I’m finally ready to announce my new startup: Passionate Produce. Practically speaking, this means I have an idea and a splash page. (That’s all you really need to launch a startup, right?)
Passionate Produce is a sex-positive, kink-positive, queer-positive crowdfunding platform, a home for all of the cool projects that you can’t list on sites like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo because they violate those sites’ Terms of Service. If you are at all interested, please go over and sign up for one of my email lists — that’s how I’m judging interest in the site, and it’s also one of the tools I’ll be using to find projects for the beta version of the site.
It’s taken me a lot longer than I had hoped to make this announcement. Part of it is technical: I wanted to have some amount of research and prep work done before announcing anything. Part of it is emotional: It’s scary to go out into the world and say, yes, this is what I’m doing with my career now.
In a lot of ways, launching this blog and the startup have been a sort of coming-out-of-the-closet process. There are some people with whom I’m very comfortable talking about my sex-positive entrepreneurship, like the folks at Artisan’s Asylum. And then there are my old colleagues from robotics — I’m holding off from telling most of them until the beta version of the site has launched, and we’re actually fundraising for projects.
It will still be several months before the beta site is up, but I wanted to get this on your radar. Please spread the word, sign up for the email lists, and encourage people you know with cool sex/kink-positive projects that need funding to contact me.
Indiegogo no good for sex-toy projects?
When I read it, I didn’t see any explicit ban on sex products in IndieGoGo’s terms of service. If you can readily find it, could you point me to IndieGoGo’s language banning sex/sexual projects. I just now searched http://www.indiegogo.com for either of the words sex or sexual. I don’t see any bans on sex projects in the first couple pages of links; I do see some sex-related projects on Indiegogo, although I didn’t see any sex-toy projects in those two pages.
Also, if you don’t mind my asking, have you found a bank that lets you open a business Acct. for an adult business? (And if so, what bank?)
I’ve been pondering whether a couple projects are commercially feasible/crowd source-able, so I’m interested in PassionateProduce.com and its terms/business model.
Hope to see you at the next teasecraft-Boston meeting.
Nope, Indiegogo is no good. If you look at , you’ll find “You may not use the Service for activities that…(ii) relate to sales of …(g) certain sexually oriented materials or services.” Then there’s the issue of credit card payments — most payment processors will not accept sales of “adult” material (which generally dictates what Indiegogo, Kickstarter, etc. will allow).
I talked to indiegogo and kickstarter, and a big old nope. I’m kinda excited!
Yes! Please do this, it’s much needed!
Thanks, I’m working on it! I should be launching this spring, within the next few months. Please go sign up for the mailing list at passionateproduce.com if you haven’t already done so, and tell your friends to do it, too. ;)