Francis: Welcome guys. Thank you so much for being on. I appreciate it. We've got Liam, who is the CEO of TDM, and Chad, who is the CMO of TDM. I want to start this conversation by saying I have a tremendous amount of respect for the organization that you guys have built. I was extremely flattered when you guys suggested we do a little team up. So thanks again for making this happen.

I want to start with the most basic possible question — the question that all these interviews start with. How did you come to be involved in this industry? What is your OFM origin story?

Liam: Interestingly, it was Kam and I who actually started TDM and then Chad came in shortly thereafter. We were in the fitness space and we were basically just selling products and services in the fitness space, importing liquid chalk from China and distributing it in the UK. And I was doing coaching because my background was in pharmacology, powerlifting, fitness in general, similar to Chad.

Then we got started with the idea based on just a casual car conversation as guys do when you're driving around, thinking like, how else can we make money? What else can we do? And we thought, OnlyFans is a pretty good option right now, because at the time it was basically like camming, in-person services or nothing at all. And we thought there's got to be a gap here and OnlyFans is the platform that will probably be the one to deliver on that, because in camming or physical services, your options as an agency are make the creator work, which isn't going to work well, or accept that they do no work, which isn't going to work well.

We thought OnlyFans, we can do all the work, we don't have to put pressure, we don't have make people feel uncomfortable, we can be ethical, corporate, professional, and all of the things that we care about as people, and deliver. So we did. And that was the start.

Francis: What year was that? Like when did all this start for you guys?

Liam: 2021. We definitely weren't the first to the space. But we were pretty early on in that journey. At the time, the notable faces for me were Nathan and Dean Indigo. They were kind of really like... Nathan was the only one I kind of believe was before us for sure. But they were around at that time.

When we started back then, it was interesting because chat was the way to go. It was the value add and we opened a physical office like we have here in the UK way back then. It was a three-story terraced house that we crammed into but the principle was the same — it was real people in real world environments here in the UK. So all value at that stage was chat. I remember we did our first ever chatting service by accident and we charged a guy 45%.

Francis: What's industry standard now, like 15% or something?

Liam: Depending on, for our kind of service, I would say probably more like 20%, but there are services now that are like 10%, 15%. But we started to find out that chat was really our value add. It was what made us different. It was where we had leverage. So that was basically the model that we penetrated.

We eventually came to the conclusion a couple years later, hey, everybody either has good chat or uses a team that has good chat. So the leverage that you could add to creators and the value that you could provide was just slimming month on month. And then that was when we kind of really went all in on marketing.

It was probably about six months in, Chad, where we had a conversation. I convinced you to leave fitness alone.

Chad: I think you actually just phoned me out of the blue completely. I don't know where I was, what I was doing, but you just called me and said, hey, how's it going? What have you been up to? And I told you what I'd been doing, which was at the time managing gyms. And then you said, we're doing something pretty cool. You should come and have a drink with us.

So I met you here where our office is based. And we went and sat down. And safe to say I wasn't ready for that conversation. I definitely was not. I had not anticipated the jump from the fitness industry to adult content. By no means was I ready for that conversation, but actually in reflection, like driving home and actually thinking about the conversation and what you guys were up to, it was just so intriguing. I just couldn't stop thinking about it for the next week or so.

I think you told me to go away and have a think which is exactly what I did and that entire week all I could think was wow these guys are making X amount of dollars doing something that's really creative and also kind of like a little bit taboo and a little bit different. It's just something that I've never heard of at all.

So that phone call then led to a week trial in the old office which in itself is interesting and I just fell in love with it straight away. The creative aspect of bringing eyeballs to your service or your product or whatever you're trying to sell, the actual process of marketing for me is just so interesting. And I knew immediately that that was what I wanted to do.

To begin with, we didn't actually put me into a marketing role. I actually did a bit of chatting to begin with. Just understood the business, the kind of end-to-end process.

Liam: What's relevant there is that at that time, Francis, for context, anybody who wanted to be a part of our business had to learn to chat because it wasn't a widely understood industry we felt at that time in 2021, 2022. So we hired some corporate professionals. We hired CTOs from public listed companies. We brought in a lot of people that were not familiar necessarily with OnlyFans as even a platform, nevermind the way that the customer psychology works.

So we thought number one rule — irrespective of whether you're doing admin and finance or whether you're maybe not admin and finance, like chat, web and tech, media, marketing, it doesn't matter to me. If you're going to be here, you want to understand how we make money. You want to understand what our core business is. So everybody had to do chat, but then Chad, it was pretty apparent that your future wasn't on the keyboard.

Chad: No, I did not enjoy chatting at all in the slightest.

Francis: Off camera, we just had a conversation about how much Chad and I hate interacting with people. So the marketing thing was more appealing because it's a little bit more... There's a layer of intermediation between you and the people that you're interacting with.

Chad: Yeah, it checks out. It definitely checks out. So that trial week then we quickly realized that actually chatting was not going to be the direction I took. So then essentially at the time, if we're open about it, we didn't really have any marketing department, so to speak. It was kind of like we were just giving creators a bit of advice on what to do and what not to do. And then that was kind of it. We just leave it to them. They crack on.

From that point, I was like, okay, well, I need to kind of take hold of this entire department of the business and really form it into something that is self-sustaining and has staff and has processes and systems. And so then the kind of journey began in terms of learning to market OnlyFans creators, which in itself probably took me the best part of 12 months to really understand it.

We tried Black Hat, we tried organic, we tried paid, and obviously that led to where we are today, which is pretty much entirely organic as far as all of the traffic that we generate for the agency.

Liam: What's relevant there as well, Francis, is that we were also at this time by accident really offering a chat service. And one of the most notable things for me about that chatting service was seeing the disparity between those that knew how to market and the success of their businesses and those that didn't and looked to us as the way to generate revenue for them.

They would be basically consistently driving a depreciating amount of revenue to each individual creator until eventually they drop off the service and they convince somebody else to join based on chat which happens less and less frequently as the industry aged. So it was also drilling home how important marketing is every single day.

The likes of Dean, I take my hat off to the guy. I think he's an absolute legend and I think he pioneered a lot of OnlyFans marketing which for me was... because obviously we were chatting for Dean, right? So when he worked on creators like Queen Mommy Milkers, we were there in the backend and just looking at really what a genius Dean is and how great he is at what he does. And it really set the stage for like, this is an example of how you market.

Francis: He was the vertically scaling guy. It's really funny. I listen to a lot of business podcasts. So it's like the same way that we're talking about Queen Mommy Milkers and Dean kind of being an inspiration is like I was listening to an interview with the founder of Slack yesterday. And it's like they're talking about all of the same concepts, and they're talking about it in precisely the same way. But when you interpolate Queen Mommy Milkers in the place of Slack or like Salesforce or something.

I think one thing that we don't talk about enough is that we are in one of the funniest industries, just objectively, of all time.

I think that's a great segue into what I really want to talk to you about first before we get into the broader marketing conversation, which is how you guys think about OFM and how you've constructed your business. Because from day one, I've taken like a very boutique, very craftsman-like approach to the industry. I built a super lean creative team, lots of role compression, very tiny model roster, and I've always outsourced chatting.

My approach has always been like, how can I maximize margin? Because I'm solo. But the problem with my business model, obviously, is you can really only scale vertically with one guy and a small creative team. It's not like scaling vertically isn't necessarily a virtue. It's just the way that I've constructed my business. It would be impossible to do it any other way. And the problem with that model is it's totally capped by how much effort I individually could put in.

Whereas you guys have built what is now, I believe, the largest agency in the UK, which is incredible. You have at least 100+ employees. You're managing dozens if not hundreds of models at this point. And I would imagine that either of you guys could take a couple weeks off as needed, and it's still business as usual at TDM.

So I guess my question is, what is your approach? What is your overarching business philosophy? And what are you trying to accomplish in this industry?

Liam: I think there's kind of two ways that I'd answer that. Firstly, retrospectively how we got to this point and then secondly, aspirationally moving forward because the way that we got here, I believe honestly stems from one clear cut differentiating factor, which is we care about people, and lots of others don't.

By no means am I saying that we are the total exception to the rule, but generally speaking, people don't seem to appreciate talent in the way that we do. I wholeheartedly believe that the reason why we're able to operate at the efficiency and professionalism that we do is because of the people that we have.

We care deeply about the talent that we have and the way that they can present us because I think you only have one chance to make a good impression with the creator. So putting somebody on the phone who is going to care about the ethics, the background, help them with their taxes, help them invest their money, make them feel safe and turn up and shoot a content day without making them feel that they're being objectified or sexualized.

A lot of that stems from having the right people in place in the first place, holding your team to account. You know, good luck holding hundreds of chatters to account if you don't have a good structure in place with people who genuinely care about the business, care about each and every one of their team.

So a lot of the reason why I believe we've been successful is because we cared about people early on and we built a very professional corporate structure on day one. We hired C-suite roles. We had middle management to an extent.

We do have that tiered system where if there is a problem that's been picked up on a chat, for example, it does go through an account manager into a supervisor, into the CRO, and then potentially to ops and then maybe up to us. Meaning that our day-to-day isn't inundated with little problems. There's many tiers and layers to every aspect of the business that has to be attributed before it can go anywhere and bother the likes of Chad, Kam, myself, any of us senior figures.

Which means that we can be pretty productive as well. We can repurpose a lot of our time to focus on things that actually do move the ball forward, like having conversations like this, calling creators, or in Chad's case, research and development, reverse engineering big creators, that kind of thing that actually helps you tangibly make a difference.

And then moving forward, it's really echoing the same thing, only on a bigger scale. Because we've obviously opened up a much bigger pool of opportunity for ourselves now. TDM does a lot more than it did before. We have our own gym chain here in the UK. We have driveway security businesses. We're building a whole new office. But fundamentally, I think it's still the same answer. People is what we care about.

Francis: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Obviously, I think it's impossible to develop the reputation that you guys have had and maintain as many models as you guys have and maintain positive business relationships — not just with your clients, but obviously, everybody in this space wants to do business with TDM.

How are you guys thinking about resource allocation right now? Like you guys are a huge organization. Where are you putting most of your effort at the moment?

Chad: If I was to answer that question, I would say that we are now focusing far more on being very specific around our recruitment so that it's able to tie in nicely with the way that we market creators, as in hosting content shoots, really getting in depth and specific with content ideation, which verticals are working, which ones aren't.

I think that would be the observation that I've had over the past few months. As we've noticed, the best creators on the platform are so much further ahead than the ones at the bottom, that there's a definite concentration at the peak. And so to reach that peak now is much harder than ever before. And I think that requires you to be much more hands-on and much more thorough with your marketing.

And in a lot of cases for us, we now want to try and recruit creators that we can have the most immediate contact and impact with. And that means that we have to be quite specific. So I would make that observation that we are now being much more specific from recruitment all the way through to marketing so that we can actually create and develop these huge creators.

Francis: How do you guys identify talent? Not necessarily how you guys are finding people, that's obviously okay if you don't want to discuss that. But in terms of like, you look at a creator, what is it that you're evaluating? What attributes are you looking for that tell you this is somebody who has the potential to reach that top percent?

Liam: I don't really gatekeep any strategies per se because I think it's the execution that separates one of us from the other, not the actual strategy. So I'm quite happy to talk about that.

The vast majority of our inbound leads come from one of three following verticals: SEO, my YouTube videos mainly, or in general, the TDM business channel, or referrals. The three obvious verticals really for any big agency I would say at this stage.

With that said and done, the vast majority of the leads that come through are what we would see as not a good fit. And we often determine that by one of the following things. Not currently well branded or not open to having that conversation because a lot of the time we've had creators that have come through that are just very bimbo or girl next door or something conventional and generic that doesn't separate themselves. But then they also pair that with a lack of open-mindedness to pivoting. And so that for me is a big red flag, irrespective of whether they're earning revenue.

The second thing would be that we tend to look for creators that we feel we get on with, which isn't a metric that we necessarily know how to track. It's more of just getting a vibe, being on the phone and actually feeling like, we see eye to eye on a lot of things here, the visions and values of your page, the visions and values of the world that we live in. A lot of that we feel has to be synergistic in order to move forward.

Chad: I think it definitely stems from how quickly and early on we picked up the importance of niche and brand. From the moment that we realized as a business that we had to either recruit or create creators that were unique in some way, it changed the way that we approach recruitment. Absolutely.

Francis: What was that aha moment for you guys? Like when did you start to make that change and what were the things that were like, okay, this is happening, we have to get on this.

Liam: Chad absolutely roasted me one day, that was basically what it was because I just thought like as you do when you kind of get caught up in business, you think more clients is more money. And you bring on client after client after client and one day Chad was like but dude every time we do that our service gets worse.

And it was like, yeah, you're right. I started to then have conversations thereafter about reverse engineering other big agencies that were doing well, bigger creators and what likely led to them being successful. And we tried to work out what we felt was the best way to grow an agency.

What's interesting is that where we got to that stage of being too horizontally scaled, that was actually something that we consciously chose to do having been previously very vertically scaled. The likes of Dean Indigo, huge, very few small, big accounts and others that we had internally. Notably one of the ones that we've shared a case study on was the likes of Stella Francis, a huge UK creator joined us at 2K a month. We blew her up to 450K. This was right in the beginning in 2022.

She was at one point probably 60, 70% of our agency's revenue and we felt very compromised. So that was kind of something we felt like we don't want to be in this position again. So then we went all in on hiring a bunch of creators because we thought, if we've got loads of creators then each time one leaves, we only lose a little bit of revenue.

And then we realized, right, we're too far in this direction now. And that was when Chad kind of clipped my wings on the onboarding to where we thought, right, well, who do we onboard then? What's important to us, who's the avatar, what are we looking for here? And I felt like that was the moment where it sort of clicked and then it was kind of smooth sailing from there really.

Francis: When about was that?

Liam: I'm going to go with like end of 2023.

Francis: And I would say that still probably puts you guys pretty well ahead of the curve. There are plenty of actors in this industry, plenty of agencies that still haven't come to that conclusion yet. So it's funny to think that you guys have been on this for two years now and it's like you're still relatively early.

What do you think are the biggest changes? Because you guys have been around for four+ years now. What are the biggest changes that you guys have seen on the marketing front? And I think maybe let's get more specific to like organic social media. What worked back then that doesn't work now and why do you think that is?

Chad: The skill gap between the upper echelon of creators and the rest, I think is widening over time. And over the past year or two years, it's definitely gotten more broad. And I think that the continual raising of the bar has made that much, much harder for the average agency to succeed.

The creators and agencies that understand niche and brand very well are the ones that have ended up in that upper echelon and the rest have kind of fell by the wayside a little bit. That for us has been the biggest change is just the development in how much energy and effort people are putting into their content, specifically for short form content. And you've had to mirror that to be successful.

The days of being able to just create a TikTok account and do a dance for six seconds and post five times a day, they're long gone. And so that's been the biggest thing and I think it will continue to be the biggest thing.

If I'm speaking transparently Francis I think you are probably one of the only people in the space that really understand niche and brand to the depth that is adequate at this stage. Most people are still trying to figure out how to do blackhat Reddit or do dating apps or paid ads or something similar. And it just baffles my mind that people are still so blind to what's clearly in front of them.

You only have to spend 30 minutes scrolling through your reels to realize that these creators are something different to yours. And that's why it's working for them.

Francis: Where do you think that those misconceptions come from? Why do people still try to do these things that clearly their time has passed?

Liam: I've got a pretty strong observation on that, is that I think it's because people are obsessive of the idea of a profit margin instead of a profit in dollars. So this is almost a realization that I feel that I create for a lot of people.

If I do get a South American creator on 90-10, and I do have the chance to work with them on blackhat Reddit or whatever it might be where they feel they don't have to buy accounts that have to hide team members and they do use a few novice Venezuelan chaps at two bucks an hour, their idea is that their profit margin is 74% and I see people boasting about their profit margin.

But do you realize that your margin is irrelevant if the amount of profit in dollars is still only 50 bucks? It's not really a flex to take home 75% of a thousand dollars. It's a much bigger flex to take home 10% of a million bucks.

My argument is that people should look at what they can optimize to achieve a strong profit in dollars rather than profit margin percentage-wise. I think that's probably a big realization that a lot of people have when they start to dip their toe into organic social.

The team, the accounts, the proxies, the hardware, the software, this stuff's not cheap. Putting on good chatters that actually echo that representation in the way that we communicate on behalf of this creator, it all costs quite a bit of money. But hey, my creators don't churn. They're pretty content and they often refer and they're often from a first world country where they're able to shoot better content, refer a better quality of other creator.

And before long, your margin sucks, but you make a healthy profit in dollars. And I can stand out and publicly say that TDM's profit margin is probably not the strongest compared with lots of other agencies but I can tell you that our profit in dollars will certainly compete.

Francis: How do you guys define brand in the context of OFM?

Chad: The way that we define brand, we realized at a point that we were falling into the trap that a lot of others do, which is conflating the meaning behind brand and niche. We kind of used the terms synonymously for the longest time.

So we came together and agreed that for us niche is category, and brand is the way that you are able to make your creator unique, make them identifiable, make them different to everyone else within that niche.

So that often for us comes in the form of content verticals. We'll split test a bunch of different content verticals, see what works, see what does not work. And then that will go into a cycle — four or five different content verticals maybe that we consistently rinse and repeat and iterate on.

Francis: Stop you really quickly just for the benefit of the audience — explain what you mean by content verticals.

Chad: Content vertical meaning the actual content itself as far as the idea, the storyline behind the content. So we will have often three to five, I would say for most creators, different content verticals, different ideas, different storylines, different reels, if we're talking about short form, that we will continually iterate on and improve.

That for us is what most often becomes the way that we brand a creator. So they essentially become the creator that is known for doing X. That's what we're trying to create here. We're trying to create a recognizable brand that people can say, "Oh that's that girl that does this thing, she wears this item of clothing, or she records content in this place." That is what we're trying to achieve.

Francis: Who do you think are some of the best examples of branded creators in the business today?

Chad: There are a few that come to mind. Honestly, there probably aren't as many as we would hope there are based on how many creators are on the platform and how many creators are out there churning through short form content.

There's one example for me that we reference quite a lot. And it's one that we very much had hands on experience with, which is M Roseweather. She is a creator that essentially was able to pioneer the whole weather girl thing. So that kind of niche and brand for me is really very clear. It's very distinct. It's unique. It ticks all of the boxes as far as the content verticals are so well put together. The content is high quality. The idea, the niche was there. The branding is there. And that is super, super easy.

Francis: Got it. And it's replicable, it's relatively simple concepts too, it's very easy to film.

Chad: Very, very easy. And that for me is like a really great example of a creator who understands their niche and understands their brand very well and then just continues to iterate, rinse and repeat and subsequently is doing very well.

There are a few examples out there. Another one that comes to mind for me would be somebody like Demon Mika. She again has very clear brand, very clear niche. There's another creator, I think her name is Sinono. She's got a very, very good niche and brand as well.

Liam: I also think there are some mainstream examples that are really useful to reference that just help you to kind of differentiate it on a macro level. For me a great one's Alex Hormozi. He is for sure a guy who you recognize based on his brand and not his niche. Because he's an entrepreneur, he's a YouTuber, he's an educator, he's a portfolio owner, like a bunch of stuff. But nobody remembers him for that. He's hat, nose strip, vest, big calves, long hair. That is who Alex Hormozi is.

And so he is for me the perfect iteration of being able to define what the difference between the two are. Niche is your subsection of the market, which fundamentally nobody cares about, but you should know about so that you know what content verticals to shoot. Branding is who you are, which is what other people recognize you as. And in his case is often visual. It might be verbal. It might be your language, where you sit in the content. It might be wearing a cool black face mask. It could be anything, but it tends to be something that helps you differentiate.

Like, you're a YouTuber, you're an OnlyFans management content creator, you're a bunch of things as well. But if somebody said, have you heard about the guy who does YouTube? The guy who does OnlyFans content creation? The guy who talks about organic social? Like, no. What about the guy who wears the black face mask? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Another OnlyFans creator would be Jelly Bean. She's a Latina, she's small, she's a girl next door maybe, she's an influencer, she's a bunch of stuff. But whenever I say the girl who jumps up and down and beats the fuck out of a Lambo, you're like, yeah, that girl. So, them for me are great examples of the difference between niche and brand for sure.

Francis: I think one of the biggest difficulties and what you just said I think describes a million other people. In some sense niche is like the target — there's obviously avatar is a word that describes us as well — but from the creators perspective niche is maybe like the group of people that you're trying to reach, brand is how you connect with those people specifically or like create an iconic image of yourself in the minds of the people that you're trying to reach.

I think one of the really difficult things about OnlyFans, for me, is if my niche is OnlyFans management content creation, it's very easy — I understand that audience very well. I understand who I'm trying to reach, I understand what they want, they want actionable advice about how to improve their businesses.

I think one of the biggest challenges with OnlyFans is a lot of guys seem to have this impression that your niche is every straight man on earth. And if it's a trans creator, obviously it's gonna be different depending on if you're representing gay creators, trans creators, whatever.

But I think that they insufficiently try to target an audience and they try to appeal to everybody. And in doing so, obviously they appeal to nobody. And then when you combine that with an inadequate understanding of brand, it's not really a surprise that it's harder than ever to compete in the OnlyFans ecosystem because nobody really understands the content that they're even trying to create, what they're trying to do, who they're trying to reach.

How do you guys conceptualize that? When you are, let's say you take on a brand new model — you guys only work with people who have been doing OnlyFans, so obviously it's a little bit different, I think most people probably come to you with some established socials to some extent — but let's say that you take on a new model and you evaluate her, you see that she's fit to work with you, but she needs to make some big changes to her socials. How do you identify who are the audiences that we're trying to reach? And how do you approach branding for a creator that you've just taken on?

Chad: The first thing we do, and I think this is a really necessary step that most agencies fail to complete, is they don't understand the creator well enough. They know nothing about them beyond their name and where they're based and maybe their age. That, in most cases, is enough for an agency to sign a creator these days. I think that's a huge mistake, and I think that the best agencies in the world are the ones that really understand their creators to the absolute depths.

So we will — our recruitment process, we're already kind of headhunting the best talent that we can find as far as creators that we see to have an already existing brand of some sort, people that we know we can work with really well. But if we've gotten to the point where we've signed a new creator and we need to make some changes, we need to understand them a little bit better so we can better position them in the market, we will basically ask them as many questions as we can get away with on a call like this one so that we can really understand them.

And often what will happen is we will recruit a creator in some cases based on physical traits like how they look physically, how good their content is, things of this nature, which is great. But then also we have had so many cases where we've onboarded a creator, asked them so many different questions and then actually uncovered something that makes them very unique, which then becomes our lever that we can pull to actually market them in a much more unique and diverse way.

That is really kind of the biggest thing I think that most agencies are failing to do, which is just understand their creators to the extent that they need to, to actually find something that is unique, different, and marketable about them.

Francis: Something that I, the way that I think about socials now is like concept exploration. It's a lot easier, especially now that I'm not in management and I can think about these problems much more broadly. That's part of the reason that I love my consulting practice because I get to talk to so many other agency owners and work with so many other creators.

One of the things, one of the concepts that I've really been exploring lately is it's just a reality. And I'm sure this is the case in the UK as well, but in the US, there is an insane amount of political division right now. And one of the things that I've really been exploring is controversy as a feature of brand.

I think about models like Bonnie Blue. She really seems to have cracked the code on leveraging controversy for clicks. And something that Bonnie Blue and Camila Araujo and Sophie Raine and a handful of other creators have done is they've become household names outside of OnlyFans explicitly as a result of their ability to drive controversy.

So I guess my question is, A, is controversy something that you guys think about or advocate for your own creators and if so in what context? And then B, what are some of the concepts that you guys are exploring right now or testing out that you think there's a lot of meat on the bone that's unexplored by the space?

Liam: I think in regards to the controversy, the overarching standpoint from our perspective is great providing it suits the creator because I think fundamentally any branding has to be authentic, which again is where a lot of agencies go wrong because they've got a cookie cutter approach of "hey we want to do a gym girl" and they'll send the girl to the gym who doesn't go to the gym.

For me that's a weak example of where branding has been incorrectly picked because we know that that's not gonna last forever and if it does, we know that it's not gonna be very authentic content, which in itself will mean that it probably sucks.

There are many examples of where you've got the most popular one would be people trying to be gamers that don't game. That to me is an example of where you really have picked the wrong vertical because I don't know about you, but I cannot watch somebody who sucks. If I wanted to watch a game of Call of Duty or FIFA or anything that I've got experience with myself in the past and I'm watching somebody who sucks, that sucks for me to watch.

So that would be one of the first observations I've got in general. And where controversy is concerned, that's even more of a dramatic failure if that's something you've opted to do, because trying to send somebody into the public domain and have them contesting people on the street, debating people on podcasts and acting up to this persona that isn't truly them, I don't think it will work out.

So Bonnie's an example for me of somebody who is in the right niche because that is generally a reflection of who she is as a person. I don't know Bonnie personally, but it looks to me like she's having fun. And so I would argue that she is well suited to her niche and brand, and I think it makes sense for her.

And there are other examples of that. Annie Knight, Lily Phillips, Kay Manuel, that are in a similar niche that all strikes me as people who truly enjoy that. So I would say where they are concerned, they've cracked the code for using controversy because it suits them.

But I would not say that controversy is something that is really worthwhile for a lot of creators, especially those that do have confidence issues or are a little apprehensive or anxious. And I think in that environment, what we look for most isn't necessarily how controversial we can be, but how authentic the content verticals we choose are to the creator that's doing them.

Francis: That, I think, is a great way to explain that 100%. Chad, do you have anything to add to that? What are some other concepts or things that you guys are kind of testing in the domain of social at this time?

Chad: Honestly, I don't think we're necessarily testing anything that's super different or unique. We're just doubling down on what we've done successfully so far.

What I wanted to say about the controversy stuff is I think it's great, of course. It generates a lot of attention, a lot of clicks, but also you have to consider the logistics of constantly setting up new campaigns that involve controversy of sorts. It is a massive headache to try and coordinate things like that.

If you look at the example you gave which is Bonnie Blue, okay? Well, how does Bonnie Blue now go from where she is now to the next level? How does she do that? Because she's already done some of the most outrageous things you can conjure in your mind. Where does she go from here? And more importantly if you do manage to actually think of something that's unique enough to get her to that next level, you've now got to execute on it. You've now got to logistically plan, prepare and make that happen.

And we know from the experience that we have with our creators that we work with how much time, energy, and frustration goes into the backend of pulling off stunts like that. So I actually think that controversy is a really great tool to use, but I think it shouldn't be the only lever that you have to pull with creators because it becomes very frustrating and very time consuming.

Francis: Do you guys think about, have you explored PR at all? Obviously, let's stick on the Bonnie Blue tack just because it's something that everybody knows. To your point, she's making tons of podcast appearances. She's working with a bunch of other people. Not explicitly working with, but collaborating, let's say. And I think collaboration is a familiar concept in OFM. But mainstream collaboration with people that are external to OFM.

I think part of the reason that people like Camila Araujo and Bonnie Blue have been so successful is that something that you guys obviously you're working with a ton of creators. So managing PR campaigns and interacting with a bunch of people and requesting to be on podcast is as you mentioned an extraordinary effort. Is that something that you guys are interested in or have done? Or is that not something that you guys are — you're mostly focused on solo socials at this point?

Liam: Without giving anything away, I think you know, Francis, that we do handle a couple of creators that are necessary in that regard for PR and other events, let's say. But really without kind of disrespecting creator confidentiality, that isn't something that we can go into. But the short answer and transparent answer is yes, as you well know, we do do that.

But it is without doubt the minority. The vast majority of our creators don't require ITV news interviews or anything of that nature. And therefore the amount of time and effort that we put into PR and stunts is limited. There are a couple of creators that we have verticals in place for. We have a couple of big podcasts lined up for a creator that's currently branded based on sharing her story about past experiences, previous occupations. And there's quite an interesting storyline and narrative that we feel is something that the public will want to hear.

So going to market with potentially big podcasts and that sort of thing is in the works with that particular creator. There are other examples of creators that have done well — in this case in my mind at the moment it's within the Porg niche and we are actually going into a very stunt oriented branding moving forward using physical props at real world events.

So it's definitely something that we do have hands on experience with both in the past, the present and the future. But it's not pivotal or central to our branding and the way that we do things as an agency. Fundamentally, we believe that just genuinely producing authentic and entertaining organic content is what helps us separate from others and being able to ideate and execute is the difference between that being a fantasy and a reality.

So that comes in all shapes and sizes, whether it be streaming, Twitch, playing Minecraft, or whether it be doing Instagram skits, BOP style. We still believe that you can build a brand that separates yourself within that. And so we will tend to just focus on the same principles with different deliverables.

Francis: What does your marketing offer look like from the creator perspective? What are the services? What are you actually undertaking? Obviously, we have a limited amount of time on this call. What does the creative process look for you guys at TDM?

Liam: As far as the offer and our proposition, we were a chatting service predominantly providing chat where we could with marketing if we felt we had value to add, which wasn't always the case back then in '21, '22, parts of '23, as I mentioned, but really from like late '23 and onwards gravitationally more so as times gone on to the point where now functionally pretty much every creator that we work with is on full services bar maybe less than a handful.

We don't tend to take people on for chatting services unless we already feel like, okay, you don't need any help with it, but we believe in your niche and brand too. We believe you've got it because we don't want to be in a position where we felt we were in 2023, where we relied on others to provide traffic for our business to generate revenue, but we had no faith in their ability to do so.

So in an instance where we work with a creator that we feel like has that already locked off — there's many examples of creators and their boyfriends who are very good, very hands-on. They understand conceptually how to market themselves. They work hard, they motivate one another. They've got things in a good spot. That would be something we'd entertain for chat because we have faith in them as a team long-term.

But for the most part, we take creators on that we believe we can actually add value to from a marketing standpoint, because I believe that chat is a relatively low leverage offer in 2025, 2026. I think if that's your value add, you are going to struggle to keep creators on your roster because that's not functionally what they need now. They need traffic, and so you want to provide that if you want to keep your churn low.

So our value add where we have a choice is to be on full services, in which case, Chad puts it really well, we want to manage as little or as much of that end-to-end process as you're comfortable with us managing. And then from really once we've got our heads together and agree that we're going to do that, Chad, I'm sure you can explain what the creative process looks like thereafter.

Chad: It's relatively simple. If we assume that we've already agreed on a brand and a niche at that point, then the creative process is quite basic. If we have existing creators within our agency that are similar in one way or another, we'll utilize some inspiration from them and try some content verticals from those creators. If we don't have anything that's similar, then we'll go to the market and we'll do some market research and we will find what is working for people within a similar realm, within a similar niche.

And then essentially it becomes a game of split testing different content verticals until we get to a point where we have some success. We iterate and improve where we can. And then we basically have that continual wheel churning until something starts to underperform. We take that out of the rotation of content verticals, put something new in, continually testing and adapting really is the key.

I think one of the things that I've learned about how to market creators, how to come up with content verticals that perform well, is to find the balance between iterating and redoing what's already worked and gone viral previously, but also understanding that there are hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of ideas that you have not yet tried that could be as good, if not better than the ones you're doing already.

I think that's something that people forget to understand when they are basically repeating things that have worked previously because that's definitely a lever that we should all be pulling, but it's not the one that we should rely on. You always want to be finding the next idea, the next thing. And that rotation, that wheel, should always be changing and evolving as you do as an agency and a creator.

Francis: Something that I advocate against and something that it sounds like you advocate against in general is like the thirst trap, TikTok dance style of content. The time for that has passed. But somebody left a comment on one of my YouTube videos that was something to the effect of, well, Sophie Raine is one of the biggest creators in the space and that's all she does.

So how do you grapple with that as Sophie Raine's entire brand in some sense is that low effort, thirst trap, TikTok style content? So she seems to me, on its face, before I really started thinking about it, like a counter example to everything that we're talking about. The exception to the rule of this is a creator that if she were to start today would be totally unremarkable, unbranded, probably wouldn't do very well in today's media environment. And yet she made $43 million in 2024.

So what do you guys think about that? How do you kind of grapple with that question? And what do you think makes Sophie Rain in particular successful despite doing all of the things that we say not to do?

Chad: That's actually such an interesting question. So whoever asked that kudos to you because that is a really fantastic question.

My interpretation of Sophie Rain's success, given that I agree with you entirely, Francis, she is unremarkable and unique in so many ways. There are two things. One of which is Sophie Rain and whoever was managing or working with her at the time did a fantastic job at making Sophie Rain — her name — the brand itself. That for me is one of the things that she has done very well that's enabled her to capture such a large portion of the market.

She, I think through a lot of promotion on Twitter, actually a lot of paid promotion especially, she managed to make her name her niche. And so it was like, if you look through her X account and you go back to last year or even the year before, they were hammering the paid promotion on X. And all of the captions that related to the posts had her name, her entire name in the caption. And I think they really made a point of just trying to get her out there on as many different platforms as they possibly could with brute force and consistency that was almost unmatched at the time.

And I think honestly, had they done that today, if they started to do that today in the exact same fashion, I don't think they'd have built Sophie Reign in the same way that they did previously. But that's definitely an observation for me.

Liam: I think it was clever copy. It was things like "I now understand the Sophie Rain hype" — it creates a curiosity around, well, what is the hype? Let me find out. Or like "OMG have you seen the Sophie Rain?" Is it like a Spider-Girl cosplay or whatever? Or like "Sophie Rain really is that girl" — so what girl goddamn it? What's so good about it? And it creates that curiosity.

It's not just a paid promo that keeps saying Sophie Reign to you, which is, look, fundamentally you probably need around 10 to 15 touch points as a creator if you really want somebody to remember you. Coincided with those touch points all being relevant within a brand that's interesting.

But in a world where Sophie is being able to touch all of these people so frequently with her name, and creating a little bit more curiosity each time, which by proxy will reduce the number of points required to be remembered, for me is the reason why she did well. And I think Chad makes a great point. If she did that today, I don't have the same faith, which is why I think that everybody thereafter has done it slightly less effectively.

Francis: I think that the brute force method is something that I think a lot of OFMs cling to because they're not doing the effort to identify talent and recruit the appropriate people. Their perspective is like, okay, well, Sophie Rain is this unremarkable creator. All she did was blast her name out as aggressively as possible and produce as much of this low effort content as humanly possible, and look at the scale that she's achieved. Let me try to do that.

And I think agencies that are trying to do that today are running headfirst into a brick wall. So I think I agree in that if agencies that are trying to do that today are running headfirst into a brick wall.

Liam: I'm interested to throw that back to you, Francis, because I know that you quite like Camilla. You think she's a good example of a very strong and well-branded creator. What would be your answer, in short, because I'm sure you're going to break it down thoroughly for the video, which I'm keen to watch — in short for you, let's look at Camilla, who's a slightly different example. What would be your thesis on how she's been able to be so successful when she's also unremarkable, ununique, et cetera?

Francis: I think that the thing that Camilla is exceptional at, the way that I conceptualize it is people love reality TV, right? In the UK, you have Love Island, you have all of these shows where it's like beautiful idiots is what I call them, where it's just these people that are good looking, but you watch the show.

When you watch reality TV, and this is something that I would actually encourage a lot of OFMs to do, because I think it actually helps you develop a theory of mind for the people that are consuming the content, right? Like guys like us are not on Instagram drooling over hot girls on Instagram. We're helping make the content. So we're not the target audience. And I think as a result of not being the target audience, it can be kind of hard to wrap your head around why these content creators actually are able to produce the results that they are.

And I think in the case of Camilla, she has this really deep intuitive understanding of — she makes reality TV for 30 second clips. And for a certain class of consumers, that's addictive content. That's really, really compelling.

So you go to Camilla's page and you see her on a podcast talking about, is it pink? And you're like, you roll your eyes. You're like, well, this is so stupid. But somebody else, our target audience is watching that and they're like, is it pink? Does she really dye it? Maybe I should go see. I just gotta go see. I just have to see for myself. That stuff works.

And so I think something that Camilla does really well, obviously she now has this mainstream — she's sort of becoming a household name outside of OnlyFans. So she's focused really hard on collaborations with rappers, with streamers. She's doing all this stuff with I'm not big in the streaming space, but Neon is the guy's name I think. She's doing all this content with Neon. She's doing all these podcasts with other more mainstream people and so she's able to access a much larger audience than just somebody who is making content specifically to promote OnlyFans.

And I think that we're reaching a point of saturation in the OnlyFans industry where that type of content — I really encourage all of my consulting clients and the creators that I work with on a consulting basis now. Think about your content from the perspective of if you were not promoting OnlyFans, what would you be doing?

And I think the answer for Camilla is she's really good at creating drama. She's really good at gossip type stuff. She's really good at manufacturing this reality TV style content. And she's totally mastered it. And she has developed sort of a monopoly on that in short form.

I think that there are going to be creators in the non-OF domain who look at Camila Araujo as a source of inspiration for like, okay, I can tackle this. And to be clear, from my perspective, I don't find any of her content compelling at a personal level. But despite that, she still managed to develop this insane cultural cache.

When I think about the content that I watch I love film, I love long form. I love watching movies. I like character studies. I like dramas. I like watching classic cinema. And so when I look at somebody who's successful who's doing stuff that I'm completely uninterested in I feel obligated from business perspective to investigate what's actually happening here. Which is why I reference Camilla so frequently.

Liam: It does actually and I think you made a great point where you said that if you watch the likes of reality TV, it's almost an exercise that you can do with yourself to reverse engineer why you remember certain characters, why certain people stick out. And I think it's a little like how I look at the world in general.

I actually heard Andrew Tate communicate this really well a couple of years back where he said that you must walk through life with the observation of how did I just spend four bucks here? Why did I look at that billboard? He kind of made everyday life appear like an observation exercise and I thought that was really cool and that was one of the things that notably I took from him when I did watch all of his podcasts a few years back.

I think it's a very similar exercise here with content creation. If you're watching TV, I hope that you're able to watch it with the understanding, the reverse engineering exercise ongoing of I remember that character's name from last episode or I've seen her somewhere before. Why? Why would I have seen her and remembered her?

If you start to look at it with the eye for brand niche and so on, and really what it was about them that helps you to remember them, that in itself is real world training for marketing your own creators.

Francis: I think that that's a really good way to put it, is that if you want to be successful in the domain of marketing, you have to view everything through the lens of marketing. Every interaction that you have on a daily basis. People are marketing themselves to you all the time, whether they are doing it at a conscious or subconscious level.

We are obviously more explicitly tapping into the psychology of marketing. But part of that though, part of the ability to create compelling content is understanding how other people think and what they respond to, even if those people are totally unlike yourself.

And especially in the case of OFM, I don't know any OFMs who are — I'm sure that there's some weird closeted porn addicts out there or whatever that are doing OFM. But from my personal perspective, I'm not a user of the platform. I don't consume the content. I'm not on OnlyFans. I don't subscribe to creators. Other than like for very occasional market research when I was actively managing in the very early days of what are people actually doing?

It's not a product that we actually use. And I think in some ways that's an advantage because it gives you the ability to have to reconstruct from first principles. What do my customers actually want on OnlyFans? And then you basically, you start at the bottom of the funnel. I've got these customers. I know what they want on OnlyFans. How do I extrapolate that to then make the top of my funnel more compelling to those people? How do I reach those people so that in some ways the Instagram isn't just the top of funnel, it's like part of the OnlyFans experience.

And so integrating that entire funnel into the OnlyFans experience, I think is how you create the most compelling funnel possible.

Chad: One of the things that you said that I found quite interesting there, Francis, when you were talking about Camilla was "what would she be doing if she wasn't promoting OnlyFans?" And you said that she's obviously good at creating controversy. She's good at the whole gossip culture thing.

I think that's a really important take home for agencies to understand is the way that you prescribe niche and brand to a creator is asking them that exact question. If you were not running an OnlyFans account, what would you be doing with your spare time? Because that is the only way to really enable them to produce content that they find fulfilling and also that is going to give them the most inherent advantage to actually perform well.

Liam: And I think in that you can also poke and prod to get the kind of answers that are actually going to allow for brandability. So in that question that we ask, it is open-ended at first where we say, hey, if you weren't doing OnlyFans or you weren't on the phone with me or you had no environment where you could work, what would you be up to? They're going to sometimes come back with, oh my god, yeah, I'd do this. And it's like, great, we've got you a brand.

But then other times they're going to say, I don't know, I don't really know, I just like working. And it's in those environments that you have to then start to poke and prod. And that's where I feel like for us, we've got an idea on what that actually looks like. What hobbies do you have? What are you interested in? What unique talents can you do that nobody else does? What previous occupations have you worked in?

Because a lot of the time that will paint a picture on how you could essentially enlighten themselves to their own branding because I'm really big on the idea and I know that Chad is too on it — it has to come from them and it has to be genuinely interesting for them. But that doesn't mean that you can't poke and prod and invoke that within them.

Francis: 100%. And I think another thing that I — that's something I think of specifically about a consulting call I did a couple months ago. And this girl was only doing thirst trap content. It's really just bland, undifferentiated stuff. And when I talked to her, she's unbelievably smart. She is a software engineer. She's had all of these interesting jobs with tech companies.

And I'm like, why aren't you doing that? And she's like, well, I don't think that that many men are interested in hearing a girl talk about software engineering. And I was like, have you met male software engineers? They've never met a woman. They're going to be in love with you on site.

And I think that the takeaway from there, too, is there's a difference between your objective when you're marketing an OnlyFans creator is not necessarily to develop the largest following possible. I would rather have a creator who has 50,000 followers in that software engineering niche where 25% of those followers are going to convert to fans than I would a creator with 5 million followers that's just churning out content that's not specifically appealing to anybody.

Liam: We have examples of that as well. Stella Francis is an example for me. I mentioned her because I think everybody knows that she's with us at this point because of the case study that's been on our site for a couple of years now. But she is somebody that does the best part of half a million bucks a month with — I don't even know Chad, doesn't she have like 15k on her personal Instagram and then I think around 170, 180 on an account that we run Chad, is that correct?

Chad: She probably has around the 300k mark with all of the accounts on that platform. But most of them are well under 100k.

Liam: That's what I mean. The average account for her is pretty small yet the earning potential feels at times uncapped because we have such a great offering in that niche where people who like trans women love her so much so that she's able to completely clean up and dominate the marketplace without really becoming an ultra viral influencer or celebrity.

I think for me it's because she sits perfectly within a niche and branded incredibly well and she happens to also be a little bit of a unicorn as well, that it just works. But it proves to us time and time again that actually, hey, you don't need to chase these validation, vanity metrics like views or followers because eventually they correlate but not linearly to your success anyway.

Francis: I think the way to think about it, I'm gonna not dox him. A very close friend of mine does fishing content. And he's got a really small following, but he has brands approach him all the time to promote their stuff. And the way to think about it, the way that he thinks about it, he has a brilliant analogy, is imagine as an advertiser that you have the ability to — you're putting up a billboard and maybe 5,000 people see that billboard every day, but if every single one of those 5,000 people is a fishing enthusiast, your conversions are gonna be absurd.

Think about an OnlyFans page as a billboard, and the more people that you're able to reach, the more directed you're able to get with your targeted advertising, and OnlyFans is just like anything else. It's a product, and what you're selling fundamentally is access to intimacy with that creator.

And the way to get the highest LTV customers possible is to narrow, actually, your focus. Not try to reach as many people as possible, because when you have like a Camila Araujo, if you look in her comment sections, one of the — I wouldn't say it's a deficiency in her brand, it's part of her strategy, but a lot of her followers are female. Her female followers are very obviously not gonna ever convert to OnlyFans subscribers, that's not what they're interested in her for.

Versus somebody like Stella Francis, who, if you're watching her content, you are into trans girls. And if you're into trans girls and she's the perfect trans girl, those are not only going to convert, but they're gonna be unbelievably high LTV whales a majority of the time, a much greater proportion of the time than a creator who is more broadly appealing.

Liam: I think oftentimes it relates back to the branding or the niche more accurately where you're referencing exactly what I was going to move on to, which is that a lot of the time the objective stuff, like you mentioned big boobs. I think big boobs is often a marketplace issue. I think if you're on Instagram, for example, big boobs is something that doesn't necessarily capture high intent audiences. Whereas if you're on a subreddit notoriously for big boobs, then in which case you would see a higher intent per subscriber.

I actually think that there's many other, and I would argue a slightly better example for me would be like fat ass. Fat ass for me in really, actually, Chad, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I would say really for every platform will attract more Mexicans, Brazilians than something like trans, for example, but that tends to carry with it much less intent depending. And so what we tend to notice is that it does correlate back.

Francis: And also less purchasing power, right? Because you're attracting people from countries that have lower disposable income.

Liam: So the brand or the niche in itself will tend to attract a demographic and a certain type of intent personnel that I feel completely changes the way that those metrics matter. So I genuinely believe that views and followers count for more in a world like big ass because it is a volume game.

If we take some of the creators that we have in the Porg niche or fat ass in general, anything to do with that kind of creator, most of the guys are going to be Juan Pablo from Rio de Janeiro who has made 40 bucks this year. And so he probably wants to just stare and that's kind of okay because he'll push us on the algorithm a little bit more and eventually the one in 10 will spend a bit of money.

Whereas with trans, they're probably not going to share it to their mate because it's their hidden fantasy. And they're not going to necessarily comment or share, but they're probably going to spend a bit of money. So maybe we get less shareability and less total views and followers, but we do get five in 10 spending rather than one.

So I think they all equal out, but I think the difference is that a lot of OFMs don't spend the time understanding which metrics matter for which niches, which is, I think, again, an example of where we as a collective understand that.

Francis: 100%. And I think the more OFMs that really start conceptualizing their business in that way and doing what you guys have done, which is actually sitting down with creators and saying, this is what you're doing, what are you interested in? And not only that, but thinking about the implications of, in my example, the software engineering girl, it's not gonna reach a huge audience. There's just not that many people in the world that are interested in software engineering, but the people that it does reach are software engineers who typically have very high disposable income. They're relatively isolated, most of them have some sort of autism spectrum disorder. I'm over generalizing obviously.

But if you think about broadly what the implications of the niche are and the people that actually consume that type of content, software engineers are a really awesome target for all of those reasons. Versus that's an occasion where you would want to take a really targeted approach and not really care too much about if the content is going viral but putting a lot of effort into the content and making sure that you're using, and this is a concept that I want to discuss with you guys before we move into the last portion of the call, which is future thinking, something that I call shared cultural vocabulary.

So software engineer is going to know terms, and you're gonna be able to use terms where immediately you can say something, and a software engineer is gonna be like, okay, I know exactly what you're talking about. If you're talking about—

Liam: It's like jumping on with a streamer and saying something's poggers.

Francis: Right, exactly. If I said that to my 60 year old uncle or whatever, he's gonna be like, did you just have a stroke, are you okay? Versus if I say that to a Zoomer, they're gonna be like, yo, pog, dude. It's a totally different — something that's really essential to succeeding on social media in today's environment is if you're going to niche down to an extensive degree, if you're gonna really narrow that focus, it has to be something that the model's interested in because they're gonna know all of the lingo and they're gonna know all of the terminology and what that type of person is interested in and that's essential to succeeding as a creator.

Liam: I think it's then relevant to note that there is no perfect example of what that looks like, but it's essential really to find something that sits within the middle of the two extremes because for me there is an extreme example of a volume based niche that will have very low intent per person but creates a very difficult environment to really brand, which for me is things like MILF, girl next door, blonde, that sort of thing.

And then there's the other side of extremely under saturated but very difficult to find a mass market with something like sploshing where fine there aren't too many guys that will necessarily enjoy you bathing in baked beans but there will be a handful and those guys will probably spend quite a bit of money and they'll probably convert when they find you.

So it's similar to an agency model where we chased horizontal versus vertical scaling — actually we learned ourselves that somewhere in the middle is pretty sweet. I think it's the same with a lot of brandings. Is it specific enough to have a genuine target market that you can say within three words who you're targeting, but is it still interesting enough to the mass audience that everybody, if they find it, will at least like it enough to watch it for a few seconds and help you to grow on the algorithm? If so, that for me would be an example of a good branding. I think if you're in either extremity, that's dangerous.

Francis: That brings me to one more question before we get into, I would love for you to just sort of freeform rant about strategy. So what makes a creator ideal for Reddit? When you look at like, so for instance, I have a creator that's generally very broadly appealing. She's got big boobs. Other than that she's like her most noteworthy characteristic, not a ton else going on.

My experimentation with Reddit, I never yielded any results. I think obviously she probably would have done well, ironically, we've been talking about the big boobs subreddits the entire time. I think she would have done extraordinarily well there, had I been able to implement a Reddit strategy properly, but outside of that, probably somewhat limited implementation.

So when you look at a creator, what makes a creator perfect for Reddit? Is it the types of NSFW content they create? Is it a body type? Is it a physical appearance thing? Some combination? What do you look for?

Chad: If we're looking at just the regular way of promoting, there's a ton of subreddits. If I would look up the word boobs in the search bar of Reddit, it would basically show me the best subreddit for boobs. And then the second best and the third best and the fourth best. Both depending on name as well as the amount of users it has as well as the amount of active users it actually has and all these things play a very big role.

From there it's just playing around with it really. There's small subreddits and Reddit wants to give these small subreddits a boost so they push this subreddit to the home feed where people come across your post if they are part of the subreddit faster.

So let's say there's 10 subreddits. You are a member of these 10 subreddits. You would have the home feed of Reddit and that's the app, you open the app, you'd scroll the app and that's where you see the posts. Of course, you can visit this subreddit and then scroll through the subreddit itself, but the most views would come from you popping up on the home feed.

You popping up on the home feed is something that happens if you are the post with good engagement. And that's why you get a lot of views. But that also comes with if you are competing in a very big subreddit with other creators that have better content than you, making it very hard for you to actually be the one being shown to the Reddit users that want to view your post.

So a lot of people have a big misconception like, what is the right time to post on Reddit? If I post 3 p.m. CET or whatever, that's the best time to post because there's not really such a thing because there's so many people posting, so many people all over the world at all times, as well as so many subreddits being there.

So instead of utilizing it like that, just post, just get it over with. Just post as much as you can in different subreddits, see what subreddits get you the most views. If you post a Caucasian creator in an Asian niche down subreddit, you're not gonna get views. So find subreddits that really fit the niche. And from there, just really explore, find the best subreddits for you.

We have creators that I would say were one-to-one copies of one another, both same height, same weight, same body type, exact same characteristics. And one would pop off on a subreddit crazy and the post would perform very, very well. And the other creator just would not pop off.

So there's big differences as well. It's really something to niche down on. Reddit is really a platform that really likes the niching down on the creators. And back in the days, this wasn't the case because creating the rage bait created engagement, created more views, but now it banishes your account. So now the quality of the content has to be a lot better.

Francis: That brings me to one more question before we get into, I'm really curious about kind of what you guys see as the future of the industry and what direction TDM is gonna go.

What does the future look like for TDM? What are you guys hands do you guys have your pots in and then what do you think the future of this industry is? What do you think the longevity of the OnlyFans platform is? Do you have any concerns about like how much longer the industry has left or what the next thing in the digital intimacy industry is?

Liam: Well, the first thing I'd highlight is that I don't want to run away from adult because I like this industry. I think we're bringing a nice touch to this industry. We're bringing a — we're proving to everybody that you can operate professionally and corporately. You can respect the GDPR policies of businesses in this industry. You can respect the way that people want to operate. You can pay tax. You can do all of these things and operate in adult.

We always try to try hard to be very compliant, whether it's with tax authorities, GDPR bodies. We believe that that is the way to get ahead of regulating the space. And I want to be at the forefront of that. And for that reason, I don't shy away from the industry. And I'm not one of these guys that's just trying to make a quick buck to move it on. I'm quite comfortable where I am. I'm content here. And I like the industry as well.

I think it's a lot less toxic actually than some of the other industries that I've been in in the past, especially things like fitness, where it's all about swinging your third leg around. I don't know, I think this industry is a little bit nicer in that sense.

For that reason, and that reason alone, I don't want to run away. But then more importantly, I think there's also a lot of innovation to happen. This industry is far behind in many ways. I think financial products helping people to separate funds at the source and control for agencies and creators being able to be paid out fairly. I think a banking infrastructure that welcomes higher risk candidates. A way to submit with the IRS or HMRC or any tax authority with more compliance from the source is important as well.

I think there's lots of parts of this industry from a financial and a legal perspective that could benefit from some authority, structure, regulation, rigidity, we want to be a part of. Again, for that reason as well, I don't feel like we should run away.

But more importantly and more excitingly, there's loads of innovation to occur. And I'm sure you've probably spoken about it a bunch of times with previous guests. The likes of AI, the likes of virtual reality are going to bring a new flavor to the way that we currently sell our services. And that for me is also exciting.

So there's a number of reasons why I don't want to run away from adult. And whilst we're investing in other things and we're picking up other opportunities on the side and trying to expand TDM as a brand, trying to expand our personal portfolio, trying to expand our individual net worth, all of that is just ancillary to the main objective of bringing TDM to the very forefront of the adult space and leading by example.

Francis: I think you guys are absolutely crushing it in that regard. You're doing everything — it's really refreshing to talk to people in the space whose values are precisely aligned with exactly what they're doing. It's clear that you guys are very thoughtful in your approach.

I think a lot of people would leverage that as a PR tactic or something like that, where they're fundamentally being dishonest. They're saying like, we want to be the good guys in the space, and then on the download, they're scamming creators.

Liam: They're doing 80-20s and not paying out.

Francis: Yeah, just a number of unscrupulous practices and this is a — I think that you guys are doing a lot in respect to not only bringing this industry into the light, but making it very clear that there is space for respectable, respectful actors who also are crushing it at the business. It doesn't have to be one or the other. And I think that that is really important.

And that's part of the documentary project that I'm working on. I'm obviously really excited to get some footage at the new TDM HQ to really explore what you guys are building and what you have built and what the future looks like. Because I think that agencies like yours and TDM specifically are the future of this business. And the more you guys win, the better the industry as a whole gets.

Is there anything else? Have you guys looked at all into something that I'm really particularly interested in that I think is going to displace, let's say, the bottom 90% of OnlyFans creators and OnlyFans agencies is these erotic AI chat sites? Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? Candy.ai, secretdesires.ai, you familiar with these products?

Chad: Familiar to an extent. I mean whilst we're not the target market. We understand what they are, how they work. I think what you're about to say is that everything we just discussed on this call in relation to brand, market positioning, all of that kind of stuff is exactly how we will combat that in the future and how we will further separate the gap between us and the vast majority of the OnlyFans managers in the space.

If that was what you were going to say, I hope I summarized it for you. But essentially, I think that those kinds of services and products will definitely grow substantially in the coming years. And the only way to combat that is to basically hammer home on the really intimate connection between the fans and the creators and making that so much more intense. I think that's really the only way to kind of put yourself in a position where you're not going to get swept up by that kind of new movement.

Francis: I agree with you 100%. I think my positioning is less — coming from, obviously, as somebody who's no longer actively managing. I'm a little bit less concerned about the displacement of OnlyFans, but I agree with you insofar as you guys have nothing to worry about because you're establishing yourselves as the top .01% of the industry and you're only working with creators that you believe have the potential to reach that.

Those people aren't going anywhere. There is a human fascination with fame and with celebrity and with that intimate connection. You guys clearly are very forward thinking in that regard. You're way ahead of the curve. I don't think the TDM, by any means, is going to be displaced by these products.

I think that my general market thesis is that OnlyFans revenue is primarily driven by that top, let's just say, 1%. 1% of the creators on the platform are generating substantially all of the revenue for the platform. It's probably something in the neighborhood of 1% of creators generating 90% of the revenue for the platform.

And I think what the AI companion sites are going to do, what they already are and are going to continue to do, is swallow up that bottom 99% of market share from consumers who are maybe not willing to spend the money that is required to have the quote unquote premium OnlyFans experience.

These are products that basically you have access to, either you create your own AI girlfriend who looks precisely like you like, behaves and acts precisely the way that you want, will do any of the sex acts that you want that can create very sophisticated images and video and that you can chat with 24/7 at approaching zero cost.

I think they're extremely compelling to a class of consumers who might otherwise be attracted to OnlyFans because it's the only option they have.

Liam: I think relevant there is again the idea of how important a brand is because branding in itself is AI-proofing.

Francis: 100%. I think that the future of this industry is going to be, it's only going to continue — OnlyFans is only going to continue to concentrate resources at the top. And if you're an agency and your objective or your focus is not bringing your creators to the top, you are not going to survive.

Probably, I think within the next two years, substantially all of those people are going to get wiped out. That's kind of how I'm thinking about the future of this industry and this market right now.

Do you guys have anything else you'd like to add, anything you'd like to plug before we close off?

Liam: Nothing necessarily to plug. I think anybody who is eager to learn more about what we do will naturally find that organically. We don't sell a whole lot of services anyway. We're pretty focused on what's core to us, and that's building brands and doing what we do and adding value to creators, which I think is fundamentally the goal for any agency, and they should remember that.

But we've discussed some really good points here. I think we've circled back to what is most important and most pivotal to an agency which is do you understand the difference between niche and brand? Do you understand how to find that with a creator and what to do with that information? And I think we covered that comprehensively here.

Francis: I agree 100%. Thank you guys so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been an amazing conversation. I'm sure people are going to get a ton of value out of this. And I look forward to collaborations in the future.

Liam: Likewise man, we look forward to welcoming you.

Chad: Amazing. Thanks for your time, man. I appreciate it.

Francis: All right. Absolutely.

TDM Interview: Chad and Liam on Building the UK's Largest OnlyFans Agency