NEW YORK – Ever since she launched MakeLoveNotPorn.com, I’ve been quietly rooting for Cindy Gallop and the MNLP project – not because I want Gallop’s vision of what erotica should be to completely supplant and replace what some have called “traditional” porn, but to expand and improve on what the already-broad universe of porn has to offer.
In the intervening years since Gallop unveiled MLNP, she has been open about the difficulty of drumming up funding for the project. In 2014, after getting frustrated with hesitance of venture capitalists to invest in MLNP, Gallop turned her attention toward cryptocurrency as a possible source of capital.
“Silicon Valley welcomes innovation in every other area of our lives except this one, and this is the one that needs it most,” Gallop said at the time. “Everything that is happening in the bitcoin space is directly analogous to what has the potential to happen in the sex-tech space.”
Gallop’s hopes for cryptocurrency evidently don’t include thinking an ICO is the right play for MLNP, however.
“We are a mass-market play,” Gallop said more recently. “Our customers use credit cards, not cryptocurrencies.”
While Gallop has seen success with crowdfunding efforts to back her “social sex revolution,” Techcrunch reports her biggest benefactor is a single, mysterious investor, who recently chipped in another $2 million to the MLNP cause.
First on the agenda with respect to the new funding is increasing the size of the MLNP full time staff from one to five, including the already-announced new CTO, Aaron Sikes. After ramping up on staff, Gallop says she wants to develop a messaging app which is explicitly for sexting. Among other things, this would give consumers a sex-friendly messaging platform which won’t subsequently yank the rug from beneath their feet by abruptly declaring sexually-explicit materials to be in violation of its acceptable use terms or content policy.
Ultimately, to reach her goals for MLNP, Gallop will need to raise a lot more than $2 million, a fact of which the experience brand-builder and marketing guru is keenly aware. To build “the Wattpad for sex” or to become “the Khan Academy for sex” – two ways Gallop has described ambitions for MLNP – is no minor matter, after all.
Gallops sites are set even higher than further building up the MLNP brand, however; according to Techcrunch, she aims to raise $200 million to establish a sex-tech fund of her own, precisely so she can seize upon the sort of opportunities from which mainstream venture capitalists typically back away.
Is it doable? Only time will tell – but if Gallop has her way, we won’t be waiting long to see her make a big impact on the market she wants to affect.
“I don’t wait for things to change,” Gallop told Techcrunch. “I make them change.”
