you and you've got no traction or a product. It's 100% the founder. And then kind of it's a gradient. By the time you get to series B and C, it's more about the numbers and founders got to be awesome. But it's a little bit more about the numbers. But pre seed seed and series A heavily founder and relationship dependent.
- [23:09]
Aaron Walter
What strikes me is if I were in that situation, considering the investment, a pause for a long awkward time would suggest there's some self awareness here. And a maturity, which I know my instinct when I'm trying to pitch somebody an idea is I've got a limited amount of time, let me get it all in so they can see what I have. That's so special.
- [23:32]
Champ Bennett
I think we all have that. Yeah, that's great.
- [23:35]
Unknown
Let's shift over and talk about motion design and design systems. A lot of our audience is probably familiar with a general design system that might be implemented at a company to help make products consistent, make interactions consistent throughout a product, easier to deploy, easier to iterate on. And I imagine motion design systems share some of those characteristics, but it's also its own thing. So maybe talk to us about how motion design systems are implemented and how Capsule can help people do that.
- [24:02]
Champ Bennett
It varies a bit, customer to customer, because motion design systems are a relatively new thing. We've thought a lot about kind of static design systems. We've even thought about it in engineering where you've got like REACT components, and essentially those are systems that can be scaled. But in brand and marketing and in other contexts, I think systems to scale communication are still a relatively new concept. And in many ways, what we're sort of betting on with Capsule is that this idea is something that we can own. Kind of in the same way that figma, like, not a lot of people knew what design systems were before figma. I really popularized and productized that concept. I think people wanted something like that, but they didn't really know what the manifestation was. And Figma figured it out. It was collaboration, plus this way of creating components and sharing those across projects. Capsule is really no different. Right? I mean, many companies that we'll go to talk to, they'll have that after Effects Person, and maybe that after Effects Person has even created some templates. Mogrts is typically a file format for that. And so now that person can maybe put that in Premiere and one or two other people can use it, but you're still kind of boxing out 99.9% of the rest of the company. The idea was really simple for Capsule. Let's take that concept of templatizing motion graphics and then put it into a tool that's as easy to use as PowerPoint. So you've got these really complex motion design graphics that do all these keyframe animations. The easing curves are dialed in perfectly. They're responsive in the sense that, like, whatever you throw at them, it will kind of react in the right way, whether that's the layout or the duration of the component. For example, we built a whole programming language File format called capsulescript that actually was very largely inspired by front end development. In my days of building out CSS based design systems and how you could scale front end development in that way, we kind of introduced this motion design systems concept. We started to put it in front of people. What's great is that people kind of more or less knew what it meant right off the bat. It's like, oh, wait. Well, motion video is something we want to do more of, but we don't really have a way to scale it. And so these formats that we're trying to do frequently, like every time we've got to go hire an agency or every time we have to go back to this After Effects person and Capsule solve that in terms of what they do and how they work. They could be the simplest thing. Like it could literally be like a text component that animates in on the screen and animates out. That's a component in a motion system. It could be an entire full screen graphic, like an intro, for example. And it's got grouped components together. Like maybe an image is coming in this way and some text comes on top and there's sound. Even you can even put sound into components in Capsule. So there's like a swoosh or something when the effect happens, think of it as like a building block or like a Lego for video. So they could do everything that you can do in After Effects and more, but anybody can use it.
- [27:05]
Aaron Walter
So champ, when I think about this, there's the value proposition when you're selling this into companies. Feels like there might be a chicken an egg scenario. Design systems, they come about because a company, a team has grown so much. We need to standardize these components so we don't have a bunch of tech or design debt. We want to do it in a standard way to create a really great user experience. With a motion design system. We've got this bottleneck of like a person, maybe two people who are doing the video. So there's not necessarily that imminent need for a system. So how do you pull that apart and say here's what's possible if you think in a different way?
- [27:49]
Champ Bennett
It's a very good question. And I think one of the biggest challenges for us as a startup to overcome, what gives us a lot of confidence that eventually this problem will be solved, is that some of the smartest and most forward thinking companies are already thinking in this way that in order to scale video, they really don't have any other choice but to figure out how to get more people making It. And so unlike Figma, which was a very kind of bottom up groundswell of designers adopting this tool and then ultimately needing to use design systems to do it together, Capsule is very different. Capsule is very much a top down thing. At least it is today. I think that will change over time. But a company needs to say from the very top, like for example, HubSpot's one of our biggest customers, they recently became an investor as well. And the reason why Capsule has worked so well at HubSpot is because at the very top they're saying we need to make more video. We want to use AI to be able to enable our non video people to do it. And we are going to bring in Capsule, build a system and then deploy it and make sure that people are incentivized to actually do it. It's not a bottom up motion like some of the other design tools have been. And I actually equate it a lot with PowerPoint. You know, like in the very early days, I think it was 1987 that PowerPoint was released for the first time. It was a very similar situation where if you wanted to do a slide presentation at a company, there was one or two people in the entire company that knew how to design and develop slides and you would have to go to them and you'd have to tell them what you want and you have to actually wait for them to go and literally make the film. And it took a long time, it was really painful and you couldn't really do that many slide presentations because of that. Capsule is kind of exactly in that same scenario when it comes to video. And I think that the pain is so high because these companies know they need to get good at this, they need to become video first companies. The pain is so high that it's forcing this kind of top down motivation to get good at it. So we've seen it work kind of magically with a handful of companies, but we've also seen it stumble when it's just like, oh well, there's a couple of people in our company who want to use Capsule and we'll make a design system for them. It works much better when there's executive buy in the CMO or even the CEO level who's saying we're going to get great at video as a company because it's an important tool for our business to communicate and sell.
- [30:19]
Unknown
So how does it fit into branding? Because we talked earlier about essentially if you wanted to create a video at a larger brand, it had to pass through this gatekeeper of the creative team or creative director, branding side of things. And obviously this tool opened it up to a lot more people at an organization. But how do you see them making sure it's on brand and fits those standards and still is easy to use?
- [30:42]
Champ Bennett
Yeah, I think we have a lot of room to build out more features like this in our product to help companies stay on brand and consistent. Right now our main feature around this is design systems. And so it's hard to make a video that at least graphically looks really bad. In Capsule, almost everything you make is going to look really good. And the design teams, the creative teams can be super happy with that portion. Where we need to do more work though is like, well, what is the content of the video? Is it a great story? Because anybody can whip up their camera and start rambling and then throw some graphics on it. It's not going to be a good video. There's definitely some room for improvement and some really exciting stuff that we're planning around that. How do we help companies as a whole create marketing assets or sales assets that are aligned with each other? And you know, a lot of companies now are starting to think about social selling, so they're arming their sellers with enablement tools to make content for their prospects. Maybe they're posting videos to LinkedIn, for example. And the biggest fear when we go and talk to companies about this is what are they going to say? Is it going to be consistent? And so you can imagine like a little early for us to get into like exactly how we're executing this, but you can sort of imagine tooling to help solve that problem. Maybe, you know, there's a dashboard that every salesperson wakes up to and they have kind of like, here's the stuff that we're talking about as a company. Here are some, you know, AI generated scripts for you to go and record. Or maybe even here's an AI generated version using your likeness that you can go push a button and publish. And then there's the whole like post creation process. A big part of Capsule is that it's collaborative. It's all in the cloud, just like Figma. So you can go in and if you're on the creative team, you can actually take part of the creative process even if you're not directly the creator of the video yourself. So like for example, at HubSpot, we help their customer education team produce videos on their own. Previously they had never used a video editor before. They would go and they would shoot some film and they would send it to the creative team. And it would take them three or four weeks to produce that video. Now they're doing it all on their own in Capsule in about three or four days. But what's great about it is you can, you know, if you're on the customer education team, you can create the whole story, you can record it, you can add the graphics on your own. The video might be 95% there. And then you share it with the creative and brand team. They can come in and nudge a few things and boom, you're done. We're attacking that problem from a variety of different angles, but it's definitely something, as you get to scale, that really matters.
- [33:08]
Aaron Walter
This is super interesting is who would use video and who could do their job better if they had access to good video tools. So you mentioned sales. Clearly, like, you could do some really interesting, innovative things. And, you know, we've worked with some super talented salespeople in the past who are creative and their approach could definitely see that being effective. Obviously, marketing is sort of like the entry and then customer success, support, et cetera. There's a lot that could happen there where the way that you communicate with customers can feel more human. So one of the things that a new product like this, the challenge is to sort of paint the picture, to say, here's what's possible and here's the right way to do it. So to have an opinion about that, is that something that you as a company are articulating, hey, here's Capsule, here's what I can do, and here's how it fits into your company and we'll help you do business better.
- [34:06]
Champ Bennett
It is, and it's why we're an enterprise focused company, is because we think of ourselves not as a tool, but as a product that you can buy that is going to help your company, your entire company become video first. So we don't just hand over this thing and say, you know, good luck. We work with you. We actually, with every single one of our customers, we're in slack with them every single day. We have weekly calls with them. We help them build their design system. So we have a creative services team at Capsule that if you don't have a video design system, which not everyone does, we'll help you build one and then we help you deploy it. So we will help you discover what the use cases are and prioritize them. Whether it's paid media or whether it's sales or whether it's marketing or customer education or comms. We've had success in all of these different teams and use cases. We will help you prioritize those, we will help deploy the product to those people, we will help train the product, to help train people on the product. And we will be your partner and ensure that you are successful. And that's one of the advantages of selling into enterprise and being laser focused on that is we can add that service on top of what we do without being distracted by maybe the tens or thousands of millions of people that might be using Capsule for free.
- [35:22]
Unknown
So this might be a good part to sort of tease a little project that we're going to hopefully collaborate on soon, which is designing a motion design system for Design Better, which Aaron and I are excited about. We had a great brand designer shout out to Aaron Stump, help us with our kind of initial brand guidelines and those types of assets, which are mostly static. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what we might expect, what we might need to kind of collect and prepare for as we think about building our own custom motion design system.
- [35:50]
Champ Bennett
Yeah, I'm excited to do that with you guys. So the process is it varies a little bit depending on where you're starting from. Some of our customers, they've got that after effects whole library built out and that's relatively easy. We just pull that all in the capsule and we hit go and you're ready to go. Others are like, hey, we've got brand templates in FIGMA or canva. Can we use this as inspiration and kind of motionize this stuff? Or we've got this PDF of our brand guidelines and in that case we bring in our services team, which we'll do with you all. So we'll sit down and there'll be kind of almost as if you were working with an agency. We'll have a kickoff call. We'll try to understand exactly the types of videos that you want to make and what we think the design components or elements of those videos are so that you can reproduce them very, very quickly. So I know that you guys do an audio and sort of video audiogram style content, which I love. I see those on LinkedIn all the time. I'm like, I think that scaffold looks great. I love seeing that. So similarly, we'd sit down, okay, what are all the formats you want to do? Let's design a system that works for those formats and then we deploy it to you and then you go crazy. I think that's one of the really cool things about Capsule is that it is kind of what you make it. It's all about the system that you build and you can do so many different things. It's very extensible. It's a platform in that sense that you can make a system for customer education. You can make a system for posting your podcast clips to LinkedIn. You could make a system for your salespeople to be able to just quickly personalize a message to a prospect or a customer that is telling them about a new feature in your product. And so it's very, very flexible as a format and then anybody can do it, which makes it really fun.
- [37:29]
Aaron Walter
Do you think this is going to change who businesses hire? I mean, I can't help but think that those who are pretty deft in front of a camera, that would be a good asset for a company.
- [37:41]
Champ Bennett
In fact, one of the things that we do is we ask candidates to record a video of themselves. And I'll tell you, that is a better filter than almost anything these days. If you're great on camera, there's a lot of things that that says about you. There's a certain level of confidence. If you're working remotely, it means you're probably a very good communicator. If you're a seller, it means you're going to be really good at selling. I actually made a tweet about this maybe two years ago that I thought that some of the most valuable employees in the future will be creators. They'll be video creators. And I think what's exciting about that is kind of the next generation that's about to enter the workforce. They're video native, they have zero problem getting on camera. My 8 year old nephew's got a YouTube channel and he's crushing. So by the time he's 25 getting a serious job, he's gonna be very comfortable on camera. Whereas I think our generation, even myself, it's like it's still not exactly something we feel natively comfortable doing.
- [38:41]
Aaron Walter
Even the formats now, like on reels and TikTok and stuff, where it's like a very crudely cut out person over some video backdrop that they're making commentary on and it's sort of shaky and the style doors are open that people will receive video in a lot of different ways. It used to be that video had to be very yet have really great equipment, great lighting, et cetera. You still want to have great lighting. I think people definitely figured that out. There's a lot of ring lights out there, but some basic equipment and just some creativity. People will tune into your video with lots of different scenarios.
- [39:20]
Champ Bennett
Totally agree. It's all about the content, the personality, the storytelling, all that other stuff is nice to have. And I do think that over time, the production value will increase simply because the tooling is just going to get better and better. And we sort of see Capsule as somewhere in between. Like, you're not going to sell our customer, you're not going to make a Super bowl ad with Capsule. Like, that's what your creative team's for, that's what your agency is for. But all the other stuff, that's like tier two, tier three, that you're having to do over and over again. And it doesn't really take a lot of creative effort. It's just sort of tedious packaging. That's where we can really help you. And so it's high frequency, it's not perfectly polished, but it does have some consistency around it. So when you're looking for that attribution across 100 people on LinkedIn, all creating the same way you have it, and people identify with you and your brand. So I think there's a happy medium there. The reason why I think many businesses haven't adopted just the free for all of let everyone create is for that reason. There's just so much inconsistency. And they don't necessarily want that. I know they want to empower people to create, but they want to do it in a way that's somewhat controlled.
- [40:30]
Unknown
We're in this era of generative AI, and there are AI aspects to Capsule which you can use and which I use, like to generate a little soundtrack, sometimes for a clip. But I'm curious how you think about balancing all these interesting and helpful tools with maintaining, you know, that human touch that people are going to resonate with. Because I think we're already at this point of saturation where you could look at posts on LinkedIn and if there's an AI generated image, I think many of us just like, scroll past it because you're like, okay, we've seen that, done that, let's get beyond that. And I feel like inherently, Capsule has the flexibility to pull in those more human touch parts of a brand. But I'm curious how explicitly how you think about that.
- [41:08]
Champ Bennett
I think that some portion of content in the world will be majority AI created, but that anything that's involving humans interacting will always be more effective if there's an actual human involved, even if you almost can't tell the difference, which I think we're still a ways away, especially in video, for it to be totally perfect. I just think there's an authenticity to feeling A connection with another person. So until it gets to the point where it's like you can make any type of video and it's literally not different than if I was to record it myself, which I'm not sure we're even going to ever get there, I still think the human touch is very helpful. And I think, especially in the context of business, if I'm selling to you as a prospect, is it going to mean a lot to me if it looks like you just hit a button and it made a video for you that is like a fake talking head of you? It's not. I might learn something. And I think that's why some of the AI avatar stuff has been so successful in customer education, because less about the relationship there. Synthesia, for example, I mean, they're crushing it. And the majority of that content is AI avatars. A lot of, like, training material. It's good for, you know, like, what we're doing right now, for example. This is not going to go away. There will not be the AI version of the three of us having a conversation for an hour that people will want to listen to.
- [42:33]
Unknown
Google tried with Notebook, but. Yeah.
- [42:35]
Champ Bennett
And there was a novelty effect, right? Right.
- [42:37]
Unknown
There was a novelty.
- [42:38]
Champ Bennett
Yeah. I mean, have you listened to any of those since?
- [42:41]
Unknown
I. Not really. I mean, I've definitely played with it and it was fun and I think there was interesting things there. But it's good.
- [42:47]
Champ Bennett
Yeah, it's incredibly good. It's incredibly good. If anything, I think what it will do is there will be use cases for video that didn't exist prior because the cost and the barrier to entry is now so low that we can do new things at scale that we couldn't do before. But I don't necessarily think it displaces a lot of the content that exists today. I think we'll still be watching Hollywood movies with celebrities that we identify with. I think there will be this kind of thing here where it's like, I really care about that person. I want to know what they specifically think and I want to hear the conversation that they're having with other people. Live as if I'm sitting there. I don't think that's going to go away. I just think we're going to see a lot more AI content, fill gaps other places.
- [43:29]
Aaron Walter
Yeah. Things that are 100% AI. So thinking of, like, short videos, there's a bunch of videos out there of, like, fruit or food turning into cute animals. And I see that and I'm like, is this real? Oh, that's not real, and it's just sort of a turnoff. But AI can be used really well to flesh out a story that would otherwise be kind of impossible to bring to life as a one person, couple person endeavor.
- [43:59]
Champ Bennett
Totally agree. Although I will say I have caught myself watching a few of those fruit to. Cute.
- [44:05]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, they're amazing. They're really cool. But at the same time, I'm like, okay, all right.
- [44:10]
Champ Bennett
This isn't.
- [44:12]
Aaron Walter
Yeah.
- [44:12]
Champ Bennett
But Capsule's product philosophy is much more about enabling the human creator than it is replacing them. And it's like, how do we do storytelling at scale that's human centered, but without all the cruft. Like, without all the tedious stuff that you have to do to get there. Right. So it's like, can I get you there in, like, the 60 seconds that it takes for you to record something you want to say on your camera and then just make that look so good that you don't have to do much after that? Then I think we unlock something that didn't exist before, that scalable brand storytelling becomes possible for the first time.
- [44:43]
Aaron Walter
Yeah. Well, your timing is impeccable. The tools for producing great video are in everyone's pockets. They're so easy to use. And the platforms where we're spending most of our time, like YouTube and Instagram, it wants more, wants to be fed with video. What have you been reading, watching, listening to that's inspiring you or giving you fresh eyes?
- [45:07]
Champ Bennett
Oh, man. Well, that's funny that you mentioned that, because about three or four months ago, I decided to take a step away from Twitter. I was very into Twitter. I didn't have a real Twitter account until I started Capsule, and it was a really important part of our story. Much of the good things that happened to Capsule, actually, the way that I met Clark from Envision was through Twitter. So many of the good things that happened to Capsule were a result of tweeting and telling our story and publishing videos on Twitter. I realized, though, that there was so much noise about AI and in particular, generative AI and video and audio and all this stuff. Every single day there was a new model. There still is. Like, that's not changing. What I realized is that I was spending a lot more time thinking about that than what my customers really wanted. And I was like, oh, well, we can do this now. We could do this now. And I think it was like, kind of a little whiplash for me and the product team, to be honest. So let's get back to the basics of what do customers want? Let's Spend more time with them and then not to ignore what's happening in the market by any means. I think that would be incredibly stupid. Understand what's going on, but really see everything through the lens of the customer's eyes and figure out, okay, what's going on in the macro that can help me solve this customer problem. As opposed to, well, this is a really cool tech demo. Let's just throw that in the product and see what happens. So to your question, I haven't been consuming much lately. I've been really just focused on building Capsule and growing Capsule and I think post product market fit. There's never a more important time than just nailing the go to market, making sure that we're building things that make the product more sticky for our customers. And that being said, I try to stay on top of everything and I test everything and I play with all these tools because it is so inspiring. It's a really fun time to be building a creative tool. Maybe the most fun time I've ever had in my career because there's just all these unlocks that are happening and could do things that you never done before. So I stay close to it, but I'm not obsessed with it as I was over the last few years.
- [47:18]
Unknown
There's definitely a lot of rabbit holes you can end up in. And I too sort of stay away from Twitter for the most part. But occasionally I scroll to just find funny videos to share with my daughter. And to Aaron's point earlier about people using generative AI in a really creative way, I recommend this guy who's neuralviz, he's called and we'll put a note in the show links, but he kind of leans into the sort of creepiness of these generated AI characters. And he has sort of man on the street interviews with various aliens. And they're just well written. You've seen that. Pretty well executed.
- [47:47]
Champ Bennett
It's great.
- [47:47]
Unknown
Yeah. Pretty funny.
- [47:49]
Champ Bennett
And now I'm seeing all the baby videos from like the top podcasters. That's right. Yeah.
- [47:54]
Unknown
They memory cast them. Yeah.
- [47:59]
Champ Bennett
One thing that universally is successful is when people see themselves in a new way for the first time, it will go viral.
- [48:09]
Unknown
Yes.
- [48:10]
Champ Bennett
That was one of the things I learned in building consumer tools and a philosophy that I try to bring into Capsule. It's like, how do you make yourself look really professional? Because when you look really good, you're going to share it. I'm seeing all these podcasters sharing these baby videos of themselves. I don't know how long that's going to last probably not very long. I think the novelty will wear off. But it's a really good way to go viral is to like give people a new way to see themselves.
- [48:32]
Aaron Walter
Champ, where can people learn more about you and Capsule?
- [48:36]
Champ Bennett
Well, you can follow me on Twitter. Although I've not been as active. I'll get back in the game and just focus on other things at the moment. But I'm do you know Champ oyouknowchamp on Twitter? You can email me champapsule Video, especially if you use Capsule. I want to hear from you Eli. I'm expecting some product feedback from you for this. Love talking to customers. Capsule users yeah, Capsule Video is the website you can sign up for free play around with the free version of the tool. But if you're an enterprise company, let's say you're working on a creative team or a brand team and you are overwhelmed with requests for videos, reach out to me directly or go through the sales funnel on Capsule. Just book a demo and we'll show you the enterprise version of the tool and would love to help your company become more video first.
- [49:27]
Aaron Walter
Thanks so much Champ.
- [49:29]
Champ Bennett
Thank you guys. Really enjoyed it.
- [49:35]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.