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Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#21

Post by aangjie »

kefka wrote: post #6
staunch wrote: post #3

VR porn is a new area with difficult problems to solve.

Given my new position at my workplace, I now have access to all sorts of gadgets and tech stuff. One thing I've been playing with is a EEG headset with Oculus Rift. My initial idea is to utilize brain patterns with Oculus content to increase certain emotions. For example, when one is playing Doom 3, the monsters come out closer and scarier when you are already frightened. Or if you're bored, nothing happens to try to…

That sounds like some increbily cool work. I'd imagine you can/already use some backend algorithms used by these people. http://emotiv.com/. If you would be willing to mail me the company you work for.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#22

Post by sudokent »

itengelhardt wrote: post #13
couchand wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rybchin said she suspects it has something to do with tech being dominated by men, who might be nervous about working with a sex-toy startup: “All these companies are run by men, and they don’t appreciate a woman’s pleasure.” I don't know whether this really is the underlying issue, but damn, it's unfortunate how plausible it is. And the reaction from Stripe to the reporter's request for comment all but confirms.

IMHO the problem is not that men "don't appreciate a woman's pleasure" - that is some serious bullshit in my opinion. Most men love it when their SO enjoys sex. The problem (to me) is the criminalization of porn and prostitution in the US. Just think about what kind of outrage it would cause if Stripe had a single prostitute or porn website use their service to receive payments. (For the sake of argument assume the p…

As someone who is trying to a create a new, unique, non-janky, adult website I have learned a lot in the last 10 months. And I have never worked in this industry so it has been a serious learning experience.

The biggest issue for me has been the banks. My assumption is that Stripe and other players would be "ok" accepting payments from "High Risk" merchants. But they cannot, their partner bank will not allow it.

I later found an article by Cindy Gallop raging against this.

http://www.inc.com/welcome.html?destination=http://www.inc.c...

"A whole range of banks turned us down, including the startup banks, Silicon Valley Bank, Square 1 Bank. We finally got a banking account at CHASE, and we were extremely relieved, thrilled to get a check book that said Make Love Not Porn on it. And so, when... I began encountering enormous problems putting a payments infrastructure into place, because we are what the world deems adult content, we couldn't work with PayPal, couldn't work with Amazon, couldn't work with Google Checkout, couldn't work with any of the main merchant partner gateways. So, we thought, let's go back to CHASE, we have a business banking account there, let's apply for a commercial account. Unfortunately, that application surfaced the nature of our business within higher levels at CHASE. And it resulted in a meeting with a more senior guy, who essentially said to us, not only can we not give you a commercial account, but you now need to close your business bank account and take your business away, because we can't handle it."

I had a conversation about this over on Reddit that was fairly interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2co0r6/anyone...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#23

Post by [deleted] »

chris_overseas wrote: post #7
garethsprice wrote: post #4

Cindy Gallop's "Make Love Not Porn" ( http://www.makelovenotporn.com ) is trying to solve some of the issues around the rise of Internet pornography (addiction, detachment from intimacy, unrealistic/degrading portrayal of women, etc). She's approaching it from a great, sex-positive way but is having issues whenever the company touches the "regular world" - hard to get funding, taken seriously by non-adult industry pe…

Here's another data point confirming the "regular world" issues you mention: http://recode.net/2014/10/17/its-hard-out-there-for-a-sex-to...

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#24

Post by durkie »

We're in the process of launching our first product at Comingle(http://www.comingle.io), making Arduino-based, open source and hackable sex toys.

We're making a sex toy platform (our library is named OSSex of course) so that it won't matter if your sex toy is made by guys. You can reprogram it to your liking, attach sensors that respond to your feedback or even build your own.

It is super hard to find a payment processor, but I imagine that their hands are tied by the card networks. I bet Stripe would love to support adult payments if they could: lots of adult specific processors charge like 14%. Seems like that'd be some nice action to be a part of, even if only in the adult industries that are lower risk (the adult industry is huge and there's no way some dildo shop is as high risk as a cam site, even though every one treats them the same.)

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#25

Post by pc »

couchand wrote: post #9
chris_overseas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another data point confirming the "regular world" issues you mention: http://recode.net/2014/10/17/its-hard-out-there-for-a-sex-to...

Rybchin said she suspects it has something to do with tech being dominated by men, who might be nervous about working with a sex-toy startup: “All these companies are run by men, and they don’t appreciate a woman’s pleasure.” I don't know whether this really is the underlying issue, but damn, it's unfortunate how plausible it is. And the reaction from Stripe to the reporter's request for comment all but confirms.

I work at Stripe. Some details in the article aren't very accurate.

But, more broadly, we actually work hard to push against the rules in many cases. (Cindy Gallop, mentioned earlier in the thread, can attest to this -- we spent ages trying to figure out a way to accept payments for her startup.)

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#26

Post by _bfhp »

Is porn really "taboo"? Or is the idea merely useful for justifying the state of the industry? What is OP's response to Robert Jensen [1], Germaine Greer [2], Corina Taylor [3], Clara Bennathan [4], Meghan Murphy [5], and Gail Dines [6] [7]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbxBJf9UtWg

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/24/society

[3] https://www.thepinkcross.org/pinkcross-articles/october-2011...

[4] http://www.bad-housekeeping.com/2014/01/08/violence-teenager...

[5] http://feministcurrent.com/9087/meghan-murphy-on-elliot-rodg...

[6] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/05/convers...

[7] http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/pornographyisale...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#27

Post by sudokent »

pc wrote: post #25
couchand wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rybchin said she suspects it has something to do with tech being dominated by men, who might be nervous about working with a sex-toy startup: “All these companies are run by men, and they don’t appreciate a woman’s pleasure.” I don't know whether this really is the underlying issue, but damn, it's unfortunate how plausible it is. And the reaction from Stripe to the reporter's request for comment all but confirms.

I work at Stripe. Some details in the article aren't very accurate. But, more broadly, we actually work hard to push against the rules in many cases. (Cindy Gallop, mentioned earlier in the thread, can attest to this -- we spent ages trying to figure out a way to accept payments for her startup.)

Hi Pc,

Do you think BTC or Stellar will help put downward pressure on the pricing model that Banks currently use for "High Risk" Merchants? My rate is essentially 15% because I'm a startup and my volume is so low.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#28

Post by Bud »

matijagoljar wrote: post #18
tormeh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their websites are horrible, though, and the content is pretty meh.

Threshold of achieving minimum customer satisfaction is also very very low - for the most part you just need to show nakedness and the problem is solved :) Tough industry. Hard to break out of a niche.

I see this argument a lot. I don't think it's true at all (at least, assuming you're not talking about teenage boys). Consumers of porn are picky and choosy about porn just like they are picky about anything else they consume. Better porn beats worse porn.

Nakedness is not sufficient at all. It's kinda hard to get off if you are doubled-over laughing at how lame the porn is.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#29

Post by resca79 »

I have not the competences to do something like that but in my opinion this is original hacking. In a small town of Sicily (near where I live) some guys are making incredible stuff with retro - computing. They have restore hold computers like PDP11, apple one with all original components.

http://museo.freaknet.org/en

Re: Ask HN: Are there any innovative startups in the porn/adult industry?

#30

Post by unoti »

I'd love to make XXX videogames. There aren't many serious players in that space, and I'd love to go after it. I can't do it alone, though, I need artists and a couple other capabilities besides software development. When I pitch the idea to people I'd like to work with on this, they don't want to participate in that space. So yes, there's definitely a stigma for a lot of people.

I've done a good amount of sex things in different venues ranging from phone sex systems to phone dating systems to sex robots in Second Life, so I've long ago lost my aversion to such things. But it surprised me how many people seem to be scared of participating in the industry.

It's easier to make high quality content now than ever before, and it's only going to get better from here.

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