This story appears in the May issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition.
CYBERSPACE—After her horrific, headline-making leap-gone-wrong that left her with a fractured back at last October’s TwitchCon in San Diego, adult superstar Adriana Chechik faced a major life crossroads.
“I was laying in the hospital and doing nothing and worried about how my income could change and what my future was, being that I might not be able to shoot anymore,” she recalls.
As fate would have it, she had recently hired longtime acquaintance Thomas Sahs as her assistant/marketing manager, and while sharing her fears with him about what lay ahead, he hatched an idea. Relays Chechik, “He [told me], ‘You’ve been really good with marketing, and after working with you and seeing how you really know the inside scoop on your analytics and your fans and your sales and distribution of your own content and making your own content, I think there's a lot of power in that.’ And he came up with the idea of creating a site that could help others.”
Thus, Creators University was born.
Still in its infancy but gradually rolling out new features as people come on board, Creators University (located at Creators-University.com) aims to help aspiring and established content creators build their brands, offering a range of tools and resources including tutorial videos, instructional materials and recommendations on marketing and business tools.
At the heart of the informational platform is the philosophy of what Chechik calls “content with a purpose”—that is, output geared toward building a brand that can stand the test of time.
“I want to show girls the power of [branding] before they get to an age where they're like, ‘Fuck, I wish I could have done that differently,’” she explains. “Not just girls, but anybody.”
What Sahs brings to the venture is a wide-spanning business background across myriad fields including the music industry, real estate, medical devices and more.
“Over the last year, I’ve really seen an opportunity to try to parlay all that Adriana’s built in the adult industry into a more kind of mainstream focus—but without shunning the adult past,” Sahs offers. “I think it's a strength more than a weakness, because I think [an adult entertainer’s] following is so vibrant and powerful and they're so emotionally involved with you that you can literally leverage that to parlay into amazing other career paths.”
While many of the resources at Creator University are offered completely free of charge, a membership option is soon to launch for $24.99 a month that will grant subscribers access to a private Discord community where they can interact with Chechik and Sahs, as well as other content creators, and receive personalized advice and support.
“We'll do anything we can to essentially help you kind of build up your profile,” says Sahs.
Another key feature of membership will be the Let's Shoot page, where content creators will be able to connect with each other to collaborate on projects—with all members vetted to ensure that they are legit.
“It’s kind of like a Tinder for influencers,” Sahs expounds, “where you can check each other’s profiles and see if you want to schedule shoots with each other, and there’s a calendar, things like that.”
“We are making sure that there’s precautions in place to keep fans off of it and keep it a safe space so people feel comfortable,” adds Chechik.
In addition, Sahs divulges, members will have access to an extensive contact database.
“That’s one other thing that I think is really valuable,” he says, “the vendors that we use for video editing, even beauty treatments, all kinds of things ... we've got a good curated list of business contacts that we're willing to share.
“And then we're also adding a PEO service, which is like a self-employment service for creators,” he goes on to note. “So, if you're self-employed and you need to have a W2 paycheck or get insurance, you can sign up with this and you're able to kind of treat yourself like an employee, and it allows self-employed individuals to look better when they're trying to qualify for mortgages and pay taxes and things like that.”
Of course, for many, the primary draw for joining Creators University will be to gain insight on building their follower base across social media and creator sites such as OnlyFans.
“There's methodologies that we've kind of used and discovered that can really improve your numbers there,” Sahs asserts.
One thing for certain is that Adriana Chechik’s success speaks for itself—the 2017 AVN Female Performer of the Year has achieved more than most could ever dream of over her decade in the adult industry, and this new chapter makes for an eminently apt next step absolutely brimming with potential.
“I’m so excited,” she exclaims. “One of my biggest things is when I first started porn, I was so crazy, and I wish I had the knowledge of brand power when I was younger. I would have kind of honed myself in and said, ‘Oh wow, there's so much power here, let's trade this better earlier.’”
Photos by Jonni Darkko
