 Thank you so much for coming and listening to our upcoming talk. So we'll jump right into it. So I'm here with Caroline Spiegel, who is the founder of Quinn, and I'd love to hear in your words what Quinn is, and then we'll get into how you came up with the idea. Yeah, so hi, everyone. I'm Caroline. So excited to be here at Slush, and thank you, Kia. So Quinn is an app for audio erotica. You can kind of think of it as like an only fans for erotic storytelling. So there's no visuals, no images, or videos on the app. And we're trying to bring a new medium to the erotic content landscape and really focus on immersive, ethical, female-first content. So tell us how you came up with this very unusual product idea. So Quinn actually came from a very personal, intimate need, personal need, as so many products do. I was studying computer science at Stanford, and my junior year I had really struggled with an eating disorder. And as sort of a result of that, I struggled with something called FSD, or female sexual dysfunction. Obviously, we're all kind of familiar with ED and erectile dysfunction, but FSD goes kind of overlooked. There are over 30 drugs on the market for FDA-approved drugs, on the market for ED and zero for FSD. So kind of had this realization my senior year and saw sort of the dearth of erotic content options for women, the dearth of sexual wellness products for women, and then kind of a winding road stumbled upon audio erotica on Reddit and Tumblr. And if you guys kind of were around in the fan fiction days, you know, on Tumblr, on Wattpad, on Reddit, that's where this genre really got started. So I fell in love with the medium there, and the rest of the kind of history dropped out and started Quinn. Okay, so you found the medium and then you realized there's not really a good app or user experience, and you decided to build that. Exactly. Did you have any apprehension about building a company and a product in this space, which is still, you know, kind of stigmatized, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that? Yeah, I mean, I was really nervous to tell my parents, but they're actually really chill about it. And that's one thing that I've learned about building in this category, is you can never judge, like a book by its cover, in the sense that some people who seem super sex-positive and progressive actually end up being the most conservative and the most sort of like repressed and vice versa. So I definitely think building in this category has made me just realize, yeah, not to judge people too soon and to, you know, try and meet them where they are. We'll get into other aspects of company building, but you've also raised some venture funding. I think you said about $8 million or so. Tell me about that experience, and if you've taken any sort of lessons in how you want to do future fundraising. Yeah, I mean, I guess the biggest lesson from pitching for Quinn and raising for Quinn is just to kind of to really, like, not take no as personal rejection and really try and kind of like remove your ego from the process, which if there are any founders in the audience, it's literally impossible. Raise your hand if you're a founder. Okay. Okay. So you believe your baby is like the most beautiful baby ever. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it's your baby and it's really painful to get a lot of no's, but I guess just to remind everyone, everyone gets turned down all the time, constantly, and it's your resilience and your ability to bounce back and learn from the no that matters most. Speaking of, one of the things I find super interesting about Quinn is that and yourself is that, yes, you're building a product and a company in this kind of unusual space, but you're also just a founder, like everybody else, like everybody else in this room that's building a company and a product. So how do you, tell us about your approach to product building. Where do you start? What are your KPIs? What, do you have a product team that you meet with all the time? Do you guys talk about, you know, we're gonna tweak the fonts, we're gonna change? Yeah, it's really funny, because so often in these interviews, I'm really talking about, you know, building through stigma and sex and all of that, which I love, but it's also really fun to talk about just generally my perspective on company building and product building. One thing that I think really powers all of Quinn is we're about the details. And I think there's this myth that, you know, you should just kind of like hire great people and let them do whatever and let them do great work. But how do you know that the people are great and that the work is great if you're not in the details with them? And I don't think that's micromanagement. I think it's just being in the product and the details and the work and having experts lead different functions in the work so that you don't kind of end up with PM culture that gets, you know, kind of politicky and difficult. And so we really focus on reviewing, editing feedback is constant, being in the details. And I also like to tie it back to the sex part of Quinn and the spicy part of Quinn. The standard for our product is so much higher because immediately people see this product and they laugh at it, they think it's stupid or silly or I don't know, not a legitimate thing. And so we have to go the extra mile to make sure we're taken seriously. And so that's definitely a part of our culture. Is that like sort of an additional pressure that you feel that you need to legitimize your app and your product more than people building business software? Yes and no. I mean, it's also for the customer because I think like users are super on edge when they're looking at a new erotic content product or really any new product, but they're particularly sensitive. They're used to kind of these mainstream tube sites where there's pop-up windows and the UX is terrible and hard to navigate and they're on edge. So it's really important to make the user feel safe and then of course also to be taken seriously by investors and by other kind of gatekeepers and tech. So let's talk about the community. You have creators, you have listeners who listens to the content. Tell us like how big is the community now of creators and of folks who tune in? Yeah, so we don't have like an enormous amount of creators. We have around 70 now and it's really like a curated marketplace. And eventually we'd like to be able to expand that but it's this balance of increasing the offering and keeping the quality bar really high. And then each sort of creator brings on their own fan base and there's different sort of fandoms and personal brands that each creator sort of adopts. And as far as subscribers, we're really excited. We've grown 400% year over year for two years. And it was not always like that before 2021, but now things are going better. So on the listener and the creator side. That's interesting that you said that a lot of the creators already had followings and listeners and they just brought them on. Do you have any folks who kind of started by joining Quinn and making content there? Yeah, Quinn is unique in that we're like, look at only fans or Patreon, right? Creators are bringing their audiences onto Patreon, which is obviously great for Patreon. But it's hard to be discovered. I would say TikTok is a good example of something that's like a discovery engine. And Quinn is a little bit of both. And we're actually a hybrid in a lot of different ways. We borrow some things from, like traditional media, we borrow some things from platforms, like only fans and Patreon, various kind of like features and creator things we do. But yeah, and I was gonna say something else about the creators of their fans. Anyway, yes, it happens both ways. Yeah. How do you think about these other platforms that a lot of those creators came from before Quinn existed? Do you think of them as competitors or do you think of them as just, they're different channels for the creators to engage with communities? Well, you know, actually I just remembered what I was gonna say and it answers this question is that like the vast majority of the customers on only fans are men, right? Which should not be like a massive surprise, but really think about that. Like our creators were actually not on only fans because they create content for women. So we're actually one of the like first kind of platforms that's like, I don't wanna say objectifying men, but like men are the commodity, right? These like hot voice actors that girls love and we're doing the opposite, the inverse of only fans, right? So yeah. So they're not on only fans because they're not selling like videos and pics, right? They're selling these hot sort of erotic stories, audio stories. So where were they? Were they just putting up videos on Reddit or audio on Reddit? Like where are they coming from to you? This is a great question. They come from everywhere truly, but what we look for is a large female following, a large very engaged female following. You know, like you'll see some of these like hot chefs that blow up on TikTok or like the guy that chops wood, right? It's like kind of the female gaze is still a little inscrutable to me, but we find them there. We find them on Reddit, on Tumblr, these other audio erotica communities and then also more traditional voice acting and acting backgrounds as well. And how do you think about business model and evolving that and growing that? Yeah, I mean, so much to say here, but I think the traditional sort of like subscription, media content business, I'm thinking like headspace and calm, right? They have sort of evolved into being performance marketing arbitrage. So they're not really, like they're not known for their user engagement. Whereas there are, Quinn for example, 25% of our users use the app every day. So they have over 28 sessions every month. So this is like a, we're not trying to do performance marketing arbitrage. We're not interested in locking you into a lifetime subscription for something you don't use. So anyway, moving away from that and I think moving into space of like micro payments to creators, right? Like I mentioned, they have these die hard fan bases and what if I really like bad influence and I wanna give him like a rose or I wanna buy him a cup of coffee, right? Things that resemble only fans or a Patreon but they have sort of the Quinn twist and the Quinn safety and the Quinn brand appeal that we can offer. Are you seeing trends, like a really common trend in the creator economy is where you see a small number of super creators who are really responsible for the bulk of the content or the bulk of the revenue or the bulk of the engagement from the fans. Are you seeing a similar distribution or is it more? Yeah, what a great question. We do. I guess I've heard it referred to as like the creator power law but it actually is true on sites like Netflix too. Like Squid Games and Bridgerton. These shows that just blow all the other shows out of the water and it's the same on only fans. There are these creators at the top that are doing 80% of the whole platform's revenue and on Quinn we have some juggernaut voice actors who are just the top dogs. So definitely notice that it's really interesting. What are the characteristics of these super creators on Quinn? Well, some of them brought their platforms onto Quinn and our top creator, Nadio, check him out, seriously, like you guys all know, he actually started on Quinn. So he was like someone who was kind of discovered and built his fan base just to kind of on Quinn. He's an anonymous voice actor and I think it's kind of a mix of things but his storytelling is incredible, it's very immersive and he does a range of stories so he'll do what we call like M-DOM or Ruffer content and then he'll also do boyfriend, gentle content and even a little historical sort of regency era every now and again. Interesting, kind of shifting gears a little bit. What have you found to be the most surprising challenge and then the most surprising kind of awesome part about building Quinn? Okay, so I think the most surprising challenge, you know what, I think it's actually related to the being in the details thing. The challenge is just the constant refocusing. I think as a founder, you're pulled in a million different directions and I didn't think like that this would be the challenge but the challenge is saying no to like 99% of things and only doing the one thing that moves the needle and it's challenging to do that because you're like, oh my God, I want to do this, I want to build this feature, I want to do this partnership and just being like no to basically everything, yes to this one thing that's moving the needle. The best part or the most surprising best part, I guess maybe it's a little cheesy but like talking to our listeners and the people that use Quinn and love Quinn and like it's transformed their sex lives, there are a lot of people just, in varying degrees it could be, oh I'm going through like a brief dry spell and Quinn really helped me reignite that part of myself to I had a miscarriage and I haven't felt turned on in years, right? So everyone struggles in this area and it's really nice to be able to add a little bit of joy to the world. Do you still do like subscriber, like user testing sessions? Definitely. Well we get a lot of unsolicited DMs of just like various essays of feedback which we love but we also do like little focus groups or kind of our more like die hard subscribers that really love Quinn, we ask them often for specific feedback. I should have known that you get a lot of unsolicited DMs and opinions. Yeah. So this would not be a tech or startup conference in 2023. If we didn't talk about AI, obviously. Obviously. Are you guys infusing any kind of AI capabilities? How are you thinking about that? Yeah. I feel like the challenge for us is really, AI is like this buzzword, yeah. And for creators, Quinn was built by and with and for creators and so AI can kind of sound like especially generative AI can sound a little threatening to be like, we're gonna replace your voice out. We're gonna replace your voice out. AI, so we would never ever do that. Sorry, I don't wanna like talk over you. No, take your time. So we would never do that. But I definitely think we're like looking at these companies that have really captured users' imaginations like replica and character AI that are really compelling and just interesting to kind of see how they're moving in this space and keep tabs on it. And we use AI, not generative AI in our recommendation engine and in other parts of our product too. But I get the hype. I get it. What is your take on generative AI based content? Yeah. I mean, it's particularly difficult in erotic content where consent is such a big piece of it. You could imagine someone using a creator or a celebrity's voice say to say like things that this celebrity did not consent to say or to saying or doing, which is problematic. So I'm so sorry. Okay. No, I'm so sorry. Take your time. Yeah. So there can be a lot of different like problems but I think like probably with a lot of consent and protections of the creators and voices involved I think it could be interesting but it's like really important to do it ethically, if at all. What about the listener aspect of it? I know only fans, you mentioned them. They're not allowing AI created content in part because they want the fans to actually know that they're communicating with the creators that they're subscribing to. No, that's exactly it. Both the perspectives go hand in hand. It's like creators obviously don't want their work stolen to replace them obviously and listeners don't want their favorite creators to go away and they wouldn't even want to consume content that didn't feel truly authentic. And I think erotic content and comedy is another one. Just generally like creativity, these things that are like uniquely human kind of soulful experiences that are, we're way, way, way off from not even kind of coming into Quinn's vision, yeah. Are you thinking about going beyond what you're doing right now? Is Quinn gonna be offering all kinds of content? You know, so we're never gonna offer visual content but definitely interested in longer form audio content and Audible's top grossing genre is romance. So very interested in that and very interested in just erotic storytelling and all its forms. Okay, I mean, I'm just excited to see where the app goes in a few years. Kind of stepping, taking a step back, just bigger picture in the future. What is putting your founder business hat on? Where do you see Quinn as a company, like 10 years from now? Is it gonna be publicly traded? Is it going to be a unicorn? Like business-wise, where do you think this is going? I really, I'm hoping, yes, it will be. I think it's really about empowering creators to create erotic content that doesn't look like the kind of content, erotic content we're used to consuming. It's not porn hub, it's not this sort of graphic, almost violent, just like in your face imagery. It's more story-driven imagination, engaging and flirting and slow burn. All these things that actually capture our imagination all the time in, you know, 50 Shades of Grey, Bridgerton and other things in mainstream pop culture. So yeah, just kind of bringing more creators into this space of erotic storytelling and scaling, hopefully rapidly, and yeah. I mean, the reason I ask is because obviously you're in a very unusual category, and as we were talking at the beginning, still a lot of stigma and kind of cultural discomfort. And so, you know, realistically, you know, we see a lot of large content companies sort of tread carefully around this type of content. You know, advertisers get scrimmage, and so I think it's super fascinating that you actually think that this could become a large company. Yeah, I mean I see Quinn becoming a public company, partly because of this, what you're talking about, that like, let's say like a Spotify or an Amazon or whatever, it's like this is maybe a category they'll be a little squeamish on. Although like I said, you know, some of their top hits, their biggest performers are romance, AKA like erotica kind of style stories. And then I also think like when I was starting Quinn, egg freezing and fertility startups were super taboo, and no investors would touch it, and it was just kind of this icky category. And now there are a ton of unicorns, like kind body, got a billion dollar evaluation, all these startups are blowing up. And so I really do think the tides change, you know, and cultural currents pull us in new directions. And I wouldn't be surprised if this category becomes more and more mainstream. Are there companies out there that you kind of look to as like inspirations maybe, and as far as their business trajectory and what they've been able to accomplish? Yeah, I mean so many, but I love Bumble. I think Whitney is just incredible. I think that it was a category that previously was super stigmatized in a lot of ways. I mean, I could really, okay, I love Patreon. I love OnlyFans. I love obviously Apple. There are a lot of amazing companies. I actually think Airbnb is an interesting one. I love Airbnb. And it's like a great example of a curated marketplace, which is something Quinn is kind of trying to create in its own way. So that's maybe a non-content one that I might call. Actually let's do some audience participation. Has anyone used Quinn in the audience? Has anyone to be bold enough to raise their hands? Yay! I wish we could get you on stage to have like some user feedback. Amazing. See now you have a new person to interview backstage. Yeah, use code slash, no, we should actually set that up, that would be great. Since we're coming up on, you know, towards the end of our conversation, I'd love to hear some of your creator economy predictions for 2024 and then we'll talk about in 10 years. Okay, I think in near term predictions, just really a focus on, I mean, I know people say this all the time, but like the focusing on a small group of diehard fans rather than sort of the Instagram model of like a 100,000 kind of casual fans that don't really know you that well, right? I'm definitely seeing, especially with Quinn creators, just the rise of like a 50 person, like diehard fan club basically for a creator and really monetizing those people who are willing to spend thousands of dollars on their favorite, it's patronage really, of their favorite creators and favorite internet personalities. And then longer term, I just think creators will own more and more of the stuff they're creating because truly they drive so much of the value that we like consume on the internet. And yeah, so I just think increased creator ownership. Well, how do you, what does that mean for your company, right? Because you're sort of in the middle, enabling the content creators to create and to connect with fans, but then you're predicting that the creators will have more and more control. Well, yeah, I think like our value has always been that creators should have creative control, that they should be able to decide their boundaries with their audience and really, we're just in support of that relationship. So we'll stay that way. All right, I have to ask you, before we wrap it up, who is your favorite Quinn creator? Oh no, it's a tie with all of them. I can't pick favorites, it's like favorite children. Fair enough. Well, thank you so much for being here, Caroline. Thank you guys so much. It was so much fun. Go slash, I love it here.