Sex tech gets a bad wrap as a category, with investors viewing it and its associated products as an extension of the adult entertainment industry.
But what if it has the potential to educate generations of device-addicted children? Or blow the lid off under-researched areas such as female health and wellbeing?
At TechBBQ, TI spoke with two keynote speakers, female founders Cindy Gallop and Anna Lee, who want to disrupt and innovate in the sector with products designed with women’s experiences in mind.
A recent survey by children’s charity NSPCC found that over half of all teenage boys believed that the porn they view on their phones is a realistic depiction of sex. This fact will stay with many well into adulthood as they develop unrealistic expectations of women and sex.
Cindy Gallop, former JWT and BBH advertising executive, was taken by surprise by this when she started using a dating app fifteen years ago.
As a glamourous 50-something, she found herself with a flock of young admirers, although some of the behaviour she encountered was jarring.
“I realised through my experience of dating younger men that when we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default — and not in a good way. As a naturally action-oriented person, I thought, ‘I’m going to do something about this,’” Gallop recalls.
This was the beginning of a journey that was more challenging than it should have been, she argues, precisely because of the attitudes towards sex and female sexuality that skew laws, funding and payment systems against supporting such ventures.
MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP) is a subscriber-based sex site where its members can rent videos of real people having ‘real life’ sex. It’s a user-generated, human-curated social sex video platform aimed at “socialising, normalising and destigmatising sex”.
Gallop says she wants to make sex as socially acceptable and as shareable to talk about as anything else you might find and share on Instagram.
Creators receive a 50% revenue share, and the site’s curators watch every single video from beginning to end before approving or rejecting them.
Every comment on every video is also checked before it’s published. “No one else does that, and we are the safest place on the internet because of it,” Gallop claims.
Despite the fact that the site portrays real world sex and not porn [with an ed-tech venture and a consent app also in the offing], because it publishes adult content, the venture is categorised the same as sites like PornHub, with the same regulations applying, which is hindering its progress.
The venture is largely bootstrapped, with a further $3m from a single business angel — but a large part of that went on legal fees in the early days, says Gallop.
“Every piece of business infrastructure that every other tech start takes for granted, we can’t because the small print always says: No adult content.”
It took the US-based venture four years to land a business account. Payment processing firms like PayPal and Stripe won’t work with adult content sites, so she has to work with more expensive adult-friendly equivalents that charge a 12% monthly processing fee rather than the standard 3%.
I ask about another well-known, user-generated hosting platform with a paywall, OnlyFans — a UK-based male-founded site that offers adult as well as general entertainment content and appears to have worked around Stripe’s ‘no porn’ policy.
In 2021, OnlyFans had to pull its adult content off its site, undermining the business models of many of its creators in the process. However, since then, the two firms appear to have come to an agreement.
OnlyFans achieved this through the sheer volume of revenue and traffic generated, allowing it to “bend” industry standard rules, claims Gallop. MLNP, meanwhile, is more focused on its mission and promises not to deplatform its communities for producing adult content.
“OnlyFans built a platform and turbocharged it with adult content, but then say, ‘we’re a general fan platform,’ and that’s why Stripe works with them.
“If I worked with Stripe, I’d triple my income overnight,” Gallop adds.
Being categorised in the general adult content bracket also means that MLNP has been turned down by other potential partners, including text services and email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp.
Says Gallop: “For every service we want to use that will help us I usually have to go to the person at the top of the company and explain what I’m doing, begging to be able to use their service; sometimes they let me, sometimes they don’t. It’s a very labour-intensive process.”
The lack of marketing and advertising presence is another growth blocker. Because social media platforms have to have strict rules about the advertising of adult content, MLNP can’t advertise on these streams, which Gallop argues is “utterly gendered”.
She contends: “Any female-lens venture – whether it be menstruation, menopause, fertility – is also banned from advertising anywhere. In the meantime, male health, erectile dysfunction products, sexual wellness or libido– that’s not a problem.”
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Despite these obstacles, Gallop still believes rewards for investors in her site will be lucrative. “It’s a massively untapped area – Sex Tech is the next trillion-dollar category,” she says.
Gallop is now looking to raise $17.4m to scale MLNP and build out an aligned tech business, which aims to normalise sex for under-18s, supporting parents and schools and decoupling sex from the porn that kids will inevitably access on their phones.
She also plans to build a consent-based messaging app dedicated to safe sexting, intending to encourage open, yet consensual, communication around sex.
“As a unique business, we have a unique capability. We have the power to change people’s sexual attitudes for the better in a way that no one else can. We have ten years of proof of concept. And a revenue model that is still working for our creators.”
Anna Lee’s venture, a data tracking sex toy which has just become a sell out in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, appears to back up Gallop’s ‘trillion dollar category’ claims.
Lee’s orgasm-optimising Lioness product flew of the shelves after featuring in an article in the New York Times last week.
Categorised as a ‘sexual wellness company’ rather than a ‘sex toy’ firm, Lioness has built the world’s first biofeedback vibrator that collects data on orgasm and arousal.
The $230 gadget uses an array of sensors to detect changes in temperature, contraction, and positioning, allowing it to create a personalised profile of the user’s sex drive. Once it knows its owner, Lioness can also make recommendations based on the feedback.
Lee – named on Forbes’ ‘30 Under 30’ list back in 2020 – stresses that any customer data Lioness gathers is with the express permission of its owners.
Lee’s journey began as a product engineer at Amazon’s division in Silicon Valley just under a decade ago. Working in a multidisciplinary team of mainly male engineers, the Berkeley graduate often found that the unisex wearable products they worked on, such as watches or trackers, would rarely fit her wrists.
Around the same time, she met a male sex toy founder who tested his vibrators on people’s noses because “that’s what a clitoris feels like”, he told her.
“These experiences made me realise that many things that are engineered and designed are not usually designed with women in mind.
“I started digging into it and realised that the sex industry is historically male-dominated. There’s not been much innovation in the space,” she adds.
So, Lee started Lioness eight years ago, and the product’s first version was completed four years ago through a crowdfunding campaign. The firm is now two years into the second generation of the product, following another fundraiser, and this year, it plans to expand in the UK and European markets.
She says the response to the product on her home turf has been mixed. “Tech companies don’t see us as a tech company even though we built the product in Silicon Valley.
“And shows such as CES also wouldn’t allow sex toys – but then we were like, ‘look, there’s just as much tech innovation and hardware integration here as with any other tech company’, but we are starting to see shifts now…”
Perhaps Lioness’s vantage point is that the product bridges sex and health tech categories.
Because the firm now boasts the world’s most extensive data set of female physiology during arousal and orgasm, it has universities queuing up to use its data to explore the notoriously under-researched areas of women’s health and women’s sexual health, which she argues are inextricably linked.
“So, for example, a man will go to a doctor if they have erectile dysfunction, and one of the first things they will check for is cardiovascular disease,” Lee explains.
“But the thing is that we don’t have equal research for women. It’s dismissed as a mental health thing — or the menopause — always blamed on hormone factors.
“We know so little about women’s health, but we do know that orgasms can help indicate different things that may be happening externally. We see it with stress. We had an athlete who suffered from a concussion; she saw her data flatline.
“There’s lots of indication from our study of the data that overall sexual wellness is overall wellness. And so much of it is interconnected.”
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