Dear Cindy: How do you find investors for MakeLoveNotPorn, or any sextech startup? Or any female-founded startup?
Cindy’s unique investor-finding strategy
How do you find investors for MakeLoveNotPorn, or any sextech startup? (Or any female-founded startup, for that matter?
As I do when I get a lot of questions along the same theme, I’m rolling them up into one answer this week. Many sextech founders have asked how to go about raising funding, given the particular challenges we face operating in the one universal area of human behavior we are all most fascinated by, most engaged with, and most fucked up about. Female founders write to me about this as well, given the sexism that operates amongst investors (last year, only 1.7% of all venture capital went to female-founded ventures). I’m sharing here my own investor-finding strategy, because while this is how I need to operate because not every investor sees the huge opportunity inherent in sextech (yet), the principle of this approach applies to anybody raising funding for anything.
My challenge is that I know that my investors are out there. There are a ton of them - in every country in the world. But they’re impossible to find by the usual means, because they all have one thing in common.
Your willingness to fund MakeLoveNotPorn is entirely a function of your personal sexual journey.
It’s a function of your personal lens on sex and sexuality, which has been shaped by your own experience - and I have no way to research and target for THAT.
Especially because sex is the one area where you cannot tell from the outside, what anybody thinks on the inside.
The people who look like they would totally get it, don’t. The people who look like complete prudes, do.
I’ve said for years to entrepreneurs, never waste your time banging your head against closed doors. Instead, engineer yourself into a position where doors open automatically as you approach.
So my investor-finding strategy is: I put what I’m doing with MakeLoveNotPorn out there, all the time. Across all my social channels. I do every media interview I’m asked to do. I go on every podcast I’m invited to. I do all that because I have to somehow make synaptic connections happen, that will attract my investors to me.
This is, theoretically, a long, slow, painful and highly inefficient process.
In practice, it works.
I am, quite frankly, gobsmacked at the amount of incoming investor interest I’ve had on LinkedIn. If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day I would say, “I’m all about LinkedIn” I would have laughed in your face. Today - I’m all about LinkedIn 😂 Investors reach out, out of the blue, saying, “I see you’re raising funding - I’d like to talk.” “I’m intrigued, tell me more.”
Linkedin is my single biggest investor lead generator. The LinkedIn algorithm works better and more effectively than on any other social channel - because when you post on LinkedIn, everybody in your network sees it. When someone likes your post, everyone in their network sees it. When someone comments on your post, everyone in their network sees it. When someone shares your post, everyone in their network sees it. You can get the word out about what you’re doing to far more people on LinkedIn than you can anywhere else - and attract your tribe to you.
I’m sharing this because it demonstrates something I’ve learnt over the past 14 years, working first to build MakeLoveNotPorn, and then to keep it operational in the face of significant challenges: it is always about the people who get it.
It’s not about the organization, or the fund, or the company, or the brand. It is always about finding the one person who really, really gets what you’re doing and why it’s so important - and how it can make money for them. When you do, they can make shit happen.
I’ve had that demonstrated to me so many times over the years - albeit to date, with roadblocks to follow-through.
The woman who overheard me talking about MakeLoveNotPorn at a cocktail party years ago and asked to meet. She was head of business development for short-form video at Amazon, said to me, “We have a huge sex-related products business”, and proposed a partnership where product pages would carry a SFW video intro from MakeLoveNotPornstars + clickthrough to #realworldsex videos where you could see products demonstrated the way they really need to be demonstrated. I said, we could host those videos in a special partnered section of our platform; she said, we don’t like to send people off Amazon, so we discussed an 18+ section of Amazon where these could be watched. She then did her best to make it happen at Amazon, but ran into internal resistance, and when she ultimately left Amazon, that opportunity left with her. Jeff Bezos, make it happen today!
The young woman who reached out (on LinkedIn!) from a big telecommunications provider to say she was a follower and fan, and that she’d just sat in a meeting where the team was discussing the fact that porn was far and away the most popular entertainment option, one that they should be bundling into their product. The men in the room proposed Pornhub - she said, I have a far better option. We progressed a dialogue where I was scheduled to meet with the Chief Marketing Officer - and then the company underwent a reorganization and the opportunity went away.
The Japanese billionaire who read an interview with me in Aera, the magazine of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, where I said I was looking for Japanese investors to fund MakeLoveNotPorn Japan (putting it out there!), called one of his portfolio companies and said, “This woman has a very interesting idea that the Japanese people do not understand - yet. I want to fund it. Make it happen.” Listen to my interview on my friend Rei Inamoto’s podcast to hear the story of how that played out, and why it ended up not happening due to circumstances beyond our control (the interview is in two parts).
For sextech founders and female founders alike, the point in all of this is - it’s the people who get what you’re doing, who will help you make it happen. Instead of cold-emailing investor after investor, cold-applying to fund after fund, put what you’re doing out there in every possible way you can, promote yourself and your business everywhere, and focus on attracting the people who get it to you. Especially on LinkedIn 🙂
Join MakeLoveNotPorn today to support my work to normalize and make it easier to talk about sex. Stock up on video credits by buying Cindy's Birthday Bundle to further support MakeLoveNotPorn!
I want to answer your questions - please respond directly here or email dearcindy@substack.com. I can’t wait to read!
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This is fantastic information for all start-ups. Thank you!
Another enlightening post! I’ve slipped on my LinkedIn posting these last couple weeks. Now I’m inspired to get back to it!