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The Difficulties of Running a Sex-Inspired Startup
- thomas_howland 9y agoAll of the above, plus VCs likely worried about giving excuses for being targeted by sexual harassment claims.
- ykler 9y agoI still have no idea what the company does. "A user-generated digital marketplace trying to “normalize” real sex"?
- dlgeek 9y agoI gave up and checked out their website. It's an "amateur" for-pay clip site (that claims to specialize in "genuine" sex) that does revenue sharing back to the users, according to the various claims I could see in 30 seconds of poking around.
- pluma 9y agoThe site's main idea seems to hinge on a very narrow definition of "porn". It offers sex video clips intended to arouse the audience -- I'm not sure what else to call that but pornographic. It tries to keep a niche focus on "realistic" content produced by amateurs but considering most real sex doesn't translate well to video, I'm guessing it'll eventually be either just another low-quality amateur clip site or sacrifice authenticity for production quality and become a generic "for women" porn site. For context, here is what distinguishes "porn" from "real sex" according to the website (obviously this list is not intended to be exhaustive): * coming on women's faces * no "hair down there" * no foreplay * no clitoral stimulation * all women love anal * dirty talk I'm willing to wager creating porn without these qualifiers isn't a novel idea and that there are already existing websites offering that. None of these seem necessary or sufficient to distinguish between porn and "real sex" videos.
- whipoodle 9y agoWow, that is so ridiculous. I was wondering what it was too. So, this is really about people drawing weird boundaries around what they find acceptable and labeling whatever's outside the boundary "porn". Mmm, so progressive. Much of what is called "sex positivity" strikes me as suspicious for similar reasons.
- kirsebaer 9y agoBack in the 1990s, VHS tapes of porn had a label explaining that this was educational materials for married couples, not porn.
- ge96 9y agoBittit it's not pretty
- TACIXAT 9y agoI was really waiting for them to explain in the article. It's like, no one understands what they do and you won't either cause we're not telling!
- sbuttgereit 9y agoThese people have managed to get the funding thing under control as a sex inspired startup. Not huge money raised to be sure, but a good little business that's been growing pretty well. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/crave#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/crave#/entity https://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/09/19/50-shades-of-angel-funding-crave-innovations-raises-2-4m-for-luxury-sex-toys/ https://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/09/19/50-shades-of... Their company site: http://www.lovecrave.com/ http://www.lovecrave.com/
- mattmaroon 9y agoWell, that article portrays banks as moralizing prudes and neglects to mention why they don't want to deal with those companies: very high amounts of fraud. Process payments for a porn site and you're going to be hit with charge backs out the wazoo. The industry has been mostly shady since the beginning so you likely won't recoup the money you got stiffed. Certainly there are legitimate players, but you can't blame a payment processor or bank for not wanting to take high levels of risk.
- ouid 9y agoAny hypothesis that violates the zero-arbitrage principle should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Dylan16807 9y ago"We don't want this business because it makes it harder to do business elsewhere" also does not violate that principle. So that rule of thumb, while nice, doesn't help a whole lot here.
- khazhoux 9y agoexplain?
- quickthrower2 9y agoA situation in which all relevant assets are priced appropriately and there is no way for one's gains to outpace market gains without taking on more risk. Assuming an arbitrage-free condition is important in financial models, thought its existence is mainly theoretical.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 9y agoNot if they take only Bitcoin!
- skarap 9y agoMaybe it's just that potential investors don't get how the startup is going to earn money?
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoThat hasn't always been a problem in the past.
- notyourday 9y agoI can see "How are you going to actually make money" questions applicable to all kinds of well funded startups except for the ones peddling porn and sex.
- zachrose 9y ago> “In the beginning, a lot of people told me not to go to the tech industry [with this product], but to go to the porn industry instead,” says Tio, who created the product for his wife during their long-distance hiatus from one another. “But for me, this is not porn. This is not kinky stuff. This is about intimacy because a lot of couples are looking for solutions to maintain intimacy.” It's like they're on the middle rung of the sex-positivity ladder, looked down upon by potential investors while themselves looking down at porn.
- mc32 9y agoMaybe not looking down so much as differentiating from it. Kind of like you don't have to look down on coffee to sell tea instead cuz some people prefer tea.
- Viker 9y agoBut why do people differentiate porn and Sex? When we look at a professional football player play football, we never call it fake football. So why when it comes to sex we choose what is real and what is fake. I understand that very few people can have Sex like porn stars and very few women have the ability to look like porn starts. But why do we look down upon them and call them fake.
- elorant 9y agoBecause porn objectifies women. Today's porn doesn't have to do anything with sex, at least not the sex most people are used to do. There's no intimacy. Women look artificial with all these cosmetic surgeries. The whole thing looks artificial. Not to mention that it gives youngsters a very distorted view of how sex should be which is a whole other story by itself.
- draugadrotten 9y ago> Because porn objectifies women Gay porn invalidates your argument.
- 0x8BADF00D 9y agoWhen is the token sale? Put me down for 500 ETH.
- naiv 9y agoIf you are well connected in the adult business it is easy to get financing from other adult businesses and even more important massive traffic. But you need to have a unique concept that converts traffic which she clearly doesn't have. There are also a couple of adult crowd funding sites, eg http://www.adultxfunding.com http://www.adultxfunding.com and some more.
- alacombe 9y agoThis is not just out of "moral" reason. The sex industry was under the scope of Operation Choke Point, an Obama-era initiative of the United States Department of Justice, which would investigate banks in the United States and the business they do with business in "edgy" categories, including pornography.
- whipoodle 9y agoHere is what people like the first woman in this article never address: If porn is so denatured, and so misrepresentative of reality, why do people make it themselves, and then share it with others, while never getting any money or fame from it? There's no other explanation than they enjoy it. And there are SO many places on the internet where people do this. And you can find all the stuff that is supposedly sooo unrealistic that "normal" people don't do. Singles, couples, groups, women and men, all of it. All of it. Why not just admit, hey, there's things I like and things I don't like, and sometimes people like things I don't, and vice versa. (I mean, I know why, but.)
- the_stc 9y agoIf they had a solid revenue model, they might be a good target for blockchain fundraising. I dislike the term ICO, because a token makes zero sense for this company. They could do what we're doing and sell shares (token-shares/blockchain bearer shares). I think we'll see a turn to this model in the post-ICO era, once the hype dies or the bubble bursts.
- madaxe_again 9y agoAnother business which ran into this in its early days was NaturalMotion - they were initially building tech for realistic animated interactive porn - and they got an initial round of angels (HNWIs) on that basis. Of course, they pivoted and ended up producing tech for movies and games, but porn was where they started. It's not impossible to get investors for an adult startup (far from it), but it is hard to grow, as word of mouth and so-forth doesn't work so well there, for fairly obvious reasons.
- senatorobama 9y agoIt's pretty good SW.. I never figured out their technique. Does it use AI? Or is it just a giant list of heuristics (i.e if else if else ... )
- al_chemist 9y agoSelling porn (sorry, sex-inspired videos) is now startup?
- wodenokoto 9y agoWhat does the MLNP company do? What is their business model? Looking at the website, the best I can tell is that it a person selling conference talks about sex.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]