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Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#11

Post by shimon »

On one hand, this should be similar to finding investors in any industry: Look at work that you admire. Figure out who built and funded it. Figure out how to get into their social circle -- start where you can, and work your way to the right people by earning respect. And make sure you live in the right town (Van Nuys?) so you can be around the critical mass of people.

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.

Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#12

Post by feverishaaron »

rcs wrote: post #5
Dilpil wrote: post #2

You seem to have some unrealistic expectations about the pornography industry.

Not true. We just don't want to lie down with the wrong dogs :).

There are so many dirty connotations in this thread. I don't even know where to start.

Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#14

Post by mixmax »

stcredzero wrote: post #10

Re: "a clever idea that could change the porn industry" 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…

I don't think people will pay for it though. Streaming high quailty content requires both good source material and a lot of infrastructure - none of which are cheap.

Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#16

Post by answerly »

Is there any "non-adult" application of your technology/process/methods? If so, one strategy may be to show that this will work with many different types of content and not just adult content. That way you go from being a purely adult oriented company to a technology company with multiple markets, one of which happens to be the adult industry.

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.

Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#17

Post by rcs »

nuggien wrote: post #9

stop lying to yourselves. You're in it to make money, so if you have an idea that think will change porn, why not jump in head first?

Who said we were lying to ourselves? Of course we'd like to make money, we hate our jobs and the soul crushing banality of the 8-6 workday, but, enjoy eating.

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.

Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#19

Post by jseliger »

You might want to read http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/...">this article from Portfolio magazine before you approach investors: they read plenty of things too and are well-aware of the problems with the industry. The big question you have to answer is whether you can make money in the kind of environment described by the article.

Anyway, not to ask the obvious, but have you applied to YC?

Re: Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?

#20

Post by stcredzero »

mixmax wrote: post #14
stcredzero wrote: post #10

Re: "a clever idea that could change the porn industry" 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…

I don't think people will pay for it though. Streaming high quailty content requires both good source material and a lot of infrastructure - none of which are cheap.

Note that I said that the functionality was "Tivo-Like." No streaming is necessary!

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:

    1) Packaging - the easy place to find high quality clips
    2) The users bring their own bandwidth
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.
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