For perspective. IamA 30 year old who built & run a tiny porn site. I spend 12-14 hours a day working on porn while balancing eating/sleeping/wife in between. AMA!

What did you think of the "highschooler" who "ran and built" a porn site on his own?

Edit: Earlier today he was on the front of hot for my home. Was busted for not showing proof and his site redirecting to another one.

I wish I'd seen it when it was first posted before it was removed. Would've loved to have gotten in on those comments, it was pretty clear from some of his responses that things were off

Do you know why it was removed? I need closure

The user refused to prove his claims. Never showed that he was a high school student, and also the domain he registered pointed to a different one that had the same style. That other site claimed to be made by a team, not a single student. So mods shut it down unless some form of proof was given.

^ Yup. Outside of the probably not a highschool student issue, there was also problems with his claims that the site was actually popular. Zero SEO and ranking on Alexa seemed to show otherwise.

From a business standpoint, another red flag was his lack of understanding around DMCA takedowns and needing to actually officially register with the copyright office for the safe harbor protections to be valid.

Also, I don't think this was brought up on the original thread, but his site has zero mention of USC 2257. This is mandatory for all adult sites, whether you host the content yourself or not, and not being in compliance with 2257 can really get you into the kinds of legal trouble you never want to be in (hint: the law is named the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act).

In case you weren't aware, now is a good time to call your IP attorney and make sure you're good to go with registration. This year's end is a deadline to comply with an update to registration procedures (i.e. end of a grace period) that require online registration (or re-registration) of your DMCA agents. Paper registrations are becoming void and re-registration will be required every three years online.

If anything, it'll be easier than it was before, as this is part of a push to streamline and simplify registrations with an online portal, but the requirements are strict. In the industry, we expect a small spate of litigation to occur against companies that let their safe harbor lapse by failing to update by the deadline.

Yada yada not your attorney, not even that kind of attorney, just aware.

Appreciate the heads up on this, I think we already re-registered but now you have me doubting. Will definitely be making sure we're set on this today, cheers for the free lawyering!

Do you get any hate mail? If so, who are the haters?

Too small for hate mail. Although, I'm sure we'll receive our first within the next hour or so of this comment being posted.

Edit: Thanks for popping our hate mail cherry. It was the gentlest, tenderest hate mail we could have ever hoped for.

My bad. :(

I just checked out your site. Cool idea.... certainly unique.

Cheers! In porn, everything is just spammy ad-heavy tube / cam / clip site clones, so we wanted to try something different.

What would you tell a 7 year old who asked what you do for a living? What do you tell adults?

A lot of my friends know, and being in my age range, they're generally more surprised / intrigued than anything. I would tell a 7 year old the same thing I tell older adults I don't know well: I run a recipe sharing site, where people can share recipes for what they want to bake, and other people can come bake those recipes.

Works pretty well. Minus the part where I have to pretend I'm really into baking for the rest of the conversation.

Transition the conversation into getting baked and see if they follow?

me: "...getting baked"

7-year old: "???"

Don't some people ask you the name of the website?

That's when mumbling helps.

[deleted]

Our team is small, and we're all maxed out when it comes to time. So for us, we're focused on getting feedback and figuring out what areas of the site users like/use the most, so we can direct all of our energy on improving that. Aggressive expansion usually involves a lot of marketing, which means less time for development. For now, most of our users find us through word of mouth.

No aggregation, so yup, reaching out and bringing on models was definitely slow at first. Luckily it seems to be one of those things where if you just keep chipping away at it, things get easier. Plus, as we bring on more models, they tell their friends about it, etc.

[deleted]

Aside from the monthly maintenance costs listed above, the biggest cost when it comes to starting a site like this is just your time. If you can't code, then ofc there's also the real cost of paying developers, but luckily that wasn't an issue for us. Forgoing being paid for 3 years (and running) is the kind of bankroll you need, which largely depends on how frugally, or not, you can live.

Challenges with bringing on models in the beginning is pretty similar to anything sales-related. You're for the most part cold-messaging people, which can be a bit demoralizing when you don't hear responses back. I could only take maybe a day or two a week of that before morale took a hit, so I made sure to space it out with other work. Once you have a few people signed up, do everything in your power to make sure they have a good experience on the site. Then things become easier since you now have positive references rather than just being a complete question mark.

Forgoing being paid for 3 years (and running) is the kind of bankroll you need

I don't know, running from creditors is rarely advisable :D

Hah, not sure how that made it in there. Hopefully it wasn't a Mr Robot moment from being overworked.

What's for dinner?

Fried eggs and bacon on rice. Yup.

Protip time!

Using the same ingredients, try this:

1) Lightly fry up bacon
2) Cut up the bacon
3) Continue cooking the bacon, fry the rice in the bacon grease
4) Transfer bacon fried rice to bowl
5) While the bacon fried rice is still piping hot, crack the egg directly into the bowl and stir well (chopsticks work).

Enjoy! The eggs should cook with the eat from the bacon/rice, and the rice should take on a really rich texture/flavor that you don't quite get from putting a cooked egg on top of it. (Imagine taking risotto and just lowering the intensity a bit.)

Edit: I just made some for lunch. I mashed in some garlic while frying up the bacon for exxxtra flavor

If this porn thing fails, I guess we'll just turn it into an actual recipe sharing site.

Have that as a boss-is-walking-by mode. "Click here to become an actual recipe sharing site"

Pretty good idea actually... just need to find the time to build it.

how much $ for you to make this and post pictures.....follow up, how much to make your team do it with you? Wait is this how your site works... but with sex acts?

Lol. Yes.

How good is it without rice?

So just friend eggs and bacon? What is this, breakfast?

Edit:

Fried eggs and bacon: 7/10

Fried eggs and bacon with rice: 10/10

The rice was born to absorb runny egg and bacon grease. Add some ketchup too and you've made heaven on a plate.

It's a reference to an older reddit post where someone would eat whatever the community wanted with rice and rate it

Found it, so good.

Yeah bacon and eggs was a real edgy suggestion

FTFY

Yeah bacon and eggs was a real eggy suggestion

Why didn't you make the site responsive? More than 90% of the time I watch porn on my phone, and I believe most people also.

It'd be really helpful if you make it. Mobile friendly. Thanks

Yup, that's the biggest feature we're working on right now. In hindsight, yes, totally agree. Should've went mobile-first with our design.

Traffic-wise, we're seeing roughly 60% coming in via desktop, 40% mobile, so it's definitely something we want improved asap.

i like to be comfortable, so sitting in a chair in front of my desktop would be the way i do it :)

You and 60%.

What goes into the maintenance of a porn website?

Everything that goes into a regular website, plus the extra time needed to watch the porn to make sure it's not violating any content restrictions.

Edit: That daily maintenance routine usually involves investigating and fixing bugs that we get notified of by users or directly from the server, following-up on customer support questions, responding to messages on Twitter, reviewing newly submitted content, verifying and approving new content creators, checking up on our traffic / new signups. THEN the real work begins.

So you the first guy to actually figure out a way to get paid for watching porn.. I think you win life

Not quite. I don't get paid. Maybe one day though

I thought this was your job ?

Unless you take outside investment, founders usually don't get paid until the site makes money. We don't make money yet, and we're self-funded.

Yeah - this is how grand slams happen and how you end up being number one in a company worth many millions of dollars.

Investment isn't really understood by very many people, nor the time needed to be spent and the associated mental weight of the risks (most businesses fail after all) inherent in the process. Good luck to you, I think your business idea is great!

Thanks for the kind words, it really means a lot!

Do you track the users' search histories? If yes, what do you do with that info? Also, how much privacy do we have while surfing free online porn in general?

Nope, sites track search histories for the purposes of ads retargeting, but we have no ads. We went into it with a philosophy that our business model should be sound enough to never need to take on outside investment or rent out ad space, so there's no plans to add ads in the future either.

Plans change, sometimes ads can be done tastefully and linking with high quality sites actually can up your game.

Would you reject Lelo advertisements throwing that foreign cash at you?

Lelo, yes. I've been hit with their ads, and while they do look nicer than the norm, it's still a full page popup that you didn't want.

What we are open to in the future is partnering with other sites that share similar beliefs (aka don't be shitty). Giving a shout out to them (and having them do the same for us) is great for everyone. The trick is finding sites that we'd be comfortable doing that with. Only a couple even come to mind at this point.

~$400 is a pretty good hosting budget for a startup. I’ve set up a few and getting something reliable at that price can be challenging. Would you be able to give any details on hosting provider and set up? What kind of load are you planning for in the short term?

I have to ask the technical questions.

Finally. Here's our stack:

• Rails / Jquery (transitioning to Vue) / Postgres
• Hosted on Heroku, assets on AWS S3, streamed via Cloudfront
• Video transcoding via Zencoder

Heroku tends to be more expensive for hosting than doing your own AWS EC2 instances, but it's awesome when your team is small and want to minimize time spent on dev ops. We have it set to auto spin up additional dynos under load, so we can literally support massive traffic spikes with almost zero input on our end. Worth the additional cost, for now.

Super excited to see someone transitioning to Vue. IMO its the best option for most people out there. I hope it gets more traction. I would love to hear how that transition goes in the future.

Compared to straight jQuery without a framework, transitioning to anything is a step in the right direction. But ya, did a ton of research on whether to go with React or Vue, and Vue's amazing documentation ultimately sold me. Will see how I feel about it in a few months though.

Once you’re a little bit more settled, create your own Heroku with Kubernetes.

Haven't heard of that before, will look into it. Thanks!

Planning on building my first production ready site during my winter break and plan on using heroku. How is their pricing when facing large scaling?

Ask me again in a few hours :) With this reddit iama hug, we're up to 12 dynos running simultaneously right now. Using HireFire to handle spikes is key though, so be sure to look into that.

1. What does your wife think of your work?

2. What did you do for initial funding?

3. Do you anticipate that your time and energy will be rewarded monetarily in a few years, as you transition from building to maintaining?

4. How many employees do you have besides yourself?

5. Have you considered outsourcing the content review to others, so you don't have to spend so much time watching porn? (It sounds great, getting paid to watch porn, but I bet it gets old.)

I have more technical questions, but will stop here.

1. She's actually super supportive of the whole idea, especially because as a site, we're completely agnostic as to what kind of recipes people come up with (she wants more female-friendly porn). Plus, she likes to help out with some of the non-technical stuff (designing and ordering free loot, giving feedback on new features, etc.).

2. I'm in a lucky situation where this isn't my first company. I sold a prior company (non-porn related), which provided the majority of the seed funding for this company plus all the free time I needed to work on this thing fulltime without getting paid.

3. Our fee structure only gives us a very small margin to work with, so to be eventually profitable we need volume. I've kinda accepted that we're gonna be losing money until we have more users, so not expecting any monetary rewards from this for a while.

4. We have four on our team, but I'm the only fulltimer (since I'm the only one that doesn't need to be paid)

5. I'd say I spend maybe an hour average each day watching porn (most of the 14 hours goes towards other site-related activities, like coding or marketing). But even with just an hour I'm at a point where it doesn't turn me on anymore. And yea, once we get bigger, definitely will outsource some of this. Maybe someone on taskrabbit will do it for cheap...

Edit: Also, feel free to ask your technical questions, I don't mind.

What kind of business was your prior one, which you sold??

Totally unrelated to porn, it was an technology consulting company. Basically helping other companies build/improve/migrate their IT systems.

As your site grows, what procedures will you have in place to ensure that all of your, uh, bakers are 100% consensual?

The same procedures we currently have are pretty solid, so should keep working.

How common is it to get reports for "nudity"?

You'd have to be pretty lost to run across us for none porn reasons. Although, we do occasionally get the random food blog / bot that follows us on twitter thinking we'll post pictures of tasty food. We're really hoping they retweet some of our stuff for their followers eventually.

Thanks for posting! I used to work for a payment processor like Stripe or Braintree, and I always enjoy reading about businesses that we couldn't support. The place I worked was able to make some exceptions for very profitable businesses (think in the vein of Grindr) and before I left, they were working to make exceptions the rule.

I personally handled fraud and disputes, so your business risks are very familiar to me - folks would fly under our radar until their dispute average exceeded 1% or our risk team caught on, it was about 50/50.

Congrats on the website, and I hope you see continued and growing success!

That said, are you at liberty to say who your merchant accounts are through? Since I want to get back in the industry, I'm quite curious. Also, can I ask what your dispute rate looks like? If you've had any yet, what are the more common causes? Have you been able to win any?

I /facepalm every time I see a new porn startup handling payments through one of the mainstream payment processors like paypal or square. Almost like clockwork, their twitter accounts do silent within the year, the last tweets usually complaining about their payment service provider and mentioning they'll be back up and running as soon as they move over to a new one.

As you said, exceptions do happen once in a while if you're big enough, but its very risky to gamble everything on that. Patreon got Paypal to give them an exception on their "artsy" adult content, but that's kind of a moot point now that they've decided to shutdown of all adult content creator accounts anyway.

We didn't ever want to be in a situation post-launch where we couldn't accept payments. So we took the time upfront (literally, it took a year) to secure adult-specific merchant accounts and payment processors. I won't mention names, but a quick bit of googling will turn up just a small handful that pretty much handle payments for the entire adult industry. Our dispute rate right now is sitting at a pretty zero, but I don't expect that to last once volume picks up. The hope is that the increased volume should help keep the ratio under the magic 1% that Visa/Mastercard want all of their merchants to be fall under.

From a growth perspective, we're pretty picky about where we talk about heartpie, which has meant our small community is fairly tightly knit and generally very supportive of the site and the content being produced. Having less shitty users / scammy creators and great customer service is honestly how you really cut down on that dispute ratio.

Excuse the personal question, but there's a lot of stuff out there about how watching lots of porn can affect real life sexual relationships. Have you found this to be the case (positively or negatively) while watching for website quality control purposes?

I think part of that negative affect has to do with decreased libido (as a guy, you can only come so many times a day) and the unintended rewiring of your brain to only be aroused by very specific things that may not be realistic / possible / desirable in real life.

It's very different when you watch porn in a work-context, versus doing it for personal pleasure. To start, you're not just constantly jacking off at work. And once watching it becomes routine (happens faster than you'd think), you're not even getting aroused by watching it. So it bypasses the libido and brainwashing issue that often causes the negative impacts on sexual relationships.

"not just constantly"

soo... occasionally ° ͜ʖ ͡ –

Only during designated fap breaks.

I'm really into animal porn. Can you get me some good stuff of a monkey and a goat?

I don't judge, but Visa/Mastercard does.

Are there any plans to add Male/trans bakers in? Balecause right now it seems like its just for requesting females. As a trans woman I'd love to join in on the fun but it doesn't seem like there is any tags related to what parts your baker has.

Absolutely. My wife especially would love to see some female-friendly male / couple content on the site. But as you're noticing, there's no way right now to tag recipes or bakers as female / male / trans. We already have a handful of male and couple bakers lined up and ready to go as soon as we finish building features that gives user's the ability to set their gender and sexual preferences upfront.

We haven't had any trans women apply to become a baker yet, we'd love to have you give us a try if you're interested!

Is there any point in a trans woman applying to become a baker if the audience isn't there?

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. If there's no trans bakers on the site, users are less inclined to make trans-specific recipes. So just by having your profile up with some pictures can help encourage users to make trans-recipes, which you can then bake.

Thank you, it's something to think about. I'll check back with you when you get the gender tagging thing working

Sounds good, stay in touch!

Do you have any tips or advice on how to start a site?

If it's something fairly small and easy (like a blog, or selling some clothes you make, etc.) my advice would be go for it. It's so easy to use a nice template these days off squarespace and the lessons learned from trying to launch it and market it are well worth the time / tiny cost to run it.

If you mean something custom built with a bunch of moving pieces, more along the lines of a "real" startup, my advice would be don't do it. Wait a few months, think it over, then still don't do it. And if you still really can't stop thinking about your idea, then ask yourself this: do you love your idea so much that you would be willing to work on it for the next 7 years, potentially without getting paid, and put in more hours than you've ever worked in your life at a regular job?

That's really the reality of what it takes to see a startup through on your own. Most "fail" because the founders didn't ask themselves this question when they started, and so burnt out / lost interest / ran out of funds before they really gave their idea a fighting chance in the real world.

So you do this for free?

Yup, it's been about 3 years since I've gotten paid. I owned another company before this that did fairly well, so was able to save a lot during that time.

The problem with the other company was that I hated the industry and the type of work it involved, so I took a step back in 2014 to figure out what I really wanted to do with my time / life. The adult industry is super fucked up on many different levels, no one really innovates here (when's the last time you heard about a porn startup?), so it seemed perfect for someone who wasn't put off by the social stigma. There's so much potential here to make a positive impact and be successful, versus building just another app to compete with the thousands of new apps springing up every month.

Ended up selling the other company to fund and focus fulltime on this.

What’s your stance on hentai?

Agnostic. If you are able to produce hentai videos, and there's a recipe for it, we're more than happy to support it. It does still need to follow our content guidelines though (set by Visa/Mastercard).

One day, we'd love to support content beyond just videos. Comics, hardware, etc. #futuregoals

Why did it take A YEAR? I read your blog post. Did you have to adjust the site to appease the bank and it was just a back and forth iterative process until the bank was happy with the business model?

Yup, we had to adjust the site a few times before they were satisfied that we presented a very low-risk investment for them. Keep in mind that everything to do with the bank is archaic. Everything is done by paper, and each round of paper submissions involves weeks of review. Your payment processor also acts as a middle man between you and the bank, so you're looking at a month turnaround time on even the most mundane things.

We also decided to play it safe and secure two different merchant accounts from separate banks, to protect against one bank randomly pulling the rug from under us (seen this happen with other porn companies, and they simply couldn't survive the downtime). That added an extra 4 months to the approval process.

its so nice to read about someone who did their homework

Thanks, we're hoping future selves thanks us for it.

What took you 34 man-weeks to build? Does this include time to research/learn-as-you-go, or were you already a solid developer? Don’t want you to divulge your IP, but that sounds like a monumental effort considering all of the off-the-shelf services and frameworks available.

Definitely a learn-as-you-go process. I had coded in PHP and the LAMP stack back in 2008, so there was still a learning curve associated with moving to Rails and getting up to speed on the latest cloud SaaS platforms that have come into being since then.

If I were to start from scratch today, I'd imagine it would take less than half the time it originally took.

As a person in a very similar situation with a very similar background - what resources should I be utilizing to get going? I have a website up and running. I'm thousands of lines deep in PHP (because it was built for just me to use in a niche industry) and now I have lots of people waving money at me that want it to be a SaaS. LAMP isn't going to cut it.

The API'S I am leveraging will sort of dictate some of the moving pieces and really seem to be Python focused. I've built/maintained websites/software for years....just never have built to scale.

Hmm yea if you're going to be integrating heavily with Python-focused services anyway, it may be worthwhile just to use Django instead of rails? Rails was appealing purely for the fast deployment nature of the framework and huge community surrounding their gems.

How does your wife feel about your profession? Does she work in porn too? Do you two actively discuss your site or is it don’t ask don’t tell?

See this answer

I googled your company and your main page doesn't have any visual content. In my mind this goes against the common line of thinking that photos would increase sales. Is that not the case with your site?

Great question. If we were a clip store, we would make images front and center. But since the site is geared towards sharing ideas, we've found that presenting lots of images/videos of actual porn content ends up hurting recipe creation. You end up with a lot of people who become distracted with content that is already made, versus spending some extra time to share recipes for content that is harder to find.

That said, our main recipes page is suffering a bit from wall-of-text syndrome, so we do plan on building in some images of successful bakes next to the recipes, just to make browsing a bit easier on the eyes/mind.

Why would you eat your sleeping wife?

Better question: how good is it without rice?

Are you only doing straight porn?

Not intentionally, it's kinda just happened this way so far as a byproduct of where the demand is. As we grow, we want to support all genders and sexual preferences. Demand is heavily skewed right now towards straight porn because many women have been turned off from mainstream porn (and justifiably so). I personally know quite a few that have nothing against porn conceptually, but hate the idea of how the porn industry currently presents itself and treats women. It's areas like this that I think we have a ton of potential to make a big impact.

It takes time to expand our baker base and build out features to support them. We're getting there though - we were pretty excited to bring on our first lesbian couple a couple months back!

Your site would seem to cater disproportionately to people looking for extreme things that they cannot find elsewhere. What safeguards if any do you have to handle requests for illegal content? Do you have any restrictions regarding content or requests that do not rise to the level of illegality but are still shockingly beyond the usual norms?

With the current state of porn, the content being produced en mass is actually so extreme that's its basically turned off almost the entire female population. There's little diversity in the content, because studios have no incentive to experiment with new ideas.

So there's huge swathes of fetishes being left unfulfilled, and reddit's actually been one of the places people have turned to to find non-mainstream content. Just take r/rholdthemoan for example. Nothing extreme about that at all, and quite a few recipes on heartpie are related to that niche.

That said, we're down for more extreme recipes too, provided they follow our content guidelines. As long as it's not violating anything in there, we're cool with it.

Totally get that not everything is everyone's cup of tea though, so we're also in the process of building default filters for users so they can set preferences upfront on what kind of stuff they want to see.

Would you consider the porn business as "the easy path" since a lot of companies won't compete there for piety reasons? Or is it just as hard in competition then any other business out there?

Easier competitively if you're not trying to start a cam or tube site (these guys have a complete monopoly over those areas of online porn), but significantly more difficult for the very reasons most companies don't want to pursue entering the industry in the first place.

Cultural stigma aside, a porn startup has to navigate some ridiculous banking red tape to be able to even accept credit card payments from its customers. You can't just use square, strip, google checkout, paypal, amazon payments, etc.

If you can get past that (most don't), you have to be prepared to fund everything yourself without venture capital. They don't invest in porn. You also have to have a business model that works without advertising revenue, unless you want to be just another spammy porn site with pop-ups that yell dumb shit at their users.

What was/is your biggest issue with the site?

It honestly changes day to day, week to week. During the heavy dev phase, it was just powering through the code and figuring out how to make all the many different SaaS components play nice together as one unified system (Rails hosted on heroku, serving S3 assets via cloudfront, accepting transcoded media files via zencoder, etc.).

When we first launched our private beta, it was "how do we get our first 100 users?".

These days, it's figuring out what aspects of the site our users are enjoying the most, so we can focus our energy on iterating on and improving that thing versus spreading ourselves too thin.

So... I could be a porn producer and could take a look at these recipe requests and create the porn to their specifies and then get paid? 💕💎

Yup, provided the person performing in it has been verified for age.

Part question, part feature request: Have you considered supporting other media, like erotic writing or audio? I recently started publishing interactive erotic fiction, and I'm finding that I have some very enthusiastic fans who would really like to pay for my content, but a lot of crowdfunding sites (including Patreon, which I currently use) are really unfriendly to adult content. I would love to have a platform like heartpie to point them to.

It's not the first time we've had this request, and yes, expanding outside of just videos is one of our longterm goals. Short-term, the team is already stretched pretty thin working on just video features, so I think we need that area of the site to become more stable before we bite off more work.

And ya, the recent Patreon changes are where we're seeing a lot of interest from creators. We wrote our about us section 3 years ago, and it's sad that things have gotten even worse today.

Do you expect/encourage gay recipes to be placed in the future?

I'd potentially be a male baker.

Absolutely, there are already a few male-centric recipes on the site, and we have a handful of male bakers lined up as well. Just waiting on some features that will allow users to set their gender / sexual preferences. Come give us a try!