From episode: Breaking Through Your Own Obstacles with Tim Branyan
okay, so your new website, I went to go apply for it, and then I figured I would talk to you first. Cool. So I'm really interested in it. It's called True Fans, not to be confused with what's the other one, Only Fans? Yeah, that's one of them. And I'm really curious like how it works. And I know you have multiple other things going on and I wanna hear about those, but I was looking through the website. I love the idea of it, creators getting to really generate income. And so I'd love to just kind of understand the concept of True Fans. Sure, yeah, so we set out having, you know, the knowledge of the things that sucked, right? Like we didn't set out to have some amazing idea. We more so saw what was not good and not liked about traditional social media. And what was not good and not liked were things such as, you know, your engagement is limited unless you're paying for that engagement in most cases. You get a fraction of the people seeing your stuff, even though they're, you know, there to see you and see your posts and whatnots, but even in community pages, that's a bummer. The other thing that's a bummer is that it's expensive to get your stuff seen. The other thing that's a bummer is they're selling your data actively to advertisers. And some people are more keen to that now, they know that. And that's a bummer because you're not participating in any of that income that's directly a result of your activity on their platform. The other thing that's a bummer is that creators historically have been underpaid and undervalued. And, you know, at the time when we were first building this, it was happening more frequent where people were being deplatformed and completely banished with no customer support. Yeah, there's no customer support. There's no tech support. It's just like, okay, well, here's the card you're dealt. And that's it. Everything's gone, yep. Yeah, and that's a super, that's a bummer. Some people build their livelihoods on that foundation and that'll rock your world. So some of those things were a bummer. And we saw who was out there. We started doing reconnaissance or researching, you know, who's in this field. And everybody was pretty much in the porn industry that was in this space. And we were like, okay, here's what we can do. We can build a better platform. We can add more features and functionality. Here's some of those. We can pay more, we can pay faster. That'll make us, you know, the logical choice there. We can have amazing customer support. We can be a hundred percent invite only and then we won't allow porn. We'll be a place for people that want to have a membership site or be earning through their social media and their creativity, their efforts online, but they don't want to be associated with the stigma. So that's what we set out to do. That was three and a half years ago. I think we hit 4 million today, which is what one of my engineers sent me a text. And that's just this year. It's a new kind of milestone. We've got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world that are finding out about us, whether they're invited by a creator or they do go through our application process, but it is invite only. And that's for a couple of reasons. One, security. And then the other reason is because we don't want to be overrun by the adult space. So yeah, that's a little bit about us. I'm happy to expound any further. No, I just think it's awesome. It's exciting because I work with a lot of people who are creators, but they struggle with, and I struggle with still the same things that you talked about. And like I said, last year I lost my entire Instagram account with no reason, no understanding, nobody to reach out to. And luckily, I do have a contact who was able to kind of tell me what happened and get it back to me. It was nothing that I had actually done, but it would have been gone otherwise. And I would have had no idea how to get it back. And the worst part for me was, I mean, yes, there's a lot of social proof on there. There's a lot of hard work that I've done on there. But before I started working, that's where so many of the first pictures of my oldest two babies are. And they were gone. Like they weren't on my phone. They weren't on my iCloud. They were gone. And I was like, that was the worst part for me. My daughter's first steps, like I was just dying. But yeah, but then it also like from a very like professional standpoint, I was like, I have to do something better because I clearly don't own these spaces at
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