Dearest investors,
We’ve passed $300k! I’m so grateful to all of you as your number increases daily, and I’m also so grateful to those of you whom I see spreading the word of our WeFunder on LinkedIn and other social channels, and encouraging others to join you in investing ❤️
For my latest investor update, I wanted to highlight MakeLoveNotPorn’s unique competitive advantage, that models a gold standard for the rest of the tech world.
To put this into context: the young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today, are not the primary targets, online or offline, of harassment, abuse, sexual assault, racism, violence, rape, or intimate image abuse. So they didn't, and don't, proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms, and we see the results of that around us every day. Those of us most at risk every day - women, Black people, people of color, LGBTQ+, disabled people - design and build safe spaces and safe experiences. But we don't get funded (just 1.7% of all venture capital last year went to female founders). Which is why we have still not yet seen what the future of the internet could be, when it’s designed and built through the female lens at scale.
I conceived MakeLoveNotPorn through the female lens, to be the safest place on the internet - because I designed it around what everyone else should have, but nobody else did: human curation.
There is no self-publishing of anything on MakeLoveNotPorn.
In order to complete each #realworldsex video submission, we require full identifying details and two forms of government-issued ID for every participant in every video. In videos where someone else may be behind the camera, we require full identifying details and two forms of government issued ID for them too, even if they do not appear in the video. This is unique to MLNP - every other adult site online only requires one form of ID.
Where someone submits a video where they desire to stay anonymous, we require that they submit a photo of themselves holding their government-issued visual ID next to their faces to confirm their identity. Nobody else does this.
With each submission, our curators check all of these details themselves. Once we are satisfied that these legal measures have been complied with, our curators then do something no one else does:
Our curators watch every frame of every video from beginning to end, before we approve - or reject - it, and we publish it.
MLNP exists to celebrate the full glorious spectrum of human sexuality. Our only curatorial mandate is that the sex is real world, legal, and it’s consensual. Beyond that, anything goes.
But we take human curation to lengths no one else even considers. Our curators are trained to watch each video asking themselves, do I feel that the camera is in a position where everybody knows it’s there? Do I have a bad feeling about this video? If a curator has a bad feeling, they don’t have to rationalize or explain it. Simply having a bad feeling means we won’t publish that video.
I cannot even begin to articulate how much nobody else on the internet operates like this.
When we have fully viewed and approved each video, we communicate with each participant in the video separately, to ensure, even beyond all the mandatory compliant paperwork in place, that every single participant has consented to the publishing of the video.
This is the point at which we begin building a personal relationship with each of our MakeLoveNotPornstars. We know who every one of our MakeLoveNotPornstars is. Nobody else does this. To see how unique our relationship with our community is, please read this wonderful interview with our Head of Curation Ariel Martinez published by LunaticFemme a couple of years back.
Our curators also review every post on every member's profile. Your profile posts on MLNP can be as SFW or NSFW as you like - but we review every one, we approve (or reject) and we publish it. Our curators review every comment on every video, before we approve (or reject) it, and we publish it. We can vouch for, and we stand liable for, every single piece of content on our platform.
Our human curation model is extremely efficient and eminently scalable. With an average-length video (#realworldsex takes as long as it takes - our videos range in length from four minutes to two to three hours 🙂 - but on average videos tend to be ten to fifteen minutes) curation time from reviewing paperwork, through viewing and approving the video, to publishing, averages one hour in total.
At scale, our human curation workforce is simply our version of any enterprise software unicorn’s human sales force.
Here’s the key thing to know about our human curation operating system - we’re tiny, we’re bootstrapping, we’re under-funded (which is why we’re so grateful to all of you!) and under-resourced, and we’ve human-curated everything for the past eleven years.
Imagine what Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok et al could do with their billions, if they chose to.
Safety on the internet is not a matter of viability. It’s a matter of choice, and will.
Our human curation layer is designed into our plans for MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, our 0-18 and beyond sex education product - read about it in detail in my first investor update here. Human eyes will vet every piece of sex education/sexual health and wellness content.
And it’s designed into two separate planned products that make up the infrastructure piece of our product roadmap: HereForTheAds, the adtech that will allow everyone like us who is banned from promoting open, healthy female-lens sexual health and wellness ventures to advertise, and ‘the Stripe of sextech’, the payments/payouts app that will allow everyone like us who is banned from using mainstream payment/payout processors, to be able to take payments and make payouts without being blocked, and without paying exorbitant fees.
These two products are not part of this round (they’re for further down the line, with funding we plan to raise from adtech and fintech investors), but if anyone is interested in hearing more about them, please email cindy@makelovenotporn.com.
The photo that accompanies this update is from the week before last, when I hosted a MakeLoveNotPorn family team dinner at my apartment for our team members, partners and kids - you can learn more about each team member and see more pics here.
Again, thank you so much for investing, and please encourage one other person in your network to invest at the same level you have - if every one of you does that, we’ll double the amount raised to date instantly 😀
With love,
Cindy and the MLNP team