Revolutionising sex, tech, and funding: an interview with MakeLoveNotPorn founder Cindy Gallop

Cindy Gallop, an advertising executive turned entrepreneur, is best known for founding MakeLoveNotPorn, a user-generated, human-curated social sex video platform challenging mainstream adult content. Gallop has been a vocal advocate for sexual positivity, breaking societal taboos, and fostering a more inclusive and diverse conversation around human sexuality.

In 2009, in your Ted Talk,  you claimed that people were getting all of their sex education from hard core porn, do you think that's changed since? Do you think there's been a shift? What have you noticed that has changed?

Cindy: Well, in answer to the first part of your question, just look around you, what do you think? Look at the newspaper headlines everyday, what do you think? You think it’s changed? No. It’s only gotten worse and worse and worse. And to be perfectly frank, that would not be the case if I'd been able to raise the funding back in 2009 that I was looking for, because when the entire world responded to my TED Talk, and I realized that I'd uncovered a huge global social issue, that was when I set out to turn MakeLoveNotPorn into a business that does good and makes money simultaneously.  And I set out to raise the funding I needed to do that. If I had raised the kind of funding that Mark Zuckerberg was able to raise with Facebook then today MakeLoveNotPorn would be the Facebook of social sex and we would not be in the situation we are today as a tiny bootstrapping startup. 

I launched MakeLoveNot Porn (eleven years ago now) as the world's first and only user-generated, 100% human curated social sex video sharing platform. The way to think about this is: if porn is the Hollywood Blockbuster movie, Make Love Not Porn is the badly needed documentary. And in the past eleven years, we – even at our tiny bootstrapping micro level – have proven the concept. Make Love Not Porn has the power to change people's sexual attitudes and behaviour for the better, in a way that nothing else can. And if investors had funded us with the kind of funding they lavish on white growth founders developing utterly frivolous food delivery apps, the world would be in a much better place today. 

Why do you think it's gotten worse?

Cindy: Again, are you reading the newspaper headlines all around you?

Has it gotten worse? Or is it just staying the same? 

Cindy: The Guardian published last month: “Too much too young: I talked to 10,000 children about pornography. Here are 10 things I learned.”

I say to parents that you cannot begin talking about sex too early – or about porn. A study of 19,000 parents worldwide identified that the average age at which a child is first exposed to hardcore porn online is only six years old. 

The very important thing about the question you just asked: never ever ask this question in the passive tense– nothing gets better on its own. All of this changes when you and I – and everyone else – make it change. And I don’t wait for things to change, I make it change.

What's been your journey with funding? Where did you start and where are you today?

Cindy: My journey is very different from those of other more conventional founders. The extraordinary response to my Ted Talk led to the launching of MakeLoveNotPorn (which was originally a tiny public service announcement). MakeLoveNotPorn.com started as a site of purely copy, yet the entire world responded. Thousands of people from every single country wrote to me, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out to me, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they never told anyone before. That’s when I realized that I had, inadvertently, uncovered a huge global social issue that needed a solution.

I concepted that solution and didn’t pitch MakeLoveNotPorn.tv for two years, because that’s how long it took for me to find one angel investor who got it and put up $500,000 in Seed funding for me to build the platform, who’s been an amazing support ever since. He’s been my only investor up until recently, and has put in over $3 million dollars to keep us going. But my challenge is finding investors. My strategy has to be to put what I’m doing out there all the time, across all my social channels. I do every single media interview I'm asked to. I go on every single podcast (no matter how small the audience). I can’t do what everybody else does “oh this VC fund invests in my sector.” Nobody is openly investing in the world of Sex Tech. So, theoretically, this a long slow painful and highly inefficient process, in practice it does actually work. And that’s an enormously encouraging thing. I am, frankly, gobsmacked at how effective LinkedIn is in bringing incoming investor interest. LinkedIn is my number one lead generator. The other thing I’m still lacking is that one all important lead investor. I’ve yet to find the one person who is willing to lead, to be public about a vote of confidence and to stand shoulder to shoulder with me that I can wrangle all the lemmings in behind them.

Did you ever try the traditional VC route? 

Cindy: Yeah. initially. Yet I couldn’t get across the threshold. I have a friend who is a very prominent female in VC, she said to me years ago “I think this could be huge, but if I took it to my partners they would say ‘what are you on?’”.

Why do you think the traditional VC route didn’t work?

Cindy: Today, we don’t live in a sexually liberated society. Something else I’ve been asked many times over the past fourteen years: “So Cindy, why do you think we are all so repressed about sex?” The answer is due to three main reasons: 1) Centuries old repression, religion, socio-cultural dynamics in every single country in the world. 2) The patriarchy. Historically every single  institution, including government and religion, has been male dominated. We as women have never been allowed to bring our lens on human sexuality, and the world is a poorer place for it. 3) Very straightforwardly: there are not enough people like me. And what I mean by that is the world makes it fucking difficult to innovate and disrupt social narratives around sex. Many people have tried and given up. And I don’t blame them because my life is shitty on a daily basis because of what I do. We need many more people like me who will not give up, no matter what. 

We do not live in a sexually liberated society. Men might tell you it’s sexually liberated, women sure as hell won’t. And in fact, we are going backwards with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with the hypocritical censorship and puritanism on social platforms on anything female lens to do with sexuality. No, we do not live in a sexually liberated society and I and every other female sex tech founder is out to bring the female lens to bear on all of this that will create a safer, healthier and kinder world for everybody including men.

Women empowerment and the female lens have been part of the zeitgeist (now more than ever). Have you seen a noticeable shift? 

Cindy: Of course I haven’t. At the top of every industry is a closed group of men with power. They are sitting very pretty with the presumption that they are the audience for everything. They’ve got their enormous salaries, their gigantic bonuses, their big stock options, their lavish expense accounts… Why on Earth would they ever want to rock the boat? They have to talk about gender equality, diversity and inclusion. They have to appoint Chief Diversity Officers. They have to have diversity initiatives. They have to say the word diversity a lot, especially in public. Secretly, deep down inside,my view is that they don't want to change a thing because the system is working just fine for them as it currently is. 

That closed group atop of every industry, are preventing that from happening. So no, of course I haven’t seen that be the change it needs to be. Even when we had a summer like the one we just had, where Barbie is now Warner Brothers’ biggest grossing movie of all time, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have made billions out of their tours…

So what do we do as women who want to see change and feel empowered, and don’t want to become enraged and bitter?

Cindy: It’s very simple. Many years ago I spoke at a conference in Dublin called Inspirefest, started by the female editor of Silicon Republic as an answer to the white male dominated Web Summit, which at the time was still taking place in Dublin. An incredibly diverse speaker lineup, I came on at the end of the two days of the programming, and I said to the audience: “we’ve spent the past two days talking about all the barriers that we all face as female founders and investors. I’m here to tell you that you have no idea how swiftly all of those barriers disappear, how quickly they melt away like snow the moment we demonstrate that we can make an absolute shit ton of money.” That’s the answer. And by the way, it’s obviously an answer that is – unfortunately – hard to implement when we don’t get funding the way the white bros do. But that’s the answer. The day we prove we can make a shit ton of money, and we do that collectively,  that’s the day we drive a massive emotional mindset shift in the white male investment universe.

And why hasn't that been happening to date?

Cindy: Because nobody’s achieved that. What is patently obvious is that we are talking about a scenario where data means fuck all, rational facts and figures do nothing. We’ve had the data for decades that proves that female founders exit faster, female founders burn less cash, female founders get to profit quicker, female founders build better business culture (we don’t get sued for sexual harassment on a regular basis), none of that matters. The only thing that will make things change  is a massive emotional mindset shift  in investors and that happens when we prove that the female lens makes an absolute shit ton of money.

How do you not get demoralized? And how are you so fearless in calling it out? How do you move with such ease calling out things the way they are and being fearless around it without having that fear of ostracizing yourself from access?

Cindy: So one answer for the first part of that question and two answers for the second. In terms of how I keep going, fortunately the thing that most motivates me is the dynamic that I call “I’m going to fucking well show you” — you tell me it can’t be done, I’m going to fucking well show you.

For the second part of your question, how do I call all of this out? For the same reason that I have been exalting women for years to get very, very angry. And I ask them to do that because we are never encouraged to get angry. You know, nice girls don’t get angry. But when we get angry we make shit happen. And we have so much to be angry about. I’m angry on a daily basis about the barriers I’m facing. I’m a big fan of being your own filter, and what I mean by that is as you will have seen, my LinkedIn bio says “I like to blow shit up, I’m the Michael Bay of business” and how that came about was  many years ago I was talking to some potential consultancy clients, because I have to support myself alongside Make Love Not Porn through paid consultancy and speaking. I was talking about my approach to consulting, and I said to them “I consult very selectively, only for clients and brands who want to change the game in their particular sector. You come to me for radical innovative groundbreaking transformative. I don’t do status quo.” and said lightheartedly off the cuff “I like to blow shit up, I’m the Michael Bay of business” everyone laughed and I left the room thinking actually that’s a good way of summing up what I do, so I’ve been using that line ever since. But I don’t use that line as a bit of fun, whimsy or creativity… I use that line entirely deliberately. Because when I characterize what I do in that way, it attracts the people who want what I do and it repels the ones who don’t. And I sure as hell want to repel the ones who don’t because they’re a waste of time, effort and money. Be your own filter. Say what you think, put it out there… You’ll attract the people that get you and you’ll keep away the ones who don’t, and you don’t want to engage with the ones who don’t.

But don’t you need to change people in the middle if you want to create real, long term, lasting change?

Cindy: Have you ever noticed the people in the middle taking any action whatsoever to help you?  No. I rest my case.

I read that you hope to raise $20 million for MakeLoveNotPorn, I’m curious how that’s going? 

Cindy: Sure. Obviously what I cannot do is the conventional approach of “right, I’m opening the round here, we’ve got three months, I’m closing…” So, with Make Love Not Porn it will take as long as it takes.

I have two tasks: I have to raise that funding and I have to keep my business alive long enough to benefit from it when I finally raise it. So, where I’m at is for the full funding round. I've spent the past year acquiring  a list of interested investors – but of course with that comes the question of “who’s the lead?” so that’s the one thing I’m missing at the moment. Although I’m having some conversations I’m hopeful I might deliver that. Because once I have the lead investor, as I said, I have a ton of lemmings I can wrangle behind them. I’m very confident in my ability to do that. That’s the overall goal. In the meantime I’ve got to keep my business alive, and it feels like often I’ve been staring down the end of my financial runway for the full ten years I’ve been doing, I’m staring at the end of my financial runway yet again, so I’m also in the short term raising bridge funding to keep us going long enough to benefit from the full funding, so those are the two things I’m doing simultaneously.

Got it. What’s the current revenue model?

Cindy: I first saw the creator economy forty years ago. I concepted Make Love Not Porn around a revenue share model to democratize access to income, so our members pay to subscribe, rent and stream social sex videos. Half that revenue goes to our contributors whom we call “make love not porn stars.”

And what do you think of OnlyFans?

Cindy: So, OnlyFans is a completely different proposition from MakeLoveNotPorn because OnlyFans is performative, fan requested, etc. Ours is simply the way people have sex in the real world. OnlyFans missed a huge opportunity because, had this been their agenda, and had they wanted to, they could’ve mainstreamed adult content as entertainment for all the rest of us. But they didn’t want to.

OnlyFans was founded by white men, they absolutely subscribe to the usual wide growth founder policy as evinced by everybody (Tumblr, Instagram, Mattel) where the white founder thinks that in order to grow they need to keep adult content off their platform (which was the biggest mistake Tumblr ever made). You may recall that several years ago, OnlyFans announced that they would no longer allow adult content on the platform. Total outrage followed, and they had to rescind that statement literally within a week or so of making it. What is appalling is their refusal to admit that what they designed OnlyFans to be powered by they do not welcome. That’s a huge shame.

What’s also infuriating to me, and my two biggest business growth inhibitors are a) the fact that we are banned from advertising anywhere and b) payments. Funding would solve both of those. 

I would’ve loved OnlyFans to fly the flag for all of us, and to absolutely have the agenda of mainstreaming all of this in a way that would benefit in the sex tech and adult world.

Do you think there’s an element of sex that will always be taboo because of vulnerability?

Cindy: I’ve been readily asked, usually by some frightfully nice intro in the BBC “oh but Cindy, sex is a private, sacred, intimate thing, don’t you feel that what you’re doing with Make Love Not Porn is cheapening it?” My response to that is “do me a favour, go to Google and type the word ‘porn’ into the search box –like millions of children do every single day– and look at the top ten websites that come up on the first Google page, go to each of those websites  take a long, hard look at the home page and then tell me I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”  

My second response to your question is that, ironically, that vulnerability is exactly what MakeLoveNotPorn celebrates. We are talking about the universal area of human experience.

I’ve designed Make Love Not Porn to be fully diverse and inclusive – and we are. Our members and our “make love not porn stars” are every age from 18 to 80. Male, female, trans, non binary. All races and ethnicities. Straight and LGBTQ. But, in the years we’ve been operating as a business, we’ve observed that Make Love Not Porn is especially a revelation to men. More men send us grateful emails and leave appreciative comments than anybody else, because we are something utterly unique men will find nowhere else on the internet: a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. 

How do we get this in the mainstream?

Cindy: Great question. And, you know, what’s frustrating me too is that I’ve built a very unique business model that I don’t get enough credit for because people get stuck in “Oh people having sex in video!” 

We operate in a way that everybody else on the internet should be learning from, I designed MakeLoveNotPorn for the female lens to be the safest place on the internet – I design it around what everybody else should have and nobody else did: human curation.

There is no self publishing of anything on MakeLoveNotPorn. Our curators watch every single frame of every single video from beginning to end, before we approve or reject and we publish it– no one else does that.  We review every post on every member profile, and by the way, on Make Love Not Porn your profile post can be as safe work or as not safe work as you like, but we review them, we approve or reject and we publish them, no one else does that. We review every single comment on every single video before we approve or reject when we publish it– no one  else does that. We can vouch for every single piece of content on our platform in a way that nobody else can. And bear in mind, we are tiny-bootstrapping (have no money) and we’ve human curated everything now for nearly eleven years. Imagine what Facebook, YouTube, Instagram could do with their billions if they chose to. Safety on the internet is not a matter of viability, it is a matter of will. 

It’s actually not possible to complete submitting on Make Love Not Porn unless it’s fully consensual, legal, everyone’s over 18. Even when a video passes all of those paperwork tests, we train our curators, while they’re watching those videos from beginning to end, to ask themselves “as I watch this video, do I feel like the camera is in a position where everybody knows it’s there? Do I have a bad feeling about this video?” Because what we say to our curator’s is that you don’t have to rationalize a bad feeling, if you’ve got a bad feeling we are not publishing it. That’s it. Nobody else anywhere on the internet goes one thousandth of the way that Make Love Not Porn does to keep everybody safe. That is the future of the internet designed and built for the female lens, and it’s a fucking crime – and I use that word deliberately – that it doesn’t get funded.

Can you do that at scale?

Cindy: Absolutely. Obviously this is built into our business model and it’s scalable.  The analogy is, our human curation workforce is simply our version of any enterprise software unicorn’s human salesforce.