Emulating Humans with NSFW Chatbots - with Jesse Silver

**Alessio** (0:05)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in Residence and Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:14)
Hey, and today we are back in the remote studio with a very special guest, Jesse Silver. Jesse, welcome. You're an unusual guest on our pod.

**Jesse Silver** (0:22)
Thank you. So happy to be on.

**Swyx** (0:24)
Jesse, you are working a unnamed, I guess, agency.
It describes itself as a creator tool for, you know, basically the topic that we're trying to get our arms around today is not safe for work, AI chatbots. I put a call out, your roommate responded to me and put us in touch. And we took a while to get this episode together. But I think a lot of people are very interested in the state of the arts, this business and the psychology that you've discovered and the technology. So, you know, we had a prep call discussing this and you were kindly agreeing to just share some insights because I think, you know, you understand the work that you've done and I think everyone's curious.

**Jesse Silver** (1:01)
Yeah, very happy to launch into it.

**Swyx** (1:03)
So maybe we'll just start off with like the most obvious question, which is, how did you get into the chatbot business?

**Jesse Silver** (1:08)
Yeah, so I'll also touch on a little bit of industry context as well. So back in January, 2023, I was looking for sort of a LLM based company to start.
And a friend of mine was making about 5K a month doing OnlyFans.
And she's working eight to 10 hours a day. She's one on one engaging with her fans. It's time consuming. It's draining. It looks fairly easily automatable. And so there's this clear customer need. And so I start interviewing her and interviewing her friends. And, you know, I didn't know too much about the fan platform space before this. But generally in the adult industry, there are these so-called fan platforms like OnlyFans. That's the biggest one. We don't happen to work with them. We work with other fan platforms.
And on these platforms, a sex worker that we call a creator can make a profile.
And a fan can subscribe to that profile and see sort of exclusive pictures and videos and then have the chance to interact with that creator on the profile and message them one on one. And so these platforms are huge. OnlyFans, I think, does about 6 billion per year in so-called GMV or gross merchandise value, which is just the value of all of the content sold on the platform. And then the smaller platforms that are growing are doing probably 4 billion a year.
And one of the surprising facts that I learned is that most of the revenue generated on a well-run profile on one of these platforms is from chatting. So like about 80%. And this is from creators doing these sort of painstaking interactions with fans. So they're chatting with them. They're trying to sell them videos. They're building relationships with them. It's very time consuming. Fans might not spend. And furthermore, the alternatives that creators have to just grinding it out themselves are not very good. They can run an offshore team, which is just difficult to do. You have to hire a lot of people. Internet is slow in other countries where offshoring is common. Or they could work with agencies. And so we're not an agency. Agencies do somewhat different stuff, but agencies are not very good. There are a few good ones. But in general, they have a reputation for charging way too much. They work with content, which we don't work with. They work with traffic. And so overall, this landscape became apparent to me where you have these essentially small, medium businesses, these creators, and they're running either anywhere between a few thousand a month to 200k a month in earnings to themselves with no state-of-the-art tools and no good software tools just because it sucks. And so it's this weird, incredibly underserved market. Creators have bad alternatives. And so I got together with a friend of mine to think about the problem, who ended up becoming my co-founder.
And we said, you know, let's build a product that automates what creators are doing to earn money. Let's automate this most difficult and most profitable action they do, which is building relationships with fans, texting them, holding sort of these so-called sexting sessions, selling media from the vault, negotiating custom content, stuff like that.
Earn creators more money, save them tons of time. And so we developed a prototype and went to AVN, which is one of the largest fan conferences, and just sort of pitched it to people in mainstream porn. And we got like 50K in GMV and profiles to work with. And that allowed us just to start bootstrapping. And it's been about a year. We turned the prototype into a more developed product in December, relaunched it.