📚 Make $10K MRR Selling Erotic Fiction

Brainstorms Issue #20

🚨 Announcements: Releasing All Issues + Podcast🚨

Releasing Past Issues: I've gotten dozens of requests for access to the previous issue. Ask and you shall receive. Here's the link to all the previous issues.

Podcast: For those of you looking for more great ideas, I've started a podcast where I'll be riffing on startup ideas with my friends. This is is an experiment, so let me know what you think! Check it out here.

P.S I'm working on getting these uploaded to Spotify and other platforms. 

Alright, let's dig into this week's brainstorm.

Make $10K MRR Selling Erotic Fiction 

This week we’re talking about sex. Why? Because sex sells.

In 2019 there were over 42 Billion visits to Pornhub, which means there was an average of 115 million visits per day... One-Hundred-Fifteen Million Per Day. That’s the equivalent of the populations of Canada, Australia, Poland, and the Netherlands all visiting in one day.

Alright, let’s get our heads out of the gutter because we’re not talking about porn.

We’re talking about erotic fiction, porn’s classy cousin.

For those of you who don’t know, erotic fiction is a literary genre made up of books and articles that present the sexual aspects of love front and center - oh, and it’s a MASSIVE industry.

Romance/Erotic fiction by the numbers:

• It’s a $1.4B industry (the largest of any book genre)

• ~⅓ of all fiction books are romance/erotic fiction

• Readers of this genre read 5x more than the next closest genre.

When I first heard about this, the wheels in my head started turning - I decided to dig deeper.

What I found blew my mind.

For starters, here’s what the top sites look like 👇

Yet somehow Literotica gets 46M monthly visits and Nifty Erotic Stories gets 7M monthly visits.

What. The. Fu...

Naturally, I asked, “how has no one disrupted this industry yet”?

The answer was surprisingly simple, major advertising platforms don’t allow advertising of any products, services, or sites related to sex - which includes erotic fiction.

This makes distribution incredibly tough for someone starting out, and even harder to dethrone legacy players.

But, I’ve got an idea…

Partner with OnlyFans (OF) creators, write custom erotic stories for their audience using the creator’s likeness, and have them promote the stories via their channel.

For example - Ashley is an OF creator. She promotes her new short story, Ashley’s Adventures (which we wrote). She sells that story for a premium to her audience

We take 50% for doing all the work, she takes 50% for letting us leverage her image and her audience.

This 1.) solves the distribution problem and 2.) gets you in front of an audience who’s already paying a premium for sex-related content.

Now, I know this sounds a little out there - I get it. But I think this is just crazy enough to work.

Note: If you’re unfamiliar with OnlyFans, check out the deep dive I did on it a few weeks ago.

Here’s how you could pull this off:

First, you’ll need to get a couple of OF creators on board. If they won’t play ball, the idea is dead in the water.

But, you’ll need to find the right OF creators. I’d look for creators who have a small to medium following but are using a personal/nonprofessional email for business requests.

This tells you they are looking for more opportunities, but aren’t big enough to be managed by an agent - in other words, they’re easier to talk to.Also, erotic fiction is mostly consumed by women, so you'll want to focus on creators whose fan base is female.

Once you find 5-10 creators, you’ll need to get their attention.

This is where most people fail. The problem is that content creators and influencers are busy people and get hit up ALL THE TIME for deals.To break through the noise, add value immediately. Don’t send a generic outreach message - 1.) that’s lame 2.) if you do that, this 100% won’t work.

Here’s what I’d do instead: go to Wattpad, search “erotic fiction”, and find a writer to write you a short erotic fiction sample. This should cost you $100 max.

Next, you’re going to send 5-10 highly personalized messages and include your sample. Ideally, customize the sample using the influencer's name and other variables so they know this was clearly written for them.

This will convey the value you bring to the table while also showing them you’re serious.

Lastly, you’re going to pick 1-3 creators to test the idea with. The goal here is to see if fans will convert to the offer, so start with a small test group and go from there.

At a price of $10/month with a 50/50 revenue share you’d need to convert 2,000 fans to hit $10K MRR - this is very doable.

That’s it. You could test this idea in 1-2 weeks if you move fast. 

Thanks for reading - now get out there and build it! 

Catch ya next week, 

Keevin ✌

I know this issue was a bit different than previous issues. Let me know what you think! 

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