alf6300

A couple of years ago I started meddling in adult.
I have done several online startups in the past 10 years, but none of them adult - I wanted to try out. In part for biz curiosity and in part for fun.

We setup a first paysite. It was not meant to be more than a side activity or a hobby for me.

The site turned out to be profitable from day 1.

The initial capital investment was 0 (zero) dollars.
(well, ok, I concede we paid the domain registration and a couple of bucks for the initial ignominiously cheap hosting)

The rest was setup by myself in my spare time. I threw together the site in php; I shot the content; the model was friend and business partner.

I had ran profitable businesses before: however, even in the first few months, this business had the best ratio of capital investments (none), effort (some weekends of fun), and profit return (not a goldmine yet, but sufficient to provide a decent living for a couple of people had it been my personal main job).

I guess we got lucky in several dimensions, and we did some things right the first time around. In my business experience, it almost never happens that you get things right the first time around.

So, a little more than one year ago, I decided to focus on this with much more time dedication and a business-rather-than-hobby mindset.

I put a (actually very little) capital in it, ditched or delegated other activities I had ongoing, and decided that this would be my next startup to make grow.

Armed with a back-of-the-envelop business plan, some friends willing to earn a buck in their spare time, and a lot of fun and dedication, we setup more sites. The guiding principle was more or less: what we have fun shooting, it might be fun for the surfer too, and they might buy it.

Everything that we touched turned out to be profitable.

We launched seven sites since then - I hear people complaining all the time about porn being dead, but this has been actually the easiest and most profitable business ride I've taken so far.

We are not anywhere yet in the ballpark of where I plan to be, but we've been growing every single month, >10% per month, with just a few motivated people and more money in the bank at the end of the month than at the beginning. Even more importantly, the growth is growing. And it's fun. I don't plan to publicly share figures, but we are at the point where we are discussing how to best reinvest the money earned. This, coming with no experience at all in the particular industry.

There is no money in porn? That's not our experience. I suspect there are a few other businesses out there that don't comment in the "porn is dead" threads just because they are too busy counting the money.

I am sharing this in part to contribute to the discussion, and in part because in order to truly expand I know we need to start seriously networking in the industry, so here we are.

Good luck to everybody.

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