The $100k betrayal that sparked my software business

When I joined Sarah Benken Foushee on her High Achieving Female Podcast, I expected we'd have a chat about my AI-powered startup, Capsho .

What I didn't anticipate was baring my soul about the twists and turns of my entrepreneurial journey.?

As Sarah probed lovingly ?? I found myself opening up about the unexpected catalyst that ultimately put me on the path to founding Capsho.

Just a few years ago, I was running a small restaurant empire in Sydney, Australia with my husband. Hospitality was never part of our master plan, but we fell into it after a quarter-life crisis led us to dust off my husband's baking skills. Five years later, we had grown to 7 thriving locations.?

That all changed at the end of 2018 when we discovered one of our store managers had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars right under our noses. The betrayal cut deep both financially and emotionally.

More importantly, it was the wake-up call I needed to walk away from an industry where my passion had slowly eroded.

So my husband and I made a radical, spur-of-the-moment decision. We would leave behind the business we had poured our blood, sweat and tears into building and move halfway across the world to reinvent ourselves. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once.??

When we landed in New York, my initial idea was to launch a fashion-tech startup. But after just 4 months of testing concepts with our target customers, we knew in our guts it wasn't the right path forward.?

Rather than force success, we objectively assessed the feedback and data. By being willing to walk away - just as we had from hospitality - we opened ourselves up to new possibilities.

With heavy hearts but clarity of vision, we decided to lean into our core strengths in digital marketing. We began supporting boutiques and brands through agency work, helping them drive acquisition. It wasn't the overnight success story I had envisioned, but it enabled us to keep evolving.

After a few years of serving clients, I launched a podcast sharing my own entrepreneurial lessons learned. I quickly identified a major pain point: repurposing podcast content into other formats felt like an endless time suck.

As I manually created blog posts, social captions and more from my episodes, I kept thinking, "There has to be a better way!"

And that spark of frustration planted the seeds for Capsho. I assembled a technical team to turn my vision into reality, while my co-founder and I focused on what we knew best - marketing. We embraced scrappiness, self-funding our MVP and getting organic traction through word-of-mouth.?

Fast forward to today, and Capsho has transformed content marketing for hundreds of entrepreneurs. But we're just getting started.

I'm grateful that my journey of unexpected pivots led me here.

My advice for fellow entrepreneurs is:

1. Avoid getting emotionally attached to any one business idea. Be willing to walk away when the data suggests it's time.
2. Leverage your core strengths rather than spreading yourself too thin. By outsourcing weaknesses, you free yourself up for accelerated growth.

Listen to my full conversation with Sarah here:

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