How do I find investors/donors who 'get it' for MakeLoveNotPorn?

Christine: 00:08

Welcome to the More the Brainier, the brave space where creative minds come to share and solve their most pressing burning questions. From Montreal, I'm your host, Christine Renaud, CEO of Braindate.

Over the last decade at Braindate, I've seen firsthand how knowledge-sharing discussions can be transformative, how unexpected insights emerge when brilliant minds think together. Feeling stuck on a challenge? Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective, or three, to light the way forward.

In the studio with me today is Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer.

Jane, who are the guests on today's show?

Jane: 00:57

This month, our three guests work hard at forging a path off the beaten track: Alex McLean, Co-Founder and CEO at Alveole, Mara Sandoval, Head of Event Design and Interaction at the World Economic Forum, and Cindy Gallup, CEO and Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn. This month, we'll be covering the themes of the birds and the bees; how to find money from people you can actually work with and how to make the switch from simply gathering to true collaboration.

Christine: 01:36

Thank you, Jane. Cindy, Alex, Mara, bonjour, welcome again. Today's conversation is about two things that I think a lot about as an entrepreneur, money and purpose. I actually was always an entrepreneur before I knew it was a thing. I didn't have any parents or family members that were entrepreneurs, but I've always loved to build things and then sell things. So I used to do ⁓ hand-made silk scarves and then babysit.

And then I'd do all these things to connect my interest and what I saw needed to be changed in my community with making a bit of money when I was younger. And actually, I really had nothing to do with the money. So I just like stashed away the cash in a little box. And my brother eventually became aware of that box and I became the family ATM pretty much. But I was charging my brother interest on the money was borrowing even if I was 10. So that was my first actually probably revenue generating business.

So let's start here. What's the first thing that you ever saved for and how did you hustle to make that money? Alex, do you want to kick us off?

Alex: 02:43

Yeah, maybe not the first thing I saved for, but one that has a more interesting story. I organized small parties where I would get a lot of people there in usually locations that we weren't really supposed to have a party, which made it a little bit more interesting. And then accumulated the money to then travel. And the first travel I did with that money was a bike trip from Toronto to Montreal. What's a short five hour drive, it turns out into a five day trek for, on a bike.

Christine: 03:05

Amazing. And Mara?

Mara: 03:09

I was not business savvy like you guys. I managed to blow through my first credit card pretty badly. So I would consider my first saving exercise and paying back that credit card. Like having, you know, putting money aside every month to be able to pay that off. It was definitely a lesson in saving money, which I hadn't applied until I committed that crime of spending too much on a credit card.

Christine: 03:33

And Cindy?

Cindy: 03:36

No, I mean, I hear you Mara. My mother is Malaysian Chinese. She's extremely frugal. Growing up, my family did not have money. And unfortunately, in that scenario, when you find yourself earning your first paycheck, you go in completely the opposite direction. So Mara, I'm so with you on that credit card bill. But I think probably actually, I mean, the first thing I really did save up for like Alex was travel.

I am temped as a secretary in university vacations and that enabled me, me and my best friend from college, to go on my first ever vacation without my parents, which was totally on the cheap, you know, backpacking around the Greek islands, but it was a wonderful experience. And you had to save up because those were the days before, credit cards and ease of communication with parents. So what you went to the Greek islands with, had to last you all the way through those six weeks that we were backpacking around. But it was a great experience.

Christine: 04:35

My first travel was actually when you still had those very ugly beige pockets that you would put under your clothes with your travellers checks, you know, as if like people who would steal anything from you don't know you have that belt there.

Cindy: 04:48

Travellers checks!

Christine: 04:51

And Cindy, you are our special guest today. You're the CEO and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn. What is it and why did you create it?

CIndy: 05:00

I started MakeLoveNotPorn because I date younger men generally in their 20s and 17, 18 years ago, long before anybody else realized this, I realized through my direct personal experience dating younger men that when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way. I'm an actually action-oriented person. I went, right, gonna do something about this. So 16 years ago, purely as a side venture,

otPorn, the TED conference in: 2009

And so I turned it into a business designed to do good and make money simultaneously. So today, MakeLoveNotPorn is the world's first and only user generated, 100% human curated, social sex video sharing platform. We kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to openly, healthily, socially, sexually self express, which it clearly does not.

The way to think about this is, if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, MakeLoveNotPorn is the badly needed documentary. We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world. And what we're doing is we are socializing, normalizing, and destigmatizing sex, bringing it out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior.

We act as sex education through real-world demonstration. And our mission, ultimately, with MakeLoveNotPorn is to help end rape culture globally. Now that may sound like very big mission, but we have 12 years of proof of concept at a micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something very simple that nobody else is doing. We show you how wonderful great consensual communicative sex is in the real world. Our social sex videos role model good sexual values and behavior. And here's the important part. We make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture. One man left a comment saying, this video makes one to be a better man in the bedroom and in life. We can do that.

Mara: 07:39

Cool.

Christine: 07:40

This is lovely. And I saw something that you posted recently talking about a young man that reached out to you saying, I want to make love with my girlfriend and all I have as examples is porn. Can you help me? And you said, because you're a kindhearted person, you responded at length. And then he went back and had sex or made love with his girlfriend. And his girlfriend was like, wow, where did you learn that? Like, dude, you have what the stories that you have in terms of impact must be just outstanding and so moving for you.

Cindy: 08:11

MakeLoveNotPorn as a unique business has a unique ability. We have the power to change people's sexual attitudes and behavior for the better in a way that nothing else can. And so over the past 12 years, we've taught countless young people that porn is not sex in the real world. Gen Z loves us. We've saved numerous marriages and relationships. That is, it's how people write to us, you saved my marriage. We've expired communications breakthroughs around sex.

Parents are buying their teenage children's subscriptions. They tell us, I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sexual relations actually look like. And as with any disruptive technology, use cases emerged that found they never dreamt of. So I was blown away when we began hearing from survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse. They tell us that MakeLoveNotPorn helped them reclaim their bodies. We helped them feel able to be sexual again post-trauma in a situation where porn is way too triggering.

And it's not just people who watch our videos. We have a number of, we call our contributors, MakeLoveNotPorn stars, who tell us being able to share themselves sexually in a completely safe and trustworthy space has helped them process and heal from sexual trauma. I never thought of that as a use case when I came up with this idea. I'm obviously so happy that it is. ⁓

Christine: 09:40

It's so moving and I have a million more questions, but I will open the floor to everyone in a second. But Cindy, would you mind sharing your burning question with us?

Cindy: 09:51

Sure. I've struggled to raise funding for MakeLoveNotPorn for 16 years. And my challenge is that I know that my investors are out there, and there are a ton of them, but they are impossible to find by the usual means because they all have one thing in common. Your willingness to fund MakeLoveNotPorn is entirely a function of your personal sexual journey.

It's a function of your personal lens on sex and sexuality that has been shaped by your own experience of it. And obviously I have no way to research and target for that. Especially because sex is the area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside. The people who look like they would totally get it, don't. The people who look like complete prudes do. So I put what I'm doing out there all the time because I have to try and attract the people who get it to me.

And by the way, because of these challenges, there is now another way of funding MakeLoveNotPorn. I've partnered with an amazing nonprofit called Inspire Access, which is able to take tax deductible donations, donations from donor-advised funds, foundation grants, and channel them to underrepresented founders like me with for-profit social impact ventures who otherwise don't have funding. So my burning question is, how can I find the investors and the donors who get the power of what I'm doing and want to support it by either investing or by donating philanthropic capital.

Christine: 11:23

I have good feelings, I think with all of us here, we can support and we can help in terms of something happening that would be wonderful for you and your community, Cindy. ⁓

Mara and Alex, it's time for clarifying questions. just as a reminder, not time to share insights or feedback or advice, we'll be just asking questions that will help us to better orient our contributions to Cindy's challenge. Mara, do you want to get us started?

Mara: 11:59

Yeah, sure. Cindy, ⁓ I have a question for you, which is a similar to the question you had for Alex. And it's two part question. So one is, well, who is your target audience? And if I understood correctly, the difficulty you have is that your target audience may be so broad that it can't be identified, that it's really about your own sexual experience. So if you could clarify more, like exactly like what? Sure. Yeah, like who is the target audience that you're trying to get funding from?

Cindy: 12:27

Sure. ⁓ So basically, I'm talking about the investor audience specifically, you know, and the issue there is that normally, obviously, if you're looking for funding or donations, you can either go, this investor focuses on my sector, or this foundation or this philanthropist is doing a lot of work in a similar area.

My challenge is first of all, that nobody invests in sex or at any rate does not invest in sex publicly. In fact, 10 years ago, I deliberately began defining, pioneering and championing my own category of sex tech in order to give MakeLoveNotPorn Somewhere to live and to legitimize investing in this category with investors, which by the way, I've managed to do very effectively. And my fellow sex tech founders will reference the fact that I pioneered the category.

But because I can't use the usual means, of identifying people who would get it. People's ability to get it is very much inside them. And my challenge boils down to one thing, which is people are funny about sex. As I said earlier, your response to me depends on how your sexual experiences have shaped you and your lens on sex. If those experiences were negative, there is no rational business argument that is ever going to make its way through that.

NotPorn investor deck back in: 2011

You know, and that's my commitment to my investors. But actually it doesn't boil down to the rational because again, people are funny about sex. In the conventional VC world, fear of what other people will think is my biggest barrier. So I've absolutely had individual VCs say to me, I love what you're doing. I think it could be really big. If I took to my partners, they go, what are you on? There are too many stakeholders, too many partners, LPs. And so I guess, my ideal investor is someone who gets it and has the agency to be able to take that decision to fund me or to donate to me themselves. Does that answer your question, Mara?

Christine: 14:57

Do you have a follow-up question?

Alex: 14:59

I'm just curious on how the business model works and you mentioned donation or investors. My feeling is that the case would be quite different for both of those ⁓ types. Are you looking for financially motivated investors that will back the business case and exit with a financial return? Or you're more looking for someone that actually would understand the social value of this that would be either donating or investing more from a purpose angle.

Cindy: 15:24

Our business model is revenue share. 16 years ago, long before OnlyFans, I concepted our revenue share model to democratize access to income. So we operate subscriptions, our members subscribe to be able to stream real world sex videos. Half that revenue goes to our contributors, who we call our MakeLoveNotPorn stars. As I said earlier, I believe in building businesses that do good and make money simultaneously. You know, that's what I believe the future of all business should be.

And so for the past couple of years, I set out to raise a serious round of funding for MakeLoveNotPorn. And I found a number of interests of investors, but what I struggled to find was that all important lead investor. You know, I spoke to investors who went, we don't lead, so come back when you have a lead, or who's your lead, because that will decide whether or not we come in in this round.

So I decided to take a different approach. I launched an equity crowdfunding campaign last year on WeFunder in order to enable us to build a product I've in the pipeline for 10 years, which parents and teachers have been begging me for, which is a zero to 18 and beyond sex education expansion of what we do, MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy, which is we're building the Google of sex ed, aggregating the best of the world sex education content that is currently being blocked, censored and deplatformed everywhere and making it easily accessible and searchable by parents, teachers, children, young people, et cetera.

get. You know, I had hoped in: 2024

Over the past year, we raised $470,000, which enabled us to begin designing and building the Academy. We are currently on track to launch an MVP in July, but I need to raise bridge funding. And so that is why the partnership with Inspire Access to be able to take donations.

So the answer, Alex, sorry, that's a sort of a long-winded answer, but the answer is I absolutely want to build a billion dollar business that delivers massive financial returns to my investors. In the pursuit of that, I welcome the fact that I now have a non-profit vehicle that can take donations from people who understand the need for what I'm building, understand the social impact, and very much want to support my ability to do that.

Alex: 18:02

And just in terms of quantum, like, ⁓ get to give us a sense, like, how many investors have you spoken to, for example, in the last years? Like, what does that look like?

: 18:09

Sure. So just so you know, so first of all, I pitched the idea for Make Love Not Porn for two years from 2009 to 2011. That's how long it took me to find one angel investor who put up $500,000 in seed funding to build the platform. And by the way, that investor was a demonstration of what I mean because I wasn't pitching him. He was a very old college friend. He was in town. We went to dinner. Purely as dinner table conversation, I told him what I was doing. He got dollar signs in his eyes, he went: “I want to fund that”.

And I was really taken aback because I thought he was a bit of prude personally. He absolutely demonstrated my point. He's been amazingly supportive over the past, you know, now 13, 14 years. He's put in $4 million in funding to support us. And I've raised another $500,000 in bridge funding over the years from a small group of friends.

It's not so much about how many investors I've pitched to because my problem, Alex, is unlike some of the more conventional startup, I often can't even get across the threshold. It's not even pitching and being rejected as much as finding someone willing to take the pitch in the first place when it's to do with sex. And so I have found that my put it out there and attract them to you strategy has worked. LinkedIn has been surprisingly effective at bringing me incoming investor interest. People see my posts and say, I'm intrigued. I'd like to find out more. You know, we have the conversation. That's how, as I mentioned, I've found a number of interested investors but not yet the lead. Once I have the lead, I'm very confident in my ability to ram the lemmings in behind. You know, I've quite a few lemmings, basically.

Alex: 19:43

Congrats, those are big numbers.

Christine: 19:45

I'll ask a quick question Cindy. So, so Braindate actually, we've been around since 2011 and we're bootstrapped since the start. We're a B Corp. So when you talk about merging purpose and profit, I, something I really believe in. I think Alex obviously is also in that same train. And I just wonder why do you need an investor? You have a, you know, I think you have a very sustainable business model.

We've never raised VC and I found that the time that I started and tried, it was a complete waste that would have been better just invested in generating more revenues and finding clients. So I'm curious to know why is it so important for you to raise VC?

Cindy: 20:21

Sure, and Christine, that's a great question. And by the way, I actually don't want to raise VC because I don't think we're a VC friendly business, but I do need to raise funding. Here's the reason why. I didn't realize when I embarked on this business that I and my tiny team would fight an enormous battle every single day, not even to grow MakeLoveNotPorn, just to keep it alive. Basically because every piece of business infrastructure, any other tech startup can just take for granted. I can't: the small print always says no adult content.

And that is all pervasive across every single area of the business in ways that people outside the sphere aren't aware of. It's not just that I can't get funded, I can't get banked. It took me four years originally to find one bank in America that would allow us to open a business bank account for MakeLoveNotPorn. Try doing business for four years without a business bank account. Partly or hardly did in ways I shouldn't have makes life very difficult. That bank, after nine years of issue-free banking, debanked us out of the blue in March, kicked us out.

gainst time to find a bank in: 2025

Explain or beg to be allowed to use their service. Sometimes they let me, sometimes they don't. Very labor intensive. Never get to work best in class with anybody. Never get to negotiate the best deals because I'm not in negotiating position. My two biggest business growth inhibitors are number one payments. PayPal won't work with adults. Stripe won't. Mainstream fintech won't. I have to work with the murky subculture of adult-friendly payment processes because anyone else knows where else to go charge extortionate fees. I pay out 12 % of my revenue every month in payment processing fees alone versus mainstream rates of 3 % or less.

The second business growth inhibitor is we are banned from advertising anywhere. We are a very advertising media responsive business. When people find out about us, they want us, but I'm banned from advertising. So unfortunately, Christine, I completely concur. I would have loved to have taken this business profitable under my own steam. I have so many barriers to that.

That the thing that overcomes is barriers of funding.

Christine: 22:45

Fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing Cindy. This is a great conversation. ⁓

And now it's your time to relax. You want to treat you with some, hope, interesting and useful...

Cindy: 23:01

I'm desperate, I'm really grateful for this opportunity,

Christine: 23:05

And hopefully also just the podcast itself can bring more people to the conversation once we're done. So, Mara and Alex, this is our moment to share thoughts, to share ideas, to share paths forward for Cindy that she might not have thought about. So, who wants to start?

Mara: 23:20

I can start. Cindy, when I was thinking about your burning question, I tried to imagine what the future will look like if there wasn't a Cindy Gallup and MakeLoveNotPorn and if nobody cared. What would happen to society and what would it be like? And like many people these days, I threw it into chat GPT and said, you know, tell me what this world will look like. And pretty much the synthesis was that it would be a world with performative sex and unrealistic expectations.

And when I think about what that would mean when you unpack it and, you know, plug it into how people behave and how families are created and how people interact with each other, I just felt like that's not a world that anybody wants to be in. And anyone who has children would not want their children to be in that kind of a world. So I was thinking about how, although we're speaking about sex, you said yourself that no one invests in sex. And you mentioned it later that it really is about society, right? It's about how we are as a human community together. And now that you've also shared about how you can't get funding because of the adult content part, like there might be a way to pivot the story around society. Yes, it's about sex, but the bigger picture is our future as a community of humans and how we interact. And maybe there's a way in there.

And then I had like ideas about also, okay, if you can't get funding the traditional way and banks won't fund you and know, PayPal won't let you make payments through them, et cetera. Can influencers help? Can people who are generating money and income in non-traditional ways, who believe in your mission, would they be able to help? Do you have anyone like that? I know you can't answer right now, but who are the people that are outside? Who are the people who hustle, who break those traditions that could maybe help you? Voila, those were my thoughts.

Christine: 25:06

Merci Mara. Alex?

Alex: 25:09

I thought it was hard to raise money for bees. I think you have a whole other can of worms. First congrats, what a great business. And it sounds like the struggle is real to get investors, but you still manage with the crowdfunding and everything. It's still impressive. ⁓ Where my mind is going is the shared pain of looking for investors. It's complicated in any context, and think you seem to have an additional pain.

I feel that I don't have much to help with. I've gone through the funding process now twice, or I guess three times. The first time was similar as your dinner conversation, someone that I never thought would give me money and just sharing my story. And then we raised a first kind of ⁓ series A like that. Sorry, seed like that. Going into the series A resembles a lot more where you were at. I think we talked to over a hundred different investors and having...having them understand the business and the weird angle to it.

And I find it clever that you created the sex tech category. wish we'd done the Bee tech category, like creating a category and making sure they can sort it. I think my only advice is to don't abandon it. And the common thread that I seem to hear from people that have gone through the process and in my experience is similar is it's not looking for many investors to say this is a great idea. It's to find one single investor that will say yes, and it might come out of the blue and that the volume, we're just, I mentioned on the top of this, or like before we for this call, we're just about to get into a new series here of funding.

And we went through a similar activity where we met, you know, what seems like an ungodly amount of people to end up finally with just one that said, yeah, I see it, I see it, and this works. And so not any advice, more cheering for you and good luck. And I think it'll happen. It's just a question, I think, of how many.

Christine: 26:58

My thoughts are around what would happen if Cindy was not spending any time looking for an investor at all anymore and where would we invest this time? You know, I'm thinking about like The Guardian or Wikipedia or just those, a lot of mainstream content, like media organizations that are struggling and they make that struggle very, very clear and they ask for folks who benefit from the work to contribute. And I mean, it goes back a little bit to what you were saying earlier, Cindy, around privilege. And I am certain that you want your content to be available no matter what your financial capacity is.

We've had at Braindate, we've had a couple of investors that really were instrumental in our success. But most of the time when I'm like, okay, everybody's doing it. There might be some good in it. Let me try again to, and I try to explain what we do because we're in innovation and we're in like social innovation and we're not social enough for the social. We're not tech enough for the tech. Like we are one of these organizations that is kind of in between in terms of identities. And so it's very hard for people to relate and understand what we do and to take that leap of faith and invest in what we do. And we've just honestly stopped trying and just decided that we would be bootstrapped and that we would invest all this effort into educating our clients and the population we want to serve so that they are willing to pay the price of our services and we can be profitable. We've been profitable for many years because of that approach.

So I wonder what would happen if Cindy just stopped trying to raise money and if it was something that is shared in your team. And it's like, okay, folks, and your team and your ecosystem and your community, instead of trying to mobilize people to help you find investors, what if we mobilize people to try and help you find the right idea for you to generate more revenues and donations so that you can be sustainable, you can be profitable with the cost that you incur because of the business you're in. You're very transparent around having such a hard time to find an investor. And that conversation is important in terms of, you know, which business are being funded and who are leading those businesses. And what about underrepresented folks in business that are not getting funded? Like all this conversation for me is important.

But as a female founder in tech myself, to a certain point, was like, that's not my battle. Like I actually, I don't really want any way to have those investors in my team because if they don't understand what I'm doing and they will push me towards a place where they can make better investment, but without actually caring for my mission, I'm not interested. ⁓ So that's my question. It's just like, okay, so if we start looking for investors and we mobilize your community around, okay, let's make this a bootstrap sustainable thing that we all carry together, like what would happen? And I'm sure you've already done that, but I would be curious if that message was really clear in your ecosystem what would happen.

Mara: 29:50

Cynthia, was wondering, do you have global reach or is this mainly an American business model?

Cindy: 29:56

We're a global platform. have members in traffic and make up at bornstiles from over 200 countries and territories. And even in our tiny bootstrapping scenario, it's very interesting that, for example, India has been our fifth or sixth highest source of traffic for many, many years. We do nothing in India. You we have no money. India obviously has a huge rape culture problem and there's a real appetite in India because over the years, you know, young people have written to me regularly from India saying, please launch MakeLoveNotPorn here. We want an Indian version. And I've been looking for on the ground, Indian investors and partners. People write from China, people write from Japan, from Korea.

And so I try, I support myself through consulting and speaking. When I travel, I put the word out all the time. The investors' partners launch localized versions of MakeLoveNotPorn. And so we are fully global and we are needed everywhere.

Christine: 30:49

And Cindy, keep going with any takeaways you've got from the conversation.

Cindy: 30:54

Thank you all so much for your inputs because honestly, you know, I mean, being an entrepreneur is a lonely path. Being a sex tech entrepreneur is even lonelier. So Mara, love the influencer idea. You're absolutely right. I am always looking for somebody who would want to champion us and be able to use their voice and reach. We have no money to pay influencers and where we've tried to engage, know, the influencers are willing to be frank about, that they have to be so big that it's not going to damage their image in any way at all.

And we're not able to play at that level. My dream, by the way, is that one day Beyonce and Jay-Z write a rap duet with the refrain, Make Love Not Porn. Because I have to think that that is a hip hop gift. So you're absolutely right. I need to people who can champion us, using their voice to a large audience.

Alex, I enormously appreciate the empathy. It is really demoralizing and difficult. And actually, you know, I go in a way, for me, it's no bad thing to have investors who self-select because I have female founder friends who've been rejected by VCs over 300 times. And honestly, I don't know how they keep going. None of us need any more thoroughly depressing meetings than we absolutely have to have! So it's no bad thing that if I do get a conversation, at least I know the person is theoretically open to hearing what I have to say.

And to your question, Christine, I love the angle. I would love to do that. I say light heartedly that I've been staring down the end of my financial runway for 12 years, but I really have been, and I am right now. That's unfortunately, we are not yet profitable because there are so many things that militate against our ability to be. And I need funding to keep us going, to be able to leverage the future opportunities.

And by the way, I've looked at this from many different angles. So I have a product roadmap for MakeLoveNotPorn. It is based on the fact that first of all, I believe that when you have a truly world changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around. I'm a big believer in building solutions to my own problems. Every business obstacle I encounter is a huge disruptive business opportunity in itself: So part of my product roadmap is MakeLoveNotPorn is sex tech, very challenging to raise funding for. Around that, I have a roadmap that is EdTech, MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy, the educational product, FinTech, AdTech, and AI. I've said for years I want to build a stripe of sex tech because the first payments app that welcomes legal, ethical, transparent businesses like mine cleans up.

And so I'm currently talking to a number of FinTech partners about basically building a solution for Make Love Not Born, the payments and payouts on our own platform, proof testing it, and then turn it into a standalone app that everybody else can use. I'm calling it Block Free because I want to free us all from the blocks of fintech injustice, and I want to do that using the blockchain. We've got a holding page up at blockfree.us and I'll put the call out here, and I'm actively working on making that happen. And by the way, the aim is to leverage the huge financial opportunity that is payments for restricted business, not just sex tech and adult, but cannabis, psychedelics, crypto itself, other businesses that are restricted but shouldn't be.

All I would have to do with Block Free is launch it, use our unique human curation model, humanize that to every applicant to make sure they're legitimate, legal, et cetera. All I have to do is operate for a reasonable period of time to demonstrate that I can take restricted business payments safely and securely. That's the game plan. And then because my background is forty years working in advertising, I have an ad tech product to enable brands to advertise who can't. I'm calling it Here for the Ads. can find the holding page at Herefortheads.com because it's ad tech that works by making people love advertising again. And I also have an AI product, which is an algorithm for consent. You can find it at MakeLoveNotPorn.ai. So I want to build solutions to all my own problems that everyone else can use and make a ton of money out of doing so.

Christine: 35:04

Well, that's it. I wish you success in that. Thank you so much, Cindy. And thank you, Alex and Mara, for such a rich conversation. That was amazing. Many thanks also to Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer here at The More the Brainier, and to Jenya Sverlov and Chris Leon, our delightful sound engineers.

Jane: 35:27

Thanks Christine. If you have a contribution to Cindy's burning question, please share it on Braindate's LinkedIn page where we'll be posting this episode or drop us a line at TMTB@braindate.com.

We'll end today's episode with a quotation from R. Buckminster Fuller:

“You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently”.

Through Mara's burning question on The More the Brainier, we'll explore the tools needed to take how we gather to the next level. Join us next week!

This podcast was brought to you by Braindate, the world's leading technology that turns your event into a knowledge sharing feast, leaving your participants transformed by each other.