This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker, and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry, and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we'll be speaking with Alex and Dan Steele of KinkCoach. We've got an events section on our website. You can find out about all the events in our industry and get discounts on some events. We have discounts for the AW Summit in Bucharest, September 21st through the 23rd, and the TES Affiliate Conference in Prague, September 25th through the 28th. I'll be attending both shows. Hope to see you there. You'll find all that and more on our website at adultsitebroker.com. We're proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You'll find articles on age verification laws and other attacks on our industry. It's to raise awareness of our industry's plight in the war on porn. Go to thewaronporn.com for more. And we're always looking for buyers and sellers of adult sites and companies. Perhaps you've been thinking about either selling your site or buying one. Always feel free to contact us at adultsitebroker.com with any questions you may have. Now time for our properties for sale at Adult Site Broker. We're proud to offer one of the most established AI-generated adult cartoon pages on Patreon, with over 530 paying members. There's a website as well. They have over 300 characters, 80,000 images, and 30 hours of video content already produced. The Patreon page has organic, loyal members with an 80% monthly retention rate. 90% of the traffic is from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. We have a successful OnlyFans agency. The agency has 15 creators with 90% of them on salary, so the agency is highly profitable. They handle all aspects of marketing for the creators, including chatting and promotion. The business has developed a suite of custom-built internal tools that represent significant intellectual property and competitive infrastructure. They use a proprietary analytics KPI and sales verification dashboard with link tracking, ad performance data, sales verification, and payout automation. All tools are built entirely in-house. This technology is a great asset for the buyer to own. We have a rapidly growing SaaS-powered OnlyFans chat agency with strong SEO. The company has over 30 clients with very little churn, ranging from $10,000 to over $80,000 a month. The company continues to grow and innovate. New technical features include an enhanced chatter portal, a new creator billing dashboard with daily billing, and an automatic blog system to grow SEO. The company's set up with very little upkeep needed by the owners. It's a cash cow that's still growing fast. We have the largest foot fetish creator site in the German-speaking market. The site is a leading niche platform that's been the number one brand in the market for over three years. The site is a highly profitable business with consistent revenue, an established SEO footprint, and strong brand authority in its niche. We're offering a growing free porn gaming site with adult sex games. The site is owned by one of the top entrepreneurs in our industry. There are more properties for sale on our website. For more information on any of these listings, go to our listings page or contact us at adultsitebroker.com. Now time for this week's interview. My guests today on Adult Site Broker Talk are Alex and Dan Steele of Kinkoach. Alex and Dan, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thank you for having us. Hey, you guys almost said that in unison. I love it. Okay. So, Alex, along with her husband, Dan, are the founders of Kink Coach, a UK-based ecosystem serving women selling adult content online. She sold content on most of the major adult platforms for years before stepping back to build the tools and education she wished she'd had when she started. Dan is the technical co-founder of Kink Coach before he ran several independent businesses across other industries. When Alex went into the adult content world as a seller, Dan started noticing the structural problems firsthand. The platforms left sellers to figure everything out alone. Don't they ever? Most new sellers were either burning out within six months or going in completely blind to the realities of the industry. The tools didn't exist, and where they did, they'd been built by people who never spoken to a seller. How about that? So, Dan built Kink Coach from the ground up. Kink Coach is the only end-to-end ecosystem built specifically for women selling adult content online, designed and run by someone who's actually been a seller. The starter pack is a 73-page printed book on all aspects of the platform. It wouldn't be nice if everyone had one of those. and the operational discipline that separates sellers who last from sellers who burn out. KC Hub is a multi-tenant SaaS where sellers run their entire business from one dashboard, regardless of which platforms they're selling on. KC Automation handles the repetitive jobs across the major selling platforms via browser extensions. Kink Market is a vetted seller marketplace. The whole stack is bootstrapped from Alex's seller earnings, not from outside investment, and serves sellers internationally. So guys, how'd you like your commercial? I thought that was fantastic. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Very good. So let's start with Alex. Tell us about your background. How did you get into the adult industry and what were you doing before? Right. So my background is generally the opposite of what people expect. for years. I was actually a horse riding instructor, teaching people to ride. It was an outdoorsy job, like all weather, very physical. Then I went off and I worked in the spas on cruise liners for a while, traveling the world. So my CV actually reads completely service industry, outdoorsy, absolutely no hint of anything that came next. The adult industry actually arrived in my life completely sideways. I was actually out with my friends one evening and we were all laughing about how easy it would be to sell pictures of our feet online. It was a bit of a joke, you know, but then I took it a bit seriously and I went home, started to research it and just try to figure out how it worked. When I looked into it, the rabbit hole was just a lot deeper than I actually realized. Within just a few months, I was selling on my first platform and I then bounced across most of them from All Things Worn to Kinky, Panty Deal Sniffer, the lot of them. What honestly surprised me most wasn't the money side or even the work itself. It was the sheer range of kinks that are actually out there. It's crazy. You think you've seen everything and then you discover an entire corner of the internet you didn't realise was existing. But I suppose the thread running through it all is custom service. You know, understanding what someone wants before they've articulated it, looking after them, being good at the unglamorous operational side. The industry changed completely for me, but the fundamentals didn't. I suppose the thing that pushed me to think about it as a real business rather than just a side hustle was realising that no one, actually I couldn't find anyone that had written down how to do it properly. The information out there, it was either wrong or it was written by people who hadn't actually sold anything, or even it was sanitised for a wider audience. I started writing it all down, which is where Dan came in. And I'll let him pick up from there later on. Yep. Okay. So what were the major platforms you sold on? You mentioned a few. And what was your day-to-day actually like as an active seller? Wow. So I suppose the major platforms, I think I said was All Things Worn, Kinky, Panty Deals, Sniffer. And there's loads of platforms out there. And I spent time on most of them. most of the time are multiple ones at once. And different platforms, they've got different cultures. So some have got different fee structures, some different buyer types. So being sort of multi-platform is actually how I built up the kind of income that turned into a real job rather than just, you know, pocket money and a side hustle. The day-to-day is the bit that people get wrong. If you are someone who hasn't done that job to imagine what a content seller looks like, they think of like pictures and photo sessions and dressing up and, you know, all the fancy side. And that's just like 15% of your time. And that's if you're efficient with it. You know, the other 85% is all the admin. And a typical day without any automation, I was waking up to maybe 20 messages on each platform. So if you're on four platforms, you're looking at 80 to 100 messages to triage overnight. Some of them are genuine, but some of them are time wasters. Some of them are scammers. Some are people who just want to chat for free and triaging that, it takes at least the first hour or two before you're even out of bed. And then I suppose my day went on to taking photos for items that you want to list, creating videos, packaging items that you've sold. And then you've got all like the listed maintenance, which takes forever. And at least we forget our accounts because HMRC is HMRC, right? And that's just like the inbound side. Then you've got all the outbound work and that's where you can actually start to make your money. So I used to, I used to call it as phishing. And it was just so time consuming. Before automation, I'd spend, I'd say, a couple of hours a day going out and finding buyers. So I'd message the new buyers that joined the sites. I would message anyone that looked at my profile. I'd even create like bulk messages that I was copy, paste, copy, paste all day long. And I would send out, I reckon, four, 500 messages a day to maybe get 10% back. You know, you've got to actively work that floor. Yeah, it was. And, you know, I put the hours in and I burnt out very, very, very quickly. You know, and that's just the day job. You know, then in the evening, that's when the buyers are actually online. So you're back to messaging and doing that, you know, the high conversion window. And the actual sales, that happens between about 7pm and 1 in the morning. So you're like doing a daytime shift on the operational side. And then your evening shift is all your sales. It's like we're running a small B&B. You're always like slightly on and the customer surface load is immense. I think by the time I got to sort of month four or five is when you start to feel the burnout and that's when most women, they don't cope anymore. Yeah. Gotcha. So were you only selling like previously worn garments or were you doing pictures and videos too? I was doing a bit of all of it. I started with the feet pictures and then you start to see what's working for other women. And what is good in this industry is the women really talk and you talk behind the scenes, you know, what's working for you and this isn't working for me. And you kind of all build a brand together. So, I mean, I tried out every kink possible. Some of them worked for me. Some of them I didn't feel comfortable with and others, you know, I dove in with both feet. But the amount out there is, yeah, literally the amount out there is incredible. Mm-hmm. Okay. Were you on OnlyFans? I tried it for a little bit, but it wasn't quite for me. As much as OnlyFans is wonderful for a lot of women out there and they're very successful, I preferred the more taboo side of the kink industry rather than the porn side. Okay. Now, your platform, I can imagine, would work on any sales platform, including OnlyFans, or no? Absolutely, it can. So, we originally started it just on All Things Worn. It then progressed on to Kinky, Panty Deal, Sniffer. I think Dan's now got six or seven that are operational. Oh, it's eight. Eight, yeah. There you go. Excellent. Excellent. So, Dan, what was the moment you realized, as opposed to just selling, you should start building tools instead? I think that you've obviously previously said I've always been in business. I've always had my own business of some description. I love problem solving. I love sort of getting my head down and really getting stuck into things aren't there, you know, and sort of being new to the market with things, I guess. So I would see Alex working day in, day out, having Post-it notes everywhere, piece of paper, Excel spreadsheets that just made no sense to her, let alone anyone else. She'd come to bed after a 14-hour day and she'd be like, right, I've made X amount of money, but I've got no idea who that's going to, no idea who that's going to, no idea. And it was just, I could just see she was struggling so much. Sounds like chaos. Yeah, it was because she put the graft in at the start. She was very, very busy, which is she was almost a busy fool. So she was a victim of her own success, really. So I started to build her a dashboard, not as a business. Never imagined it would turn into a business. I built it for Alex to be able to streamline her work. I started with sort of basic Excel spreadsheets that then sort of progressed into a dashboard. So she could sort of see everything in one place. But to be fair, it was a market hiding in plain sight. So interesting. So it started out as tools for her and you guys made it a business? Yes. It was purely tools. Interesting. Purely tools products, yeah. That's awesome. That's just awesome. Well, you had a real world example that it worked. That's fantastic. So King Coach is now for products. Okay. And either of you guys can address this. which came first, second, third, and why? So the order is actually quite telling because it reflects what we were solving rather than what we were planning. As Dan said, KC Hub came first, which was the dashboard. For all the reasons we just talked about, I was drowning in messages, payments, inventory, customers, all spread across multiple platforms and I didn't have a central view. So the first version of KC Hub, it was quite rough, just a place where I could see all my conversations and all my orders. But the moment that worked, the rest of the products just followed naturally from it. The reason it was first, it just wasn't strategic. It was just the biggest, loudest problem and the thing eating most of my hours in the week. I suppose on the writing side, the book actually started before Casey did. But I was keeping notes for that for months and things that worked, things that didn't, mistakes I was watching other sellers make. And it was just a Google document that just kept growing. I suppose after KC Hub came the automation, which was a game changer. The dashboard, it solved the visibility problem and I could see everything in one place, but I still had to manually handle all the messages on each platform. And the volume I just described, I mean, that's hours every day before you've even got to actually selling. So Dan, he built this browser extension that automated those repetitive jobs, saying hello to new followers, posting listings, organizing the incoming messages by intent, sending out the right opening line to the right type of buyer. So KC Hub, it gave me one screen, but KC Automation, it gave me my evenings back, and that was so important. It was like a breath of fresh air. And then lastly, the most exciting one that we've got now is Kink Market. That came last for a different reason. It's the marketplace. buyers, they come to one place and they find actually vetted sellers. And that exists because platforms themselves, they keep changing the rules, Bruce. They keep taking bigger fee cards. And building our own marketplace meant sellers we worked with weren't entirely dependent on platforms that they didn't control. It's the infrastructure play, if you like. So the book, the starter pack, shipped properly after all of that. Once we had the tools and the community and the storefront, the marketplace, the book became like the entry point that connects new sellers to all of it. So they can read the book. And then if they want the tools, they're right there. The order, it's not accidental, but the book is the Trojan horse and everything else is actual operation. Got it. So you guys have actually basically built your own competing platform as well as offering support through your platform for others. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I mean, we've built our own competing platform. It's the early stages of the platform. It's kind of a bit of a case of the chicken and the egg at the moment. Obviously, without sellers, we can't get buyers. Without buyers, you can't get sellers. You know, but so obviously it's early stages, but we are, I think Alex will pick up on this later, but we are doing it slightly differently. I think you pick up on this, but it's more of a case of the sellers who come on to Kink market actually get their own website with their own url with their own domain so that they can advertise that on their own etc it's just it's just about giving something back to them and sort of putting them in control really yeah control is where it's at there's no two ways about it that's fantastic that really is so the starter pack is 73 pages and 21 chapters that's a lot what's actually in it and which chapters do you think sellers are most surprised by when they open it well bruce the is structured around the actual operational year of a working seller. So it starts with the early stuff, choosing a name, setting up your identity, the safety stack before you've even done your first photo. And then it works through things like pricing, listing photography, dealing with difficult buyers, the legal side, the financial side, and the longer term arc of building this as a sustainable career. The chapter that surprises most people I think would be the safety stack. New sellers, they kind of expect a few tips about not using the real name perhaps, but what they actually get with this book is layered identity protection, payment privacy, anonymous postage, what to do if someone tries to extort you with a screenshot, and that happens way more often than I'd like to tell you. It's how to spot the signs of a buyer who's moving from customer to stalker mode. That stuff, it's generally life-altering for sellers who would otherwise have learned it the hard way. The other surprise tends to be the chapter on how to say no. Most new sellers think that this work is about saying yes to everything just to get an order in. The chapter on declining requests and holding your own boundaries and what to do when a buyer pushes is the one that long-term sellers come back to because the women who last in this industry, they're the ones who learn the difference between a customer and a problem. And the book is quite specific about how to tell them apart. Yeah, and I'm sure sometimes one can move from a customer to a problem. Oh, absolutely. And unfortunately, in this industry, the unglamorous side is that there are a lot of problems out there, and you've got to be able to spot them very quickly and deal with them and hit that block button and move on. Yeah, 100%. And unfortunately, they tend to be kind of the same people over and over. And yeah, you just got to move on because they're not customers. As you said, they're problems. That's it. And growing that thick skin is so important. There's no room for being sensitive in this industry. Mustnily. 100%. I agree with you. I'm the nicest guy in the world, but I've found in my line of work, It's really easy to have people try to take advantage of you, try to take advantage of your good nature. I'm talking the B2B side. And I'm nice until I'm not. And my way is, as I can tell you guys are, I'm here to help people. That's my goal in life. But if somebody is a pain in the ass and they continue to be a pain in the ass, I say goodbye. eye. And I can see that being very similar to how it would be for content sellers. Yeah, absolutely. I have women come into me daily, Bruce, saying how they've been stalked, or how someone is badgering them or pushing them to say yes to something they don't want to say yes to. And let's face it, everyone's got different personalities. And there's women out there that are too shy or too insecure to say no and to mean that no. And they suddenly get into a corner where they're made content and it's out there that they didn't want to make. So Dan and I are here very much to help them. We have telegram groups where we're constantly supporting women and the feedback's been fantastic. They found their voice, they found when to say no and how to do it and be confident in saying no. That's awesome. As it should be. Nobody should do what they don't want to do, period end of statement. So how does the starter pack connect to KC Hub and the automation tools? Does someone need the book to use the rest or do the products work independently? There's actually only one piece that's truly standalone and that's the book. The starter pack is its own thing. You can buy it, read it, never touch any of our software and it stands on its own. Everything else is built around KC Hub. The Hub is literally the hub. That's not just the name. It's like the central workspace. KC Automation extends the hub by handling repetitive jobs across the selling platforms. But all that activity does flow back to the hub. Kink Market is a marketplace, but your orders, your listings, the customer data, they all live in the hub just by default. So if you're using any of the software, you are inevitably using the hub. The way Dan designed it from the engineering side is that the hub is like the spine. Automation and kink market both feed into it. But whatever happens on a selling platform via automation or on the marketplace via kink market, they all sink back to a single source of truth, which is the hub. Okay. Let's talk more about the hub. What does the seller's day look like before, which you kind of talked about, and after using a dashboard built for them? Oh, sure. I mean, the difference is night and day. So my workspace before using the hub was I had like eight browser tabs open, a spreadsheet, my phone, sticky notes. I kept forgetting to read them. Each platform. Love the sticky notes. Oh, obviously they were everywhere. I should have taken a picture. Every platform, obviously it's got its own inbox, its own listing manager, its own way of telling me about orders. So I had to check each one separately. And because I was operating across four of them at one time, there's a lot of checking and things slip through the cracks all the time. Buyers, I'd promised something I'd forgotten to send or forgotten to create. Customers had deadlines which I'd forgot to meet. It just made me look messy and I hated feeling like that. You know, it was chaos held together by good intentions and energy drinks. Love those. But KC Hub is the workspace that replaces all of it. I mean, at its simplest level, it's a single dashboard where a seller can see every order, every conversation, every listing, every customer, every payment, every shipping, across every single platform that she's on. It pulls all the data into one place and presents it in a way that a seller can actually work with. It flows both in and out, so any changes on a platform pulls through to the hub and vice versa. There's a few main parts to it. So you've got the inbox. So it unifies across all the platforms you sell on. There's an orders module. Again, it free flows between the platforms and back to the hub. It works out all of your tax for you. So you don't need to do that on a separate spreadsheet. The mental load, it just drops dramatically. The seller's no longer holding all of this in the head and on post-it notes. She can actually do her work and do it well, save her time and actually finished her day at a decent hour. By the way, we've been saying for her and for she, and are we opening this up to men as well? Sure, that's such a good point, Bruce, and I'm glad you picked up on that. I've actually got Cycle for Men live. I've actually created the automation for Male Things Worn, which is, yeah, so obviously we must apologize for always saying she and her. Oh, it's okay. I was raised by a woman. 90% of the clientele is female. But yes, we have actually launched it for male sites as well. Absolutely fine. Good. Wanted to know that. So we'll make sure we're not leaving anybody out. So KC Automation is a suite of browser extensions. In two questions, actually, in plain English, what do they actually do for a seller day to day? and also you mentioned you're adding more platforms to it. Is this something that you're going to continue to do? Yes, exactly. So the sort of messaging problem on these platforms is overwhelming. Obviously, Alex was selling across, I think it was four platforms at the time, so she'd wake up to 80 to 100 messages in the morning. Some buyers just to chat, some buyers to try and scam her, some buyers to do X, Y, and Z. You have to sort of triage and go through and try and just reply to the genuine ones, filter out time wasters. So I built a tool to filter out time wasters. And that's all like actually before the actual sort of selling actually starts for the day. Before automation, Alex was spending hours and hours just on outreach. It's such a huge business that you might be competing against two, three, four, five thousand ladies and men on a platform. And you have to make yourself sort of heard. They always say that the dog that barks loud gets the food. so um again the automation was sort of built to message profile visits if someone looked at your profile it would send a sort of nice message to say thanks for looking at my profile blah blah blah all these messages are customizable i think i've put 10 different options so it's not the same message to every single person 10 different messages can go out at any one time they're going automatically so people get a message right away which is so important for the selling process Exactly, yeah. And then it was a case of, I then started to look at the AI side of things, but I didn't want to dilute the real seller dynamic. I didn't want to leave that lady leaving her voice, because I think this business is so much about connection. So I sort of built it that the AI would simply greet them, say the basics, but anything like selling or asking questions about the actual kink or the actual product was purely down to Alex. I'll sort of let Alex take over more about this. Yeah, I just want to sort of put on what you said. The biggest one is messaging. When you sell on a platform, you get the same handful of messages over and over. People saying, hi, are you active? Do you ship to Spain? What's your pricing? And KC Automation, it just handles all of them automatically. That is so awesome. It really is. And it uses replies that the seller has set up in advance. So we don't set them up for her. We can advise and guide, but she in the end can, or he, can write their answers in their own voice. And the seller, the extension knows which response to send to which type of message. So instead of typing hi, thanks for the follow for the 18th hundredth time on a Tuesday morning, her voice replies for her and she only actually gets pulled in when the real conversation needs her. Yeah, that's awesome. That's just awesome. And that's utilizing AI, which what a tool that's become. Absolutely. Yeah. And then obviously it's about the listing, keeping the listings fresh. All the listings fresh. Yeah. Platforms, they downrank stale listings. So sellers used to have to manually repost or bump their listings every few days to stay visible. Whereas Dan's built the automation to do it for them. It sets a schedule and the extension keeps the listings active all the time. And if a particular platform's got like a dashboard, like a feed, some of them do, some of don't and it works with the ones that do it will put again in your own voice messages on that dashboard every five minutes or every hour whatever you want it to say so you if you've got a day job your messages are still on that dashboard so you're still active well yeah the social side i mean this is actually where the biggest time saving happens and there's i suppose two related jobs here one is the the follow back or say hello culture where new followers they expect a greeting the other and this is the bigger one is a proactive outreach like Dan mentioned before messaging all the new buyers and ones that have signed up profile visitors you know the extension will see these new people or the new visitors and it will reach out to them in the seller's voice and it just it keeps it feeling real doesn't it we don't want it to sound bot like I think what's so important is to sort of remember that anything that's that's relational we don't we don't automate I mean so So the actual selling conversation, the negotiation, the bond between the seller and the returning customer, that stays human. The automation purely handles the repetitive admin that takes up a lady or man's time. It never actually replaces the actual work. The seller still has her own voice. She just doesn't have to type it out a thousand times a day. Well, I think the automation saved me, I'd say, four to five hours a day. That is amazing. No two ways about it. So Kink Market is a curated marketplace. We referred to it earlier. what's the case for kink market for buyers and sellers versus the existing platforms? Well, kink market exists because the big platforms are fundamentally unstable for sellers. They change the rules without warning. They de-platform people for reasons they don't explain. They take bigger fee cuts every year. They make business decisions that suit the platform and not the sellers operating it. And I see this all the time. Every seller who's been in this work for more than a year has a story out waking up in the morning and their accounts are suspended or their listings are invisible or payments are frozen. I mean, the classic one is when OnlyFans said, and it didn't turn out being this way, but said they were going to stop handling adult content. I mean, that was the classic one. That just rocked the world. Yeah, exactly. And some people are here because they want to sell just for some pocket money. But a lot here is a full-time job. And if you wake up and that's gone, you know, your throat closes over. So Kink Market is the marketplace where the relationship between the seller and the buyer isn't subject to a third party's mood. The platform, it doesn't change the rules every quarter. The fees don't creep up. The seller knows exactly what they're getting. And because it's curated, which is the part that actually matters for buyers, the big platforms that open anyone with an email address can list, which means buyers, they're spending half their time filtering through dormant accounts, fake sellers, scam listings. And that's actually happening more and more and more. So on Kink Market, every seller we vet before we allow them to list. How do you do that? Well, because we know them, because we talk and we're out there on social medias. And because I've been in the business for years, so many sellers now, luckily that they trust me, they know Dan and I personally. And so it's only the sellers that I see that are putting two feet into the business are working it correctly. You know, they've got outstanding reviews on other platforms. And I've got to know them through bits of telegram chats. And yeah, it's people that I've gotten to know. So we're not we're not opening this up to the 1000s that this is definitely filtered. So what you're, you're doing is you're mainly offering this to people who do this full time and are already successful at it. Yeah, I mean, not necessarily full-time, and not even necessarily successful, but people that... Are proven. Yeah, are proven to actually have morals. Yeah, I guess we won't just offer an account to Joe Bloggs down the road. It's just really a case of sort of filtering out the bad so that the customer gets the best episode, if that makes sense. That's good, because when you go on most of these platforms, OnlyFans is always the greatest example, And there's, what did they say, 4 million or is it 6 million? I don't remember. But how many of those are active? I mean, it's like, it's crazy. It's just crazy. And what chance do you have to make any money if you're a creator? Coming in, you just don't. It's real simple. Exactly. Unless you've got a huge following, to go on to OnlyFans is very difficult. I suppose the big thing with Kink Market, the seller, I think Dan mentioned this before, they get their own site and their own domain and it's built for her by Dan through a few conversations and him getting to understand her voice and her style so it's not just a profile on the marketplace it's an actual standalone storefront with her own url the seller is listing on kink market also has got a permanent online presence that's actually hers it's a real website she can put out business cards for share directly with her buyers that's awesome so Alex you bootstrapped this from your seller earnings with no outside investment. You didn't do the classic OPM, other people's money. Why no investors and would you take them now? Well, the honest answer is twofold. We couldn't have taken an investment even if we'd wanted to, and we wouldn't have taken it even if we could. Both are true. Why couldn't you? Well, on the couldn't, the adult industry is locked out by most mainstream venture capitalists. Oh, yes, I know. You know, that there are maybe a handful of investors in the world who will seriously consider an adult tech company. Most of them, if they do, they attach strings, which I don't think we would accept things like pivoting away from the adult focus to make it the brand more investor friendly, or even limiting which product lines that we could run or ask us to step back from being publicly the faces of the business. I suppose the point of Kink Coach is exactly the opposite of all of those things. So even if we had gone hunting for investors, I think the doors would have been closed to us. On the wooden side, we built this on my seller earnings, quite literally. So the money that paid for the first version of Casey Hub came from women's underwear sold on the internet. And there's a symmetry to that I quite like. Absolutely. Dan, what's the hardest part of running a software business in the adult industry, banks, payment processors, advertising, or all of it? Basically, the most difficult thing we've come across is various banking. High street banks won't open an account for us. The ones that do close us down without warning in 18 months, people like Stripe and PayPal classify us as prohibited, even though we're a tool company. Every payment integration that I try and work with takes twice as long. Advertising, Google, Meta, TikTok, all refuse our ads. Customer acquisition has to be organic. word of mouth, industry podcasts like this. SEO is really important. Hosting providers exclude adult content. It's just very, very difficult. Pretty much everything takes us three times longer. You know, the actual product work is the easy bit. Building the software that helps sellers is straightforward. Finding a stack to run it on that won't be pulled out from under us is a constant background work. Okay, fantastic. Well, there certainly are adult-friendly payment processors and adult-friendly, some adult-friendly banks, not many. I always tell people the rule of thumb is never tell them exactly what you're doing if you're talking to a banker. Be very vague and have a vanilla website to refer them to. And that goes for payment processors as well. But there are adult-friendly payment processors hosting companies. You know, like Mojo Host is the classic one. So that's out there. And by the way, if you guys ever need any vendor help, I don't know everybody, but I know just about everybody. So keep it in mind. That goes for my listeners too. Feel free to reach out if you're having problems with anything like that. Except for banks. Banks is hard. I don't have a go-to bank. Sorry. So you guys are UK-based and you're building for international sellers. What does your UK perspective bring that US founders might have missed? okay interesting well the most obvious thing the uk perspective brings is that we're not just building for the us market by default most adult tech is built by us founders for us sellers with international users as an afterthought dare i say you know we came at it from the other direction so from day one our product has had to handle the realities of international sellers because that's who we are. I suppose it shows up in real practical ways. So GDPR is built into the hub from the start. It's not bolted on for European customers. UK consumer protection compliance is in there, which matters for any business selling to UK buyers from anywhere. Multicurrency handling came early because most of our sellers, they do ship internationally. Customs handling, declaration values, shipping label generations for international posts, all of it. We've had to think about these things from the very beginning, where a US-only product can leave them out and still serve most of its market. The UK and the EU are also where the most interesting age verification and online safety regulation is happening right now, right? We've talked about that a lot on this podcast, and we'll continue to. Yeah, well, like the UK Online Safety Act and the proposed EU rules, the various state-level age verification laws in the US, the trajectory of regulation in this industry is going in one direction. And the UK is generally ahead of the US on the practical implementation side. So we're building for the legal landscape that's coming, not just the one that exists. Okay. And by the way, for everyone listening, we are working on having an episode with Ofcom. So, stand by for that because they don't talk to a lot of people and they will be talking to us. So, that's something that we're going to have later this year. What advice would you give a creator who's thinking about getting into selling adult content today? Well, first, the honest bit. It's harder than it looks. It's a small business. It's not easy money. The women who burn out, and there's a lot of them out there, they're usually the ones who came in thinking it was quick or simple. The women who last are the ones who treat this like a small business. So my advice, oh, there's probably four things I'd say to women thinking about getting into this today. Firstly, do your research. Read what's actually out there and spend a week lurking the platforms before you even think about creating an account. Like any business, which unfortunately people don't look at this as a business. So it's adult. It's not a business. Well, it's a business. That's it. That's it. I think secondly, what was very important to me to give to sellers is building the safety stack before you even create a listing, before your first conversation, set up a separate email, a separate identity, a separate name, a separate way of receiving money. I think the women who get into trouble in this industry are almost always the ones who treated security as something to add later. Thirdly, treat the customer side like a job. Buyers are customers, they're not boyfriends, they're not friends, they're not validation, they're customers and the energy you spend on them, it's got to be professional energy only. I think fourth is get the boring stuff right, like the accounting, the tax, the database, the legal compliance. I know they feel like things you can do later, but they're really not. And I think, honestly, the women who do this well, and they do it really well, their income can be life-changing. The autonomy is genuine, the flexibility is real. Most of the women in our community, they're running profitable businesses on terms that they set in hours they choose with skills that they've developed. But you've got to take it seriously. You know, if you want a head start on all of this, the starter pack is literally written for you, is the book, the automation is there to help. We're there to help. We can generally hand on heart say that, you know, coming through with Kink Coach, you will get your business heading in the right direction. Sure. Yeah. Well, you should charge for it. No two ways about it. But you have your own ways of making money, which is good. By the way, besides your platform, what is the revenue model? In terms of sort of how we're making money? Yeah. It basically works on a very very simple system anybody who joins up to the automation pays a flat fee of 34.99 per month which works out something like £1.60 or £1.60 or £1.70 a day that sort of covers live support it covers all updates for free etc etc etc and then for each extra platform they purchase from us so let's say they want to go on to three sites they were paid a £34.99 for the first site and the hub and then £10 per additional site. So it's like a rolling income. We do different options to pay by the every three months, every six months at a sort of discount, every 12, 12 months. To get onto the kink market is a £10 supplement. And then that obviously gets you your website built. It's more about a subscription. And I think what we've found from the customers already using it is that customers stay. Once they're in, very, very few have ever left because they've realised they've actually got their life back. and that's it really it's just that there's no sort of hidden fees there's no you know i'm going to take a percentage of your sale it's literally front fee to use a service and that's it that's awesome what's next for kink coach what are you building in the next 12 months that you can talk about what we're building in the next 12 hours i mean it's um it's i've got ocd so i'm very very very detail orientated i love to sort of make my own problems to solve them better for example being an adult content-based company, we had quite a challenge getting our extensions sort of recognized on Google Chrome Store. There's a lot of red tape. So I sort of bypassed that and I've actually built a system now where customers' extensions auto-update through what I've built. So it sort of bypasses the need for Google Chrome Store. I'm doing that. I've just sort of built a unified messaging system only recently. It's obviously going out to different platforms. I'm sure we're going to have customers come to us and say, I love your product, but I'm on X, Y, and Z. Please, can you build a tool for that? And of course, I'll do that. There's a proactive outreach tool, things like email messaging systems built into the hub for our users to go out to a bigger audience. Say they want to do stuff straight to Facebook or straight to X, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I suppose the biggest thing about the next 12 months isn't any single feature. The company is going to stop feeling like a startup, and I want it to start feeling like a proper business. And we've spent the last few years figuring out what to build. The next year is about building it really well, more sellers, more confidence, more momentum. And the next chapter of Kink Coach isn't a new direction. I think it's the same direction, just with more conviction. You explained about Kink Market as well. I mean, the Kink Market focus now is buyer growth, sort of building that buyer base, more SEO, more advertising, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just sort of really get our name out there because I really believe that this could be extremely popular to the masses, not just obviously the smaller numbers. Okay. Sounds good. What's the one thing that, and I think this one would be for Alex, that you wish more buyers understood about the creators they're buying from? Well, probably the single thing I wish more buyers understood is that the woman on the other end is running a business, not auditioning for a relationship. The volume is the part that often surprises buyers. The average active seller is having dozens of conversations at one single time. I mean, sometimes hundreds. You're not the only person she's speaking to that evening. And that isn't a slight, it's reality. And it's really difficult as a seller because you want your buyer to feel special. You know, they're not just going to buy off a shop. They want to build some form of relationship. But it's a very, very fine line between how much energy she can actually give you. I think the other thing buyers don't always see is the emotional labour involved. The woman responding to cheerfully at midnight has probably spent her day dealing with a stalker, a scammer, a buyer who tried to extort her, a payment processor freezing her funds, you know, and yet she's still trying to be cheery for you. And yeah, I wish buyers would appreciate that a little bit more. Yeah, absolutely. As do I, because it's a very difficult business, as you all know. Well, Alex and Dan, I'd like to thank you for being with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk, and I hope we'll get a chance to do this again soon. You're most welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having us, Bruce. Thank you. My broker tip today is part five of how to buy a site. Last week we talked about how to determine the value of a site, how to negotiate the sale, and how to get to the point of drawing up an agreement. So now you're talking to your attorney and you're having them draft an agreement. What should be in it? Well, your attorney should guide you through the legal side, but here are some considerations to keep in mind from a buying standpoint. What's the date you'd like to close? Make sure you know you'll have the money to either pay the deposit or the entire amount of the purchase by that date. I've had buyers who aren't ready and that just causes issues. Make sure that all of the assets you're purchasing are in that agreement, such as every domain included in the sale, processing in payment accounts, relationships with vendors, all records including 2257 data, software to run the sites, and any other assets such as source code for the sites. Of course, it should spell out any payment schedule if there is one. Who's responsible for closing costs, such as paying for escrow? And there are always terms that are unique to yours in the seller's situation. This assumes you're the party responsible for drawing up the agreement. If the seller is drawing up the agreement, then it's important that you express all of this to your attorney so they can check the seller's agreement and see if any changes are necessary. We'll talk about this subject more next week. And next week, we'll be speaking with Bull Boss Josh and Edger9000 of Pearl Industry Network. And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. I'd once again like to thank my guests, Alex and Dan Steele of KinkCoach. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.
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