Founder @inthesunroom and other internet businesses
Los Angeles
Joined August 2019
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My controversial idea for solving the gross imbalance between men’s & women’s experiences on dating apps:
Figure out the gender ratio that results in men & women receiving roughly the same amount of attention (I suspect it’s ~60:40 women to men), and strictly enforce that ratio.
That means not all men who want to join will be able to do so until they get off the waitlist. But I strongly believe the experience for both men & women using this hypothetical app would be hugely improved.
And you’d tweak the monetization model. Instead of charging men for all the extra roses, likes, and boosts needed to stand out, you’d simply charge a door fee à la Raya. $9.99/mo for men (or whichever gender there is a waitlist for).
I doubt anyone is brave enough to build this.
The bedroom vs the outbound aesthetic. Circa 2022, in the thick of launching Sunroom.
Happy to report I don't live like this anymore.
PSA for founders building social apps:
With the imminent under 16 social media ban, Australian teens are about to be looking for alternative ways to connect. The ban only applies to an exhaustive list of social media giants. Huge opportunity to seed your app with displaced Aussie teens & kick-start your growth.
It’s taken me a while to feel ready to write a post mortem for Sunroom. For me, the last 5 years of building Sunroom have been filled with discussion about Sunroom’s wins, challenges, opportunities, and threats, distributed through investor updates, pitch decks, speeches, team retreats, team memos, and endless text exchanges between Michelle and I. After we closed the sale of Sunroom to Fanfix, I well and truly needed a break from thinking about this company. But with time and space, I’ve come to appreciate just how monumental the last 5 years of effort was — on both a personal level and broader community level.
I wanted an opportunity to encapsulate the years of learnings, personal growth, and frankly, pain. I’m conscious that most people reading this have probably only ever heard the positive highlights from Sunroom. Such is the way with building a company 0>1: it is almost never in your best interests to be publicly candid about your weaknesses, challenges, and threats. As a startup, you need to constantly manufacture the perception that you’re big, that you’re crushing it, and that you’re a bullet train that everyone should absolutely jump on before it’s too late. With the time that’s lapsed after selling Sunroom, it feels safe to open up about the highs and lows of this big adventure.
I get raw in this post. I dig into things we did well, things we struggled with, and the larger forces at play that made scaling Sunroom difficult. I’ll wrap the post with the three fundamental learnings that we never reconciled, and that I believe prevented us from turning Sunroom into a much larger business.
lucysnewsletter.substack.com…
Women-first brands are not in vogue like they were in the 2017-2022 era.
Bumble boomed amid “me too”. The brand was celebrated. It was needed. But now that movement has lost its cultural relevance.
Bumble should rebrand, and combine it with a meaningful product innovation.
It’s interesting because studies have shown that women get bored of monogamy in long-term relationships before men do. I think women stand to gain more from monogamish arrangements than men do, but many don’t have the foresight or social safety to ask for it upfront (today’s attacks on Ben & his preferences show just how unsafe it is to declare yourself monogamish).
FWIW I think the ideal for many women might be monogamy through the honeymoon and baby-making years, then shifting to (ethical) monogamish once the dust has settled. But we’re still a long way from normalizing this.
I’m back after a long hiatus from X.
There came a point in the journey of building Sunroom that it no longer felt productive to be here. The constant stream of founders sharing their business success while I was deep in the trenches with my own, was like…
facing a barrage of hot models on IG while in the throes of a weight loss journey: it constantly pulled me into a state of comparison, to the point of distraction.
Sunroom was acquired recently, and I’m taking time off to recharge and figure out what’s next.
I’ve started working on OnlySearch again! After years of the site humming away without our input. We’re now the highest ranked OnlyFans search engine on Google. Which is kinda cool considering we’ve barely touched it since 2020.
Here’s the story of how we built OnlySearch…
This is the story of how we built OnlySearch, the #1 ranked search engine for OnlyFans profiles.
I'm Lucy. I’m the co-founder and designer of OnlySearch.co. After a long hiatus, my team and I are returning to OnlySearch to continue developing and growing the site. In this post I introduce our team and tell the story of how OnlySearch came to be. From our early hackathon roots, to idly growing for multiple years, to refocusing our efforts & monetizing.
Link to full post 👇
We launched VIP Posts on Sunroom! Happy to report they're working! So far VIP Posts have made our creators tens of thousands in extra $
The magic is that VIP Posts bring in passive earnings. Creators don't need to work their DMs to make sales, they happen directly on the profile
Problem we’re facing:
Creators need to have posts on their profile when they launch or it doesn’t work. So we get them to add 4 posts during onboarding. Then we see crazy drop off at this step bc it becomes a big chore in their minds. Even though our ask will result in earnings