What was Freyja?

One of the most frustrating things about social media censorship for me is the fact that I can not be clear in my message. Indeed, I have had countless people comment on my posts and DM me asking the same thing;

What does Freyja do?

Despite popular belief, the reason what Freyja (and myself) does is not completely clear on social media is not because I’m incapable of writing a summary or forming company messaging, it’s because I can’t explain it without risking losing my, or the company's account. And when I depend so heavily on social media for my business that’s then a risk that I’m not going to take. 

So, what did Freyja do, and why did I start it? 

Prior to starting Freyja I had been heavily involved in rowing and American politics and in 2018 I ran a campaign to reduce sexual violence in rowing. The whole experience of running that campaign was incredibly frustrating, and it left me with a desire to do something else around this topic, I just wasn’t sure how that was going to manifest itself.

Then I figured it out. I was thinking about how insane it is how many people nowadays will slap or choke another person without asking, and I realised this was because none of us have a good sex education, and we all learn off porn. This was certainly true for myself. When thinking about this I had a eureka moment, and realised that if I wanted to do something about the problem I was so passionate about, then a safer porn site was going to be the solution. It’s fair to say that before I had a solid business plan/model, I only really had the idea of some form of social improvement. Now it was only a matter of figuring out how that solution would manifest itself. 

The first thing I did was speak with a number of different charities, and performers to ask what they wanted to improve in the industry. I wanted to get a better sense and understanding of the industry before committing to a business model. At first I envisioned a site where performers give the sex education since we all learn from them anyway. However, this isn’t fully what we ended up with. After speaking with a number of creators we settled on building a fan based model site, alongside an education site. The whole idea was to make a fan site that was safer for the models and the users and that combined sex education teaching. The company also had a number of creators working directly in it, so that it was built by performers, and with them unlike other companies in this space where creators are often kept out of the conversation. 

How did we make money? There were a couple different revenue streams for us: 

1. 15% sales commission off individual purchases 

2. Ads 

3. B2B adult marketing 

4. Assistant services   

Yet, in typical startup style what you start with is not usually what you end up with. There were two large USPs that came about during development/launch:

1. Safety is sexy 

When we were building this site we were trying to figure out solutions to some of the safety issues that happen on these types of third party content sites. We wanted to do everything we could to try to reduce harmful or illegal content from even going live. When we were in discussions about how to do so we developed our pre-moderation system. With this system all content would be reviewed in under 2 minutes before going live and meant that harmful content could be stopped before even going live. What this also meant is that if something was grey area or unclear, it gave us the time to have a conversation with the creator rather than just unfairly censor without reason. This safety system quickly became one of our most unique selling points, and my favourite part about the company. I still think that this type of model is the solution to harmful content on both adult and social media sites. 

2. Social media without censorship 

When we launched I only envisioned our fan site being for the adult industry. However, quickly after we saw sex educators, activists, and even charities signing up. This obviously seemed a bit strange. We discovered that this was because they saw Freyja as an alternative Instagram/Tiktok where they wouldn’t be unfairly censored for talking about sex, wellness and more. This was because our moderation system and guidelines meant that people could use Freyja without fear of harmful content like on some adult sites, but they also didn't have to be censored like they were on Instagram. Quite quickly we had to adjust the tech on our site to not make it just a fan site but more of an open social media where sex was okay. So, a good way to think of Freyja is as if a fan site/IG and tiktok had a child. When we expanded into wider social media, we had multiple tears where we could separate adult content, sensitive and non-sensitive so that you didn't have to come across what you didn’t want to see. This also essentially created multiple different advertising spaces for us, not just adults. 

Overall, they always say that pivots are important, and that startups need to know how to do this, and not just stick to their original concept. I’m glad we had this flexibility to pivot, and we adjusted when we saw something was or wasn’t working, however, in hindsight if there were some parts of this I wouldn’t have done with a second chance.