Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?
The problem is, we haven't really liked (or felt that we could trust) any of the investors that we've spoken to thus far.
FOSS, CC, Design. These concepts seem foreign to many that we have spoken to.
We would rather not take money from a traditional pornography company or an adult investment firm such as AdultVest. We see ourselves as technologists, artists, and writers who happen to have a clever idea that could change the porn industry.
We don't want put ourselves into a position where we're forced to promote content that we find unseemly.
Our mantra is: "Don't be seedy." And, we aren't.
Mixing money and sex has always been a recipe for disaster. We believe that we can walk that line, but, we want to hedge our bets by finding like minded investors.
How do you go about finding respectable investors for an "adult oriented" start-up?
42 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI've also noticed that some of the consumers of the more specialised porn and upscale swingerclubs are wealthy individuals in their 40's and 50's. Naturally these people have a very open view on pornography and adult-oriented startups. If you try networking a bit in the upscale swingerclubs in the big cities and/or the well-run specialised sites you might find an investor. These people are mostly very open and very nice. Probably because they, like the gay community, are an outcast niche that has to constantly defend their sexuality.
I'll confirm that they're a mostly very open and very nice crowd, and there's a higher proportion of wealthy and intelligent people among them who would love to invest in a good adult-oriented startup - especially if it's a fresh idea.
We have no real moral object to porn or the porn industry.
We have a proof of concept, we just can't continue to do our jobs, work on FOSS, and work on this indefinitely.
We need funding to realize our dreams, hence the title. :D.
I mean... if you work 8-6, what do you do from 6-12? Just a thought...
I think a lot of consumers of porn are interested in short clips (5-10 min) of consistently high quality. This is a niche that isn't well served yet. YouPorn and the like is a grab-bag of short clips -- You can rummage around and find good content, but isn't a place where you can just go, press a button, and know you'll get something with good content, tailored to your tastes, with high quality sound and video, instantly the first time. An application that presented tailored "channels" as a TiVo-like application would stand to make a lot of money.
Studios and other porn content producers would like this if it could guarantee them a payment for their content, provide data on the viewing habits of users, and add user interfaces so that a consumer could click a button to buy a DVD or other product.
You have content organized in "channels." You start out with very small resolution and short streaming "previews." But once you subscribe to a "channel" the application starts downloading longer Bittorrent "episodes" from torrents that are posted to an RSS feed. So there is an initial period when people only have access to "previews," but after the first night, it really is like a Tivo for short high-quality porn clips.
With Bittorrent, much of the bandwidth is provided by the P2P cloud. The bandwidth costs are for initial seeding and for the shorter, smaller "previews."
So really, the two keys to this idea are:
I know that when I watch a porn DVD, what I'm really doing is going to my favorite one or two clips in the chapters menu. It's like in the old days when you had to buy the whole CD just to get the 1 or 2 tracks you really loved. I suspect that the market for really good, really short clips can come into being. Once one site shows that money can be made this way, then a lot of the high-quality free short clips will shift their availability to such pay channels, just like the shift from Napster to iTunes.On the other hand, porn is special. The heroes of porn don't get famous for being smart or having great blogs. You probably have to wade through a lot of seedy people and organizations to find people whom you consider like-minded. You might never find them; perhaps you're better off working on a new-to-porn investor.
For example, the ad network Adbrite operates one general purpose ad network under their main brand and another adult version at blacklabelads.com. They have traditional investors, including Sequoia.
Anyway, not to ask the obvious, but have you applied to YC?
I can't promise much, but I could gurantee free porn for life to you and your children (though your grandchildren will have to fend for themselves) should anything come of it. christopher.m.pike(a)gmail.com
Lucky for you, by law they have to post their mailing address (and, for what it's worth, these are the real offices.)
http://www.kink.com/2257statement.php
>> Mixing money and sex has always been a recipe for disaster.
Well said. ;-) You can obviously make money with sex, but you will pay the price after all. No loss, no gain.