If Kristi Mitchell seems more like the type of woman you would meet at a PTA meeting rather than at a trade show for owners of adult-oriented websites and businesses, well, it’s an assumption with which Mitchell is all too familiar.
Indeed, the Eroticy.com founder and president is the first one to admit she’s an unexpected candidate to be the owner of an adult site. "Nobody who knows me would ever guess in a million years that I would have ever been involved in the [adult] industry," the 35-year-old housewife-turned-adult-industry-businesswoman said. "I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and went to high school and then college, just like most Midwest suburban girls. As a teenager, I was conservative, family oriented, had a close group of friends, and was one of the ‘popular’ girls that were a bit untouchable. I came from a Catholic family and had a big church wedding when I married a successful, driven, and young overachiever."
Mitchell’s husband, a successful dot-commer who scored a $180-million sale for a company he’d started for $48 million, ultimately helped her become a successful businesswoman in her own right. Although she’d briefly worked in the retail industry following the birth of her first child, Mitchell agreed to become a stay-at-home mom after having a second. However, after seeing her husband make a fortune off his dot-com sale, Mitchell realized there was something beyond changing diapers and making dinner. "I was a bit jealous of all the excitement and buzz, and I wanted to be involved in the action again," she explained.
Mitchell consulted neighbor and friend Linda Halagiera, a fellow housewife who also was bored with suburban life, and the two women began kicking around the idea of launching their own online business. "The conversations over coffee turned into online business-model brainstorming sessions" instead of "neighborhood gossip, talk about our kids, and general women stuff," Mitchell confessed.
Mitchell and Halagiera eventually turned to their spouses for suggestions, taking to heart Halagiera’s husband’s off-the-cuff remark that sex sells. "The comment resonated with us, and we looked into several business models—including online stores for videos and toys to content sites," Mitchell said. She and Halagiera realized that developing a dating site for a decidedly more liberated crowd would be "a very scalable business model."
With virtually no capital, they set to work on their concept: the world’s first and only sexual social-networking site. Mitchell’s husband threw a website together in a couple of months, and the site eventually was launched and hosted via Mitchell’s personal computer and a DSL line in the Mitchells’ loft. "We began marketing it through posting directory listings and link exchanges with other sites," Mitchell said. "We used to watch when users came on and jump for joy when five or six were on at once."
That was in 1998. The site has flourished since, and within a year the two women had built up a free membership base large enough to warrant paid memberships. "We were amazed and excited when we realized that we had 20 people sign up for a membership that day," Mitchell said. "It was at that point that it became clear to us that we had a real business."
Indeed, with more than 4 million active members, Eroticy has been a very profitable venture for its two founders, giving them the freedom to build a business from scratch while remaining close to home and functioning as doting mothers. It also has become something of a social community, earning the site several comparisons to MySpace.
Eroticy’s features are plenty: the usual member profiles and user-submitted content (videos, blog, pics); a host of adult content such as feature-length streaming videos; sex education articles; photo galleries; reviews of strip clubs and other adult-oriented venues, and interactive adult features and games.
"We don’t consider our site an adult online-dating site; we consider it the first and only sexual social-networking site," Mitchell offered. "Our site was built from the ground up as a place for sexual discovery. The goal was to build a tolerant, accepting, open-minded community where men, women, and couples can come and explore their own sexuality.
"One important feature of our site is helping users collaborate with the community, explore different sexual interests, discover what different things they might be curious about, and find ways to explore their personal sexuality," Mitchell continued. "There are many features and lots of different types of content that help our users achieve this truly valuable experience, and one of them is finding others with similar sexual interests and often hooking up."
For Eroticy Vice President of Marketing Michelle Pendenza, who joined the company in 2001 after Halagiera left, Eroticy offers a user experience quite unlike that of any other dating site. "I think what makes our company unique is that we’ve really put a lot of our focus on building and maintaining an online community that both men and women enjoy being a part of," she commented. "The level of user-to-user interaction via email, chat rooms, and message boards—combined with a broad array of content features and articles our users care about—allows us to convert and retain paying members like no one else. We like to pride ourselves that we offer something for everyone."
Mitchell is aware her gender has a good deal to do with the success of Eroticy. "When we first designed [the site], I think that being a woman involved in the process made our site very different," Mitchell posited. "At the time, it seemed that there were very few adult sites out there that were created with women in mind, not only men. We introduced women-friendly content such as erotic stories, sexual-education articles, trivia questions, polls, and much more. We still attribute the fact that we have a great number of active females on Eroticy to that content."
In the early days of the site, Mitchell and Halagiera kept the momentum building by taking all money earned from the site and reinvesting it into marketing, equipment, improving the site, and adding content and features. "We literally didn’t take a dime out of the company for a year," Mitchell revealed. "We really weren’t doing it for the money; we just wanted to be involved in building something exciting. We were passionate about what we were doing and loved the feeling of watching something grow so fast."
The success of the company also shows what can be accomplished when site owners listen to affiliates. "We’ve always relied heavily on feedback from both our users and our webmasters to improve our product and ensure that we are meeting the needs of not only our members, but also our valued affiliates who have chosen to work with us," Pendenza maintained. "We are constantly rolling out new members’ features and marketing tools to help optimize the conversion and retention we receive."
Today, Eroticy stands as an example of a do-it-yourself success story. Having obtained other dating properties, the Eroticy program now includes the wildly popular swingers’ community Swappernet.com, as well as Dreammates.com, SingleMe.com, PassionatePersonals.com, Cherish.com, and a gay site, EroticyMale.com, which launched in late 2006. Meanwhile, Eroticy’s parent company, Think Productions (helmed by Mitchell’s husband, Scott), recently announced plans to sell all of its dating properties to Mountains West Explorations Inc., to be obtained under the name Cherish and presided over by Mitchell, who will continue serving as president of the new company.
As someone who admits she doesn’t fit the usual bill of an adult industry personality, Mitchell takes a certain amount of, uh, "perverse" pleasure in her success. "It’s liberating," she said. "It is encouraging to realize that so many unique and talented people from such diverse backgrounds can come together and form one of the world’s largest and most profitable industries. I am honored to be part of such an enduring and successful group of individuals. Although I might be considered the most unlikely success story, I respect and have a lot of fun with my colleagues.
"I love what I do and consider myself to be very fortunate," Mitchell added. "I hope that everyone, at some point in their lives, is lucky enough to have a job they look forward to doing every day. The fact that it is an adult business is something that I no longer think about on a daily basis. Yes, it is adult; however, it is also a business. I love the people involved; I love the challenges that I am faced with, and I love all of the opportunities that lie ahead for us."
