I dropped out of high school and don?t have an undergrad degree.
However, today I have an MBA from The University of Washington and I used what I learned during the program to bring my online porn business back from the dead. Go Dawgs!!!
I imagine the paragraph above just gave the Dean of Foster?s Business School a minor heart attack as well as a number of my connections here on LinkedIn who aren't really sure what Stripe Media does.
Thank God there is no better defibrillator for a biz school dean than reclaimed revenue and profits and I hope my other connections here find this to be an interesting read. So here we go, I promise I will keep it PG-13 and by the time you get to the end you will be happy to count me as an alumnus and a connection.
My company?s site,
Yanks.com, was launched in 2002 as a side project to learn how to make money on the internet. After over a decade, it is now widely regarded as a top ten adult amateur paysite. To understand more about the business model, visit the site, be ok with the dirty bits and look around. Obviously the site is NSFW, so do it at home.
When the idea for Yanks struck me, I was bartending at a popular nightclub in SoCal, so the pivot to porn didn?t exactly give me whiplash. We grew quickly and painlessly out of the gate, quite often doubling revenue a few times a year. While the adult niche we settled on is quite benign by internet standards, solo girls and girl-girl, our approach to content quality, customer service and B2B relationship management were all quite novel for our industry. Essentially we made great content and didn?t rip off our customers or partners. Crazy approach right?
Yanks needed to be saved because the credit crunch of the most recent recession decimated our gross revenue to the tune of a big fat -60%. Apparently porn is not entirely recession-proof and like any other business, losing that much cash flow is not cool, even if you do get to look at naked chicks most of the day.
From the moment I started the UW MBA program, I used my business as an ongoing, live 21-month case study to ?Lazurus? Yanks from the brink and eventually double her gross revenue.
Here are four things I did in particular:
Re-established Our Value Propositions and Story
The first step in retelling your story is to reread the one you are telling now. Is this still you? Does it represent the best of what you offer and who you are? Are you telling it to the market segments most likely to be captivated by it? In our case our story wasn?t being told well or to the right people. Yes we told people we were unique, honest and offered a great product. But our brand had creeped over the years in scope and scale entirely losing its focus. So we started from scratch. We told the story of who we have been and who we have become for the past decade and looked deeply at what type of person was most likely to spend money to be a part of that story. We then built our branding around telling those particular people who we are and what specifically they would be missing by not being a part of our story. We now ask them to join for specific reasons repeatedly, always highlighting our quality, integrity (huge in this business) and uniqueness relentlessly. Surprisingly, a strong ask was something that got lost almost entirely in our explosive growth and devastating decline. We were a great product behind a confusing, ineffective sell. We have solved that and the right people buy into our story regularly and bring along a lot of other fringe segments with them.
Analyzed and Revamped Our Revenue Streams and Cost Structure
On the net, traffic is king. However, for way too long we focused mostly on BIG POPULAR TRAFFIC sources and not big traffic $OURCE$ that actually gave us an ROI. During our reboot we switched to focusing on the later. Coming out of a recession, if not a near depression, we did what seemed illogical; we raised our prices. However, it wasn?t a cash grab as we concurrently raised our production value. We also analyzed every outgoing dollar, making sure to the penny it supported the premium value proposition we have always offered and are now selling with a laser focus.
Acquired and Retained Partners that Aligned to Who We Are and Dropped Those that Didn?t
The adult internet is a web of affiliate revenue sharing programs. B2B partnerships are crucial to success. In this business, your closest competitors are almost without exception your best opportunities for partnerships. Keeping like-minded folks clicking from your product to one that also suits their taste is how you funnel them down to a sale. These realizations lead us to really think over who we were working with and for exactly what reasons. This analysis then drove us to cull our partners on all levels, our upsells, both our incoming and outgoing traffic partners as well as our vendors. If you didn?t fill a necessary gap in our service model, align with and enhance our value props and, while this sounds odd, really want us and be excited to have us as a partner, you were out. Even if you have the capability to send us sales it was better to part ways.
Spoke the Language of Business to Refill Our Coffers
Once we had a plan we needed the money to execute it. That part was tricky. While porn accounts for 30% of all internet traffic and searches day-in and day-out, surprisingly you will never meet anybody at a bank that has ever seen a naked person on the internet. How odd, right? However, armed with my MBA and knowing the language of business I was able to speak well enough to convince the VP of a local NW bank that I just ran a business like any other and we needed cash. When I say the language of business, I am talking about both business terminology used effectively and perhaps more importantly the ability to spin out jargon and buzzwords so fast I could make a banker's head explode. I mean, ?You?re telling me this bank isn?t interested in working with ?Big Data? and ?Social Influencers?? Wow, have fun in bankruptcy.? Keep in mind this was a couple of years ago so those terms worked much more effectively on your average banker back then. Anyways, after a very stressful conference call with the bank's risk assessment team and various VP's they gave me the green light. On a side note, everyone but me on the call was female, so apparently only women at banks watch porn. Who knew?
Turning around our business went deeper than four simple bullet points. There were obviously other facets to us regaining our success. The most obvious one I didn?t mention in regards to the MBA was the people I met and worked with closely during the MBA program. Their genuine interest in what I did and how it compared to their squeaky clean mainstream world provided me with endless points of interest to ponder every time I left the classroom. The people you meet are simply invaluable.
At the end of the day my journey for my MBA was not only for a piece of paper, but for a set of tools I can use in any business environment. While I tried to make this a bit humorous, this is what I do. It pays my bills and allows me to support myself and the people I love. Whether you sell boats, bread, bedroom furniture or boobs, business is business. And thanks to my MBA business is now once again booming.
Connect with me on LinkedIn for more!
