Thread by @cyantist

Why did OnlyFans work when Zivity did not? A thread.

1) Timing. We were the General Magic of this sector. We had all the right ideas but the wrong timing. Timing really matters and at the time we launched, Facebook had under 100,000 users and MySpace was a thing. There was no iPhone yet. Payment processing was nascent. Only games in town were traditional credit card processors, risk tolerant (aka high fee) processors and PayPal.

Traditional processors wouldn’t touch us and claimed our chargebacks would be high. (They were not until we reached over 1M in revenue, then interestingly, some shitty characters started showing up who used the service and charged back anyway)

PayPal would allow nudity but not anything sexual, which precluded us from a lot of content. We decided to build off of PayPal and adhere to their standards until we grew large enough to matter to them. We never grew large enough to matter and even though my husband was one of the early PayPal investors, it didn’t matter - they shut us off on Thanksgiving once just to fuck with us. What a wonderful holiday that was.

We had to build our own custom batching processing for micropayments because we were doing something nobody else had done other than maybe the early cam girls.

2) Stigma: this goes with timing, but at the time, people don’t realize this, but I was personally protested. If I showed up at tech events there was this contingent of people who worked very hard to try and make my life a living hellscape for daring to be a startup in this space.

This means I wasn’t able to hire easily like other startups. This wasn’t a company you could call home and brag about to your startup. So, we sometimes had to sacrifice our values to hire people who were long term not a cultural fit and in hindsight, I should have fired them.

3) Funding: we were the first to raise venture capital and the first to give it all back. Because the subject matter was so controversial, I could never see eye to eye with the board, the employees or anyone, and in the end it made sense to just go out on my own with a skeleton crew and operate it as long as I possibly could.

We ran almost 9 years off of less than $1M and many times came close to making it, but then something tragic would happen. Loss of a key employee, hackers and huge personalities. Lots of those. Too many of those. Lots of hubris.

4) Make Love Not Porn came later and so did Patreon, KickStarter and others. We *invented* this model but the sad part is we didn’t know how to market it properly. I have to give props to Patreon for truly figuring out the language. OnlyFans wouldn’t be what it is today without them figuring out how to define the behaviors that people were doing. We failed miserably at this, calling our micro payment a “vote” instead of “backing”. Patronage was the key. We figured this out towards the end.

5) I became very ill after having a baby, so I hired a CEO and they had very strong opinions about how things should or should not be done. I didn’t have any fight in me any more. This is on me. But I should have pushed harder for us to accept and KEEP BTC. They ran experiments and sold it when they got cold feet. We could have operated the business for quite some time off the early BTC we DID take. We were the first site of our kind to do BTC. Sigh.

We also figured out that each model would want her/his/their own page outside of paywalls. That was Patreon’s contribution to the wisdom of the sector.

So, even though we were first, Patreon really deserves the credit for making it “right”.

6) I should have had more belief in myself and my vision. Zivity was my baby and the business model came from my mother telling me that artists can’t make money, and I set out to prove her wrong. You may not think of this as “art” but I assure you it is and this model applies to all forms of art and we haven’t even seen the full evolution of where this is going. We saw it back then. OnlyFans is just the beginning. So is Substack etc.

I wasn’t the CEO of my business for the first few formative years. That was a huge mistake. I should have fought harder for this role. This is my fault. The investors insisted on a “professional CEO” after my co-founder left and I should have said no.

7) I tried everything I was humanly capable of, making myself sick doing so. It wasn’t healthy.

However, I feel validated knowing I came up with a multi-billion dollar business model. I maybe never get to see a dime of that invention, but who cares? Millions of artists now can make a living when they previously could not.

Sexual stigma was reduced.

It remains to be seen if OnlyFans is a net positive or negative for the world. We never did hardcore content for payment processor and legal reasons. I do worry about how this impacts young people and their career choices esp with facial recognition on the rise and the loss of privacy. You can’t hide your real identity anymore like you could when we started.

7) I wish I had $1 for every person who brings OnlyFans up to me these days, and it used to make my blood boil, but that’s just the ego talking. It’s best to just let these things go and realize it isn’t about you and never was.

Oh. That should be #8. Oh well.

Because of @cindygallop and others fighting for this category, we PAVED the way for OnlyFans to exist. As they say, we crawled so they could walk. Cindy probably did more to help around the stigma than anyone else I know, as she foretold just how large this category would become.

By the time OnlyFans was doing $2B in revenue, that’s when VCs finally cared and really took notice. We finally have our first REAL success story in the sector over a decade later.

@cindygallop One of my proudest accomplishments? (And I’m friends with the founders) is getting Suicide Girls to ultimately change their business model. That was a huge win and another one I hoped we would influence.

Now it is the only way.