Francis: There's been a ton of hype around AI OnlyFans, and more people are jumping on the bandwagon every day. The appeal is obvious. Removing the human factor makes things simple. There's no more worrying about whether or not the model will produce enough content, or miss a payment, or decide to quit OF. But what does AI OnlyFans actually entail? How do you market and scale AI models in practice? And what implications does AI OnlyFans have on regular creators and the future of the OnlyFans industry? In this episode, I sit down with the founder of Xcelerate. an AI OnlyFans management agency. And he answers all of those questions, plus lays out the exact processes, frameworks, and the incredible piece of software that he created to build a business that spends off millions of dollars a month with zero human creators. So if you've been curious about AI OnlyFans, this episode is for you. Listen closely and enjoy. You guys are obviously primarily an AI agency, so I think that that's something that a lot of people in the industry are sort of coming around to the reality of. A lot of people are for whatever reason, maybe they're there. They've got lazy models and they don't want to work with models. They're leaning much more heavily on AI assisted content, hybrid models, or even full AI models. So we're to talk about the basic mechanics of AI for OFM, how to scale an AI agency, how to market AI models, what that actually looks like in practice, and then kind of the implications of AI for legacy agencies and how obviously AI agencies are going to be a thing. but how legacy agencies and, you know, quote unquote, normal creators can compete in this new world of OF. So I think the way that I want to start is the same way that I start all of these conversations, which is how long have you been in OnlyFans management and what's your OFM origin story? How did you come to be in this business?

Tristan: Yeah. So just a little backstory from us. So we've been in OF for three to four years now. I'm not sure the exact time when we started, but when we started OF before that, we were doing contracting businesses or like waste management companies. were doing construction companies contracting. And like in order, when we got into OF, we started just looking at much more scalable business models because To be honest, we were working at the rubbish dump, was working for waste management and that we were doing these kind of like small end jobs and that, and we're just contracting out for like one or two K and you're barely making any money whatsoever. And you're probably looking at just other business models and we were managing teams out of these contractors and we just started looking at what's something we could do online. And as you know, like you're scrolling through your feed on IG and you just see Andrew Tate comes up on your feed. Yeah, like, and he got a lot of people into the industry for sure. But something that was really interesting about it was when I started looking at the business model from a business perspective. Like if you start breaking down OF and understanding the core mechanics behind the model, like the startup cost was zero. The business is not B2B and like being a young entrepreneur, could say B2B businesses doesn't matter if you have the perfect product, they don't care because you're like young age or 16, it doesn't matter how good you're serving.

Francis: like this.

Tristan: You just look at like OF in other ways, like the product's addictive based model. The market is like half of the world. It's one of the oldest products and older services. It's always been a reliable service. And so at the end of the day though too, it's just social media marketing. There's nothing really special. And like, if you understand the basics of generating views and attention, you can really just monetize and OnlyFans is just a platform to monetize it at the end of the day. So that's what we just looked into, like slowly stepping into OF. And when we slowly started stepping into it, like most agencies, like we generally knew nothing. Like it was so dark. We were like trying to buy some courses to try and learn some things, but it's such a unique business model that it's really, you have to put yourself into it and actually learn through the reps. And then you'll actually start to scale your agency. And what I suggest in order to scale it fast is just understanding the core principles. Like that's where you'll be growth compounding. And that's where your agency will actually be able to scale as When you take apply core principles and then actually apply this to your team and build a team to actually manage agency and grow the agency for you is very tricky, but that's where you will see the highest reward.

Francis: It's an extremely difficult thing to navigate. And I definitely want to pick your brain about it throughout the call. OK, so you went from literally dealing with garbage and waste to deciding like, OK, this is a scalable business model. I see other people are doing this and having success. What did the kind of, and who is we in this scenario? you have one?

Tristan: Me and my partner is that we were all working in the construction based business and it was like we were just washing rubbish bins and that and then we started like looking into how do we start this OF agency and in the beginning it was like since we're still young it was very hard to get creative. Like we're outreaching, we're doing basic like hustle methods, we're doing a bit of EA traffic and we've done a lot of traffic like we've done most traffic sources and to be honest we just fucked around and wasted our time. across most of that time. And that's because we just didn't understand what was working, what was bringing in results. And Sione Object Syndrome is a major aspect in this industry and everyone's looking to make quick money. But like, if you just focus on one thing, this is where majority of the success will come in. Like ask any big agency, they'll say the exact same thing as they specialize. And so how this led to us getting into AI though, was like, we started looking at like, since we're really, it's hard to compete with these big agencies and influencer agencies. Back even like three, four years ago, we started looking at how do we increase the conversion of a model and we started looking at like, how do we actually augment her looks and this led us to AI. So like, how do we start making hybrid models where you're taking a base model.

Francis: really early to this thing, because you're talking about doing this in like 20.

Tristan: Hey, yeah, this is a long time ago and there was like people who were like starting out with us and like when we first started off with just like basic stuff flow, like for example, just editing the face or making the bottle's body look more curved and that and just like, just basic things that can increase the conversion rate of the model. That's where we started out. then once we started with the hybrid models, like from there, you just started looking at just increasing with like AI inpainting or something really cool. And that was a major phase and. I still know a lot of guys that run this method where they basically do AI boob in painting. So they create like increasing the size of like models, assets or certain things. So you just make the model more viral or make it more absurd. And we've seen like really dark versions of this in the industry where they abuse it too much. And then there's also the really benefit of it where you can create unique creators and unique brands just by leveraging AI.

Francis: So what is your approach today now that you've been, you you've been leveraging AI for a very long time, you know, three years isn't a long time in business, but in terms of like adopting a new technology and incorporating into your business successfully, you're way early to this. So obviously I would imagine that things have gotten significantly more sophisticated and we'll get into the nuts and bolts of that later, but Just general high level overview, what does AI OFM actually mean? What does your agency structurally actually look like now?

Tristan: Yeah. So in terms of like how we're managing our agency, a whole front end. And so when I mean with front end that talks to like the marketing content, all of that is done by AI. No creators making reels anymore, taking photos. And there is certain creators that are influencers or that we have a few influencer girls left that still take normal content. But at the end of the day, any girl who's not in that personal brand and really wants to relate with her, who call like audience, you could say, they all of their content is done by AI. And then in terms of the backend, if we want to monetize them on any fans, all that content is still done with like, let's say a hybrid models or real girls doing scripts on the backend. And that's basically how we're looking in terms of managing AI within our agency in terms of creative.

Francis: question, I think I know the answer to this, but maybe some listeners might not. Basic requirement for having an OnlyFans account that can receive money is ID verification. how does that work with AI creators?

Tristan: Yeah. So basically it's almost impossible unless if you state on the OnlyFans, which we did not do is state that it's AI. And so what you want to do is you're just going to have to verify a normal creator on the platform. And then you can either increase her looks with AI and like make her look more like the AI model on the front end that you're trying to portray. Or you can even do faceless, but at the end of the day, you still have to have, if you want to run it on OnlyFans. you want to have a real creator. And I would suggest to run it on OnlyFans as we've done numerous, numerous split tests across different creators and different platforms. And we've seen that OnlyFans have got the highest LTV, best conversion rate as that's due to their brand. Like they still the best platform in terms of conversion. So I would suggest trying to aim if you have that possibility to do that.

Francis: as opposed to like a fan view or a slushy.

Tristan: And those are all great platforms like they all innovating and I really respect what they do It's just only fans has sadly got that massive brand behind it and they are the king of the hill and they got all the subscribers

Francis: space. It's really interesting to me. I think that that's a good point and something that probably doesn't get talked about enough because I looked at one of the models that I was working with actually got approached by slushy to do marketing for them. And we took a really deep dive into the platform and it has so many features that only fans does not. It's a super feature rich super robust platform. I think it's amazing for creators but that network effect is so powerful. I think that that's something that people don't quite respect in this industry because people are talking about all these other platforms and should I should I do fansley should I do family should I do X Y Z thing what do think it would take to displace only fans because obviously the answer is not like feature like the actual features of platform or the functionality what would somebody what would one of these competitive platforms have to do to actually dethrone only fans in your

Tristan: Like the best way to understand how to dethrone to OnlyFans is understand how it was before OnlyFans. So before OnlyFans was on the market, what would happen is there'd be a lot of these kind of like, you could call them e-whoring funnels and we do not partake in any of these kinds of things. But basically it was the wild west. Well, e-whoring is like, they're just selling like nudes on Snapchat and these like third party platforms.

Francis: work merchant places.

Tristan: You'll see that a lot of the times majority of these transactions between customers and creators were scams. There's a lot of like mistrust. wasn't any of like something that could be trusted in terms of payment and value exchange. so when OnlyFans stepped in, firstly, they got that first view, move as advantage when COVID hit and they really scaled their platform by building in big creators and building on the brand. But OnlyFans is at that point now where it's such a household name. And it just is the most important thing that people need to understand is the trust. Every time a subscriber comes to OnlyFans, they know that if they spend money, they're going to get that money back in terms of content. And if they don't, they can then message support and make a dispute. But at end of the day, there's always that trust and the same with the creator. Like the creator knows they're going to get paid and they manage that trust. And that's really important in terms of this industry to allow like smooth transactions. And that's how it's got to the scale it is. Because people actually can exchange what they're looking for in terms of whatever.

Francis: Got it. That makes sense. Back to one last thing on the topic of the actually managing these AI models. So you have a real model that's on the back end on the OnlyFans side. You have a real model. You're using IDV. What does the rev share arrangement look like for that? Because if the model's not creating any content, but you're just basically using them for the IDV section, what do your actual agreements look like? And you don't have to give exact numbers. I'm just generally curious about what that covers.

Tristan: In terms of compensation, there's certain clientele that we like to do hybrid splits with the creators. like as the income scales, their earnings can decrease a little because they're working less and that's the reality of it. And we don't really do like set fixed like splits between us and the creators. And initially we do also do salary creators where we have creators on contracts and then we're paying them salaries and then exchange for their services. And their rights to their content from there, we're just like, they're doing all the backing content and we manage everything else. And it kind of comes down to what the creator is comfortable doing and what they're looking for. Like if they're not going to choose the rates, then sadly we can't work with them. like, we just offer what we can offer and we try to give a good service overall.

Francis: Got it. So, my next question is, it seems very obvious to me, like what some of the advantages are for AIOFM. You're not relying on the model for the creation of content. Like the marketing piece is obviously huge. And so being able to basically automate that or create as much content as you want is a tremendous advantage. less, less humans in the loop, less room for error. What are some of the other advantages and maybe, maybe even some of like the hidden disadvantages of AIOF models.

Tristan: Yeah. Well, in order for me to explain this, you want me to like break down a little bit into the principles of like AI so people can get a better understanding of how it works. Okay. So I've made a really fancy presentation here to explain the basics of AI. And this will be really good for just the user, like the viewers to understand what's going on. So the first thing, this is what we do internally. And we actually explained to our team is like understanding first principles thinking is really important with AI.

Francis: Yes, absolutely, I'd love that.

Tristan: And then just understanding firstly, how to prompt and we really try to get our team native with AI. So talk with the AIs, like most of these, these AI platforms have speech to text, like start getting used to using the platform so you can start generating better prompts, understanding how to make the prompt structure as well. And please understand that like treat AI models exactly like normal models, we set you up full control. So you are in charge of the content, you're in charge of the distribution. It's technically right now with the current state of the technology, anything's really possible. Like I don't want to lie. 99 % of the types of content or whatever creatives you're trying to do, that's all replicatable or you can easily generate it. the thing is everyone says good content and we'll talk about this later, but like honesty is a major aspect and I'll explain how that actually works with creating content with AI. And then once again, like the best method in OnlyFans is do what works. Always do what works is going to be the most profitable. And I'm just telling you before like anyone wastes their time, do what works. So. Let's break this down a little bit. So what you'll see is understanding methods versus principles, like first principles. So what the average agency would say is, for example, hey, today we're going to do a method where we're going to get Reddit plus Cupid, and we're going to turn this into OnlyFans subscribers. So for example, tell the VA to 20 followers on Reddit, add Cupid, and then from there, the Cupid will chat with the subscribers and then convert them to OnlyFans subs. And that's what the agency would say. what we call that is a method. So the reason why the method is because you're only teaching them the basics of what you're trying to do in this exact task. You're not teaching them the core fundamentals. Yeah. Why they're doing it and understanding the mechanics behind it and how this actually works. And most importantly, if you want to scale to like six, seven figures, like this is what you need to be teaching your team. This is the most important thing is teaching this to your team. So what we would teach our team is for example, something like the whole concept of this funnel is actually.

Francis: like why they're doing.

Tristan: Not about making a follow on Reddit. It's more about making a false notification. And so what do we mean a false notification? It's something like a like, a follow, something that will notify the sub on why you've like got their attention. So once you've got the attention with the notification and they can see you followed, then you want to add something like Cupid to take this cold traffic to hot traffic. you, they, they don't look like they're going to convert. You use Cupid to convert them to hot traffic and then they become only fan subs. And when you teach them the formula.

Francis: really quickly for those, for those who might not be aware, Cupid is just like a chat automation tool.

Tristan: Yeah, it's just the AI chatting tool that allows like customers so you can talk with AI and then it'll convert basically like a sales agent kind of. And so then from there, they'll actually convert to subscribers. And the reason why you want to teach them these fundamentals is so that they can apply this to any platform. Or if there's a problem, you can overcome that with your team, not just you fighting fires every single day in your agency. And this will allow you to scale past that. So start teaching them core fundamentals. And now let's take this a step further and actually look at like the core fundamentals of just content itself. understanding these core content fundamentals allow you to understand how to create prompts, how to build your creatives. So if we look at every photo, like any photo in terms of OF is they're broken down into these core variables. These are what we like to teach our team is like, what is the contrast, the sexualness, the outfit, the relation to the niche, the pose, background. You understand the point here is We break it down into core variables. And why we want these variables is because at the end of the day, every time you're generating a new content, you're just changing the variables. You're changing the produce, you're changing the background. And so if you understand these variables, then you can start using these in prompts and you manipulate the prompts to match the variables.

Francis: makes you recognize. And this is a way to basically systematize the, cause what we're, what we're actually talking about here in terms of the composition of this image is design principles, right? So you already had contrast, you've got background. can see that the way that the shot is lit, she's very well lit. And then she's got bright colored, like a dark background, bright colors that she's clearly separated from that background. So she's the absolute focus of the viewer, but they're still aesthetically pleasing elements of the vision. So you're, you're incorporating all of you basically systematized all of this. You're saying these are the variables that matter from the perspective of the viewer. Now you're teaching your team, you need to incorporate every single one of these in every single image that you generate.

Tristan: Yeah. And it's just about like mastering these variables to create the perfect images every single time. And this is exactly like normal content creation. Exactly what you're going to do with normal content creators when creating content. Except with AI is it adds that speed and scale. Cause you can just change these variables in under a second. The creator needs to change outfits, go to new locations, new creds. Like the AI adds that speed element and that scale element to it.

Francis: Right, because there's no, I mean, the functional cost of creating these images is pennies on the dollar as opposed to finding a private pool for the model, getting the camera, getting the lighting equipment, like setting up this. This picture is a very simple picture, but to do this in real life, there's actually a lot going on at play that is somewhat inconvenient and like that's a throughput problem that creates the bottleneck.

Tristan: Yeah. And so like we look at just the fundamentals of images and now let's go down to like video format. majority of agencies would notice the hook, meet and then value. They're breaking down your content into the hook, meet and value. And this is really good with AI as like AI you'll notice with the current state of technology, whenever you're designing workflows, you may be using a mix of tools, but also you'll notice that it's not perfect at one shot takes yet. So you may be breaking it down into a lot of different scenes, which still is very normal to do a lot of. actual creators do this. It's just it doesn't get all the kind of emotions you want to show or angles or poses blue-ently within one scene.

Francis: course. So generally, you're breaking these into three separate scenes or segments when you're creating short forms.

Tristan: And the reason why we want to break it down into these like formats, you could say is so that we can then optimize for this. So we really want to understand what is converting the best. And once again, the best method is do what works. And this is this thing with creatives. So if the creative is converting and what I mean converting is like just it's going viral, let's say, or if you're doing paid ads, like it's really getting you good cost per clicks. This is what you want to optimize for. And you're just going to optimize to find the best hooks, the best creatives. And that's what we're trying to do here. So for example, like. What you really want to set is viral format. I can even go into an IG accounts and like show you this with the hooks and you can visually see it. But so when we look at this AI creator, she's doing really successful right now. I'm not going to stay to it is just for their privacy. But so you'll see this creator is really consistently playing this pose here. And you can see they're changing the outfits, but they still have this pose. They've seen that this pose is constantly going viral. It's consistently performing with really great views. And you can see it here once again, and then they're having the little caption. And they're changing these captions. And so you can even see like most of the kind of captions are relating to this idea about why I love men or fun facts about men or question to men. And that's what they found is a viral hook. So they found, Hey, every time I post this, this is consistently performing well. And an example of this with another real creator is you can see she's finding these like review videos and these are really simple concepts, but it still explains the idea here of like she's reviewing the content. And she sees that every time this content, she does her little reaction and this is what's generating a lot of views. So that's like the simple breakdown of like understanding the different formats. And now when you start applying AI to this is you really want to just optimize for the best formats. And when I mean optimize, you also want to do this per account base level in terms of organic. So an example of this would be as don't be trying to copy the same concepts across all of your accounts, rather specialize every account.

Francis: Yeah, that makes perfect. So like for this, if you scroll up really quick for this, for this creator here, it looks like she's doing sort of like costumes and theme stuff versus on the right side, she's doing sort of would be role. those separate accounts? These are two different accounts. Got it. Okay. And I think that's a, this is a brilliant way to, to visually display that principle. It's something that I try to communicate. Obviously I'm on the side of like organic branded personality based content, which is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum of this, but the same principles all. Still apply. And what you're talking about is just, again, exactly what you said. You're reconstructing what is good content from first principles.

Tristan: Yeah, and then like, so for example, a really good trick that we like to tell our team is what Mr. B says is don't think of the words like, algorithm, like the algorithm is saying your content is bad and you're getting low read. Rather change that to the word audience. So the audience is not liking this content. They're not finding this content entertaining. And this is where we really like to play into this idea of honesty. So what do we mean is honesty is like, everyone says let's make good content, make content that's viral. Like people don't understand what that means is. At the end of day is when you post a piece of content, you need to understand that that's how you're distributing your product. Your model is your product at the end of the day. And so every time you post it needs to be really good quality. Like people, when they're doing AI, they really try to like step back on the quality and they think that scale will outperform on quality, but it's the exact same. You need to have that quality still. And so when you're posting, you ask yourself, this content funny? Does this content have a good hook? Is it sexual? Is it engaging? Is the contrast of this video really high contrast, the outfit? that showing off the creators best assets is like you need to break it down into these core steps and you be really honest and some of these agencies, know Kilo Organic agencies, these guys are so strict with these kind of little simple basic things and they will not post content if it doesn't meet that criteria. Like they really are intense on the review process.

Francis: I think a lot of, think that that's really intimidating to a lot of agencies because they are used to, know, we came off of the 2019, 2020, 2021, like that post COVID boom where almost anything worked. And I think that we're still, I think a lot of people in this industry are still operating under the assumption that you can kind of get away with doing anything as long as you do a lot of it. And that's not the way that social works anymore. So it's interesting to hear you're basically taking that like producing a massive volume of content. Obviously you're leveraging AI so you don't have any of those, those physical, you know, physical shoot space limitations that like a normal creator might have, but it's still incredibly important to actually understand at a fundamental level why this content is working so that you can reproduce the things that work as opposed to just like, I'm just going to spam bullshit and until something, you know, cause if you, if you post a hundred reels, even if all of them are garbage, one of them might go, you know, one of them might get a million views. But as you're demonstrating here, if you actually think about this stuff from first principles and you understand the elements of what good content is, you'll be able to reproduce that. Those 100 repetitions, you're going to get way more hits and you're going to get way more value per unit of effort spent than if you just throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks.

Tristan: Yeah. And there's like two points that you made that are really important is, this is what I really didn't understand when we started. if you just, someone explained it to me, would have saved me so much time, so much years. When you get a viral piece of content or not even a viral piece of content, something that's performing way better than the other pieces of content. This is where you need to optimize to recreate that creator. And you say, Hey, something about this video is actually converting. Something's making this video get more attention. And especially with AI, this is the perfect opportunity to do that. So. A lot of people, they'll just start throwing shit at the wall. And I did this too, where you're just making creatives constantly. You're just pumping them out, trying to make funny videos. But what we actually really start doing internally is, and you'll see a lot of big creators is optimizing your creator for viral formats. And really well established creators like this creator here, if you go to her page, you'll see that she has got different videos across the whole page. But if you start scrolling and you start looking very closely at the videos, you'll see a lot of videos are in the same pose, same background, same angle, just different hook or something. Like it's the exact same thing and they're optimizing on their own content. And the reason why this is really important is it allows you to firstly, when you're building your model's brand and your story about your models, you start creating your own unique brand for that creator. And another thing is like, this is where the people who followed your account, followed your account because they liked that content. So if you're constantly changing the creative angles or the style of your content, the people who are following that account are not going to keep on engaging in that account and you're not going to get extra reach and get more followers. That's really important and like. A very simple example to understand why these viral formats work is basically understand the idea of a trend. A trend is a viral format. That's just multiple people have tested this and it's going viral and that's why it's going viral costs a lot of traders. And people need to understand is just start building their own trends and you build your own trends by finding viral formats and scaling those. And one last important tip is don't abuse the formats. So if you find something that really works and constantly is like performing well and it's going very well. Try and have a mix of like five to six viral formats, because if you're just constantly posting the same videos at a certain point, that's just not going to work.

Francis: You're gonna alienate your core audience. And I think another thing that people forget is that it's not just like the views don't matter in a vacuum. Your objective is to convert the followers into paying subscribers. So if you're just spamming the exact same content over and over again, you might be getting a lot of non follower reach, but those people are not going to convert to OnlyFans just because your reel got him 100 million views or

Tristan: Yeah. And then another little tip is just for people to understand like how this would actually be created from the creative process, like with AI and tools is every photo with it or every video within AI starts with a photo. So once again, remember if it starts with a photo, we're starting to look at these core variables again. And then all you're doing is you're finding a winning photo and you're animating that with the video and actions. So if I find that this photo is really converting well. and like I've that into video. In the next video, I'm just going to change the outfit, but I'm going to keep the same creative concept and the same again and again and again. And it's just really simple. And so remember like AI content still is at the point where you need to generate a photo and then animate that photo with like video generation models. And that's just something important to keep in mind.

Francis: So one thing I want to talk about is that conversion piece. Do you see, as somebody who is man it, who's done sort of pure, the done things the normal way, the legacy OF way, versus AI content, do you see any big differences in conversion? Do you see like an issue with audiences noticing that the content is AI or do people even care at this point? Yeah.

Tristan: Yeah, so that's actually the last point you said is really important. So initially when we started OF, like the conversion was really there. you didn't have a good like dev that was managing the AI, people were calling it out constantly, Hey, this is AI. And that also helped with the engagement because there's a lot of fights in the comments. But like from another standpoint is like normal creators now and with AI's quality, it's starting to become like indistinguishable for your average like. You could say subscriber, because if we look at the subscriber, they tend to be like older audiences. And these are the people you want to be targeting who have the money and the finance. And they're at the point now where they just can't tell the difference. And I give you with AI every day, you can start picking up on it slowly still, but it's really getting to the point where it's indistinguishable from reality. And in terms of conversion, then it just comes back down to those simple principles as does this model look good? I people need to be honest with themselves and say, does this model look good? Does she have unique characteristics? What is going to differentiate my model from the rest? And this can be really tricky. And I'll explain away like later on on how you can combat this. Cause if everyone has AI, then it becomes a little bit of a dogfight and there's only certain ways you can actually scale your crater. we can talk about that now, or we can like go back to the main question is, overall it's like the conversion just comes down to how good does the crater look. Like it doesn't really affect anything.

Francis: Yeah, I mean, that I think that that is an important question for people that are sort of on the fence or maybe exploring this as a concept. But I do want to talk about scale. So. I've seen obviously you've been kind enough to show me your your your revenue report, so I know what you're making. It's very impressive. What I'm curious about is what does scaling this process out look like? Right. So how many how many models are you managing? Is the throughput on the revenue side more? Does it come more from, let's say, like finding people that are willing to, to, you know, to do that backend, like IDV, and then just saying, approaching them with an offer. What is scaling an AI agency actually?

Tristan: So like scaling an AI agency in terms of like really scale, mainly getting the creators is not actually the hard part, especially if you're like well-leveraged within the industry and you have access to a lot of like referrals and these kinds of things. And also you can run multi-canned like multi branded accounts for creators. Like she could be one brand on this OF account and another OF account, she's a different brand, a different girl. But then that allows you to have two different front end angles. In terms of like creators, we're around like 30 to 48 fluctuates depending on like how much we really want to push and other projects we're involved in. But the main thing you want to be looking at, and this is depends on your traffic source to be honest, is like scaling your team. So currently we still like having an element of physical editing involved with our creatives. So we'll like take the clips, we'll edit them up, design the hooks with creative editors and just like a normal agency would manage their creative process. And so with us scaling is we're looking to really bring people to understand the cultural fit of what we're trying to go for, understand the humor, like the humor. And we're really looking to bring that high level talent to our agency. And that's our goal when we're looking at like scaling is bringing in the correct people to scale these concepts. And then the last thing is just like understanding the data. So like what is the things that are working and then automating these kinds of processes with like SaaS that we have in-house and like other kinds of products we're making.

Francis: What would you say is like stopping you from, and if you're comfortable, you know, give like a rough ballpark of what you're pulling down monthly, what's stopping you from increasing that number and like what kind of your objectives are. So can see what, let's say 12 months.

Tristan: Main thing is just scaling the team. So the thing that's stopping us from like, let's say scaling to multi seven figures is like really just that quality aspect. So every time you're bringing a new creator on, we time to, we try to go in like similar niching every single time. like, whether it's like big boob clients hell or like whatever the niches, we try to stick to that because we know that's a winning playbook that we like to play on. But at the end of the day though, it's like, it's something that's stopping us is the quality aspect. Every creator needs to look good. Every creator needs to have these kinds of certain like things that are going to make her unique. We still build our niches and we still build brands. not just doing really copy and paste, but the thing that's like at the end of the day, still stopping us is we want to have that quality within every creator. Cause a lot of people, what we'll see later on in like the 2026 is that everyone will have an AI model, but there'll be really few that are like really popping out and being successful because they just really lacking that quality element and the unique creatives. And you need to treat it as real craters. It's just AI is a way to scale normal craters. It's just a tool at the end of the day.

Francis: Yeah, my next question was going to be what is the average performance across all of your models? Obviously you have a ton of data. like if you're, if you're producing good content at scale for an individual model, what are you generally expecting out of an AI model? And what are the, like the differentiating factors between your highest earners versus that app?

Tristan: Yeah. So the main thing is you need to understand the difference between full AI and like hybrid AI. So like girls at all, it's a full AR in the front end, but they're also just a normal girl and they're not having the best kind of looks you could say on the backend. This can definitely affect their performance in terms of sales and the hybrid AI where it's full AR on the front end, but hybrid on the backend. This definitely does have that conversion increase. And you're looking on average, like multi-file figures across your craters. And if you just start scaling that out, that can really build up the revenue long-term and really become big.

Francis: And from a team building perspective, especially since you guys are so creative forward, what is your like, let's say staffing per model, like you onboard, let's say you onboard 10 new models. what, what, what is the, what are the staffing requirements for that? What does that actually look like structurally?

Tristan: So since we're like using our CRM right now, we've become pretty lean in terms of like staffing, cause a lot of this processes have been automated by like automations in general and just SaaS. But we'll have like, let's say one talent manager as we still want to offer a good service to the clientele. Something that the models can feel comfortable talking with another female and helping them manage day-to-day experiences. And like, I would really suggest that, especially if you're starting out within the industry is really optimizing your time. to get the highest value and focus on the things that generate money. And people like to say, Hey, I like talking with the clientele and I can understand that for like really high level agencies where they're managing major influences. like this, OF is at the point now where like talking with creators is not going to make you money and managing creators. So you need to be looking to like outsource these things to your team and really get someone managing that and you focus on things that are high leverage outputs. But so it would have one talent manager. They'll be managing around like six to seven models per talent manager. And then from there, we'll also just have like the VAs that are going to be managing, like, just helping the talent manager with organization and time, these kinds of things. And then we'll have like one editor manages three, three models. We pay editors per edit. They do say it really incentivizes them to make as much edits as possible. And you have editors and then you have your creative team and the creative team themselves, they're just on base salaries and they'll help with like the launching of the brand. So when the model on boards, what's the goal with this Google? What they, we really do an in-depth breakdown of what's our target audience. So we expand out that model's brand. And then from there, we want to push it onto creatives and then start pushing pay to ads. And then we have our media buying team.

Francis: Got it. Okay. So what is the, what is your split of like, how do you approach or the, or the paid ads mostly for like, let's say free page traffic. what's your sort of like split approach there? Because the paid ads ecosystem is something that I personally know very little about, especially in the context of only fans. So maybe, elaborate on that a little bit. What does that look?

Tristan: Yeah. So in terms of paid ads, we're like really starting to specialize in meta and starting to scale meta ads as our main like media buying platform. And in terms of like, what do you mean? Like organic to pay, like how much traffic we're running from organic versus paid or.

Francis: Yeah. Where are you seeing the greatest return and like, what do you know, just for somebody who's totally ignorant, what is the, like what is your cost to acquire customer with paid ads versus like LTV from pay that.

Tristan: So we're really running some special funnels though. like our LTVs can be extremely high on certain creators, like $80 LTVs for like paid subs. And we're looking at like $18 CPA to acquire these subs. And for free subs, like I can explain a lot of like advanced things about that, what we're doing to really like understand that comes down to network effects with free subs and how you can scale your LTV through network LTVs. But for free subs, we're also getting around like dollar free subs when starting to scale our spend. And then in terms of like traffic, we're predominantly paid, but we're also really like big, we're starting to get big on organic as there's a lot of easy levers to scale organic now, if you understand those core fundamentals once again.

Francis: Let's go back to the question of scale, because there's obviously like scale in terms of increasing the number of models that you're managing. But what about scaling the actual volume of output per model? How many like reels, carousels are you putting out per day? How many accounts does the average AI model have? How do you approach thinking about that?

Tristan: So it's, everything is just like capped on quality. If you can get the quality up, I know creators that have got like 10 accounts and some of these AI creators are pushing like serious numbers, like one mil views per account. And they got 10 accounts, that's 10 mil views average growth day. There's seriously like going to be a lot of converting subs and it just, really comes down to how well can you match that quality at the scale. And we started off really simple. Like we're not doing anything special. We've got five accounts that we start with creator. We'll just do some simple IG boosting to like get the accounts going. And then we start posting the reels. like, once again, we start testing out different viral formats that relate to the mall's branding niche. And then once we understand those viral formats and see what's working, then we start optimizing the account to that certain direction. So we say, Hey, when the credit does these kinds of videos on this account, it's really converting well. And so what you really want to do in this is what is just the hardest part. And it's took us so long to master is that flywheel effect. So it's really powerful with AIs. Hey, we see this is converting, let's repeat this creative and change the output, change the variation and do it again. And that's where you can see really like massive growth. And then another thing that is really important is to understand networks and like we can go really deep into networks because this will be what I think is the biggest way to actually scale your agency in 2026 and like actually compete against AI.

Francis: when you say networks, do you mean professional networks or like the network of models and sort of like having an owning a self contained ecosystem that you can.

Tristan: Distribution networks is what I'm referring to. We can break that down, understanding the concepts of that. Cause that's the only way I see that agencies can compete and anyone can compete in 2026 is building our network.

Francis: Yeah, so let's talk about that distribution network then. What have you guys built out and like, what do you see in the space that like the huge, huge agencies, like where are you seeing innovation in terms of distribution and what does that for you?

Tristan: So like, let's just break this down even more simple so that like the audience can understand it. If we look at any business model, most business models are playing on two very important variables. And if you get these variables right, you'll have a very successful company. So at the end of the day, you always need a good product and then a good product without distribution is nothing. So example of this is Apple. Everyone knows Apple. They've got extremely high quality products. They have really good apps, everything, the aesthetic, everything is a pleasing behind the product. And then if we look at a company that's doing major distribution is Amazon. They're everywhere, they're distributing their products to everyone. so going into 2025, I mean, 2026, with is just exactly like every other business model is you want to get maximum distribution. And the one thing that people really need to understand nowadays is with AI, everyone can have perfect products. And a perfect example of this is Sophie Raine. So Sophie Raine is an example of, she's a, I think the day, like it's sad to say it, the model is the content that she produces is the product. So like Sophie Rain, she's got a really good converting look that meets most of the audience's standards. And if everyone wants to understand the secret sauce behind Sophie Rain is her dances are the viral format. They figured out every time she does a dance, it converts really well and it gets a lot of attention. And Sophie Rain is an example of a powerhouse of distribution. She's pumping out creative constantly. She's on almost every single platform and she's just following this simple concept that's worked. And like, that's the secret sauce. And the secret sources, really push that distribution initially in the start. Like they did a lot of paid ads on Twitter, but we don't want to get sidetracked by that. like people, understand this idea of products versus distribution. And so if you understand that idea from there, then you want to start looking at is building our networks. Because the reason why you want to build out a network is at the end of the day, the people are going to have the most success is the people who can distribute the fastest and get their product out there the fastest. And the fastest way to do that is by having networks. How fast can you share your models content with everyone else? Because at the end of the day now, anyone can have a selfie ring. Anyone can have a perfect product. There's nothing stopping anyone.

Francis: I agree with that 100%. And I agree with you also that like Sophie Rain's biggest strength is distribution because now she's achieved such a scale that other creators mention her in order to get like boosted traffic to whatever that thing is, right?

Tristan: Yeah. And that's exactly correct. So it's like, if you can master distribution, this is where you will see the scale. Cause everyone has perfect product now. Like people need to understand this. Every piece of content can be replicated. There's nothing special about your creator because this can all be copied by AI now. That's the sad reality that we live in. And so it's about how can you build out these networks? And you'll see that when I mean networks, you need to really start thinking in terms of every single way. Frontend networks, backend networks, like organic networks. So example of a frontend network would be your IG pages, like having IG pages and they're sharing traffic in between each other. Backend network would be GG swaps on the backend. These are like examples of networks. And if you want to break it down to the core fundamentals of the funnel, and this is where you can see a lot of successes. Once again, first principles is if we look at this average sales funnel within OnlyFans is it's attention, monetization. And retention. this is like, most people really forget about the retention aspect. And in order to achieve retention in OnlyFans, you want to have networks that can really distribute to high, high quality, like hot traffic. So for example, you had that email marketing service where you're doing like the email marketing. That's a good example of like good distribution because it's instant. You can instantly connect with the customer. You have control over that lead and you can always convert them again. And people need to understand that in OF is if you're pushing massive amounts of views, you need to look at how you you retain these audiences and keep these audiences within your ecosystem and your agency to constantly monetize them over and over again.

Francis: Just a quick concrete example of that so that maybe it's a little bit easier for the viewer to imagine what we're talking about. The simplest iteration of this would just be like having multi-platform, a model that's on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, right? The more platforms that you're distributing high quality content on, the more you have the opportunity to channel your audience to those other platforms. So every time that person opens up any of these social media platforms, they're getting an additional net new exposure to your model. And that ecosystem. is what drives conversions because ultimately it's not just about the view count of an individual video. It's about how many people are seeing that content over and over again and getting exposed to your model and idea of your model over and over again. Sophie Rain again a perfect example of this right. If I go on Twitter I'm going to see Sophie Rain. If I go on Instagram I'm going to see Sophie Rain. If I go on TikTok I'm going to see Sophie Rain. And if you have pretty much everyone is using one or at least let's say two social media platforms on a daily basis and if every single time they open that application and they're seeing your model, eventually they're going to convert just out of pure curiosity. Yeah.

Tristan: And I would just be a little bit careful though, if you're like a starting out agency or like you'd be surprised as most seven figure agencies, they all are specialized. They have this specialized, maybe one or two, three methods and they specialize in this because at the end of the day is competitive and there is competition and you need to have focus. Like focus is so important within this industry. Start off simple. Like don't be jumping from one platform to another. Start with like a really simple platform like Instagram. It's not simple. The most important thing is content. And that's what makes it so competitive is like you need to master the content, need to master the brand, the story. But at the of the day now is like, you can just scale horizontally, different brands across different IG accounts, different offers. And that's the secret is once you start building out your network, it's just adding in offers. Every single new creator is a new offer. It's exactly like email marketing. So when you have a new, new girl, it's a new offer. And that's how you can scale your agencies just by constantly adding in new offers. And this will then convert. And if people don't really want to build networks, what you'll tend to see is a lot of small agencies will be making like 10k a month on the AI model and they'll really be struggling to scale is because the market's going to be just flooded eventually. so if you have that distribution, you can really still compete. And that's why I don't think legacy agencies will like fail and fall is because a lot of these guys have massive back end distribution networks that can launch craters, get them to 50, 60k a month easily, just GG swaps. Like it's, so powerful, these networks and like, just need to, as an even normal agency or AI agency, start looking at how do you keep the traffic you're getting to yourself and scale.

Francis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And yeah, that's a good caveat to my, the reason that I use that example is for simplicity sake, but even the simplest version of that, I agree is if you're a new agency that's starting out, you shouldn't be trying to do multi-platform distribution. You should be doing mastering Instagram first. And it doesn't necessarily have to be Instagram, but that advice of like, if you're getting, if you're just getting started picking a lane and mastering it, and then also not. underestimating what the word mastery actually requires. think a lot of people, like I can scale a creator to a hundred K followers on Instagram and they think that they've cracked the code. it's like, realize there's people on Instagram who have a hundred million followers, right? Like you're not even your, your basis of the, of the degree of mastery that's required. So don't, I think the headline here is like, when you run into plateaus, don't assume that the problem is the platform assume that there's something you don't know. Yeah.

Tristan: People don't even know the depth. And that's the correct way. And the best way to do that is those first principles thinking and building your team to solve the problem. Like one mind is always better than more. so the culture is just such an important thing. People don't know. And every high level agency, they're just looking, how do they build their culture and within their team? How do we make our team forward thinking? How is our team always hungry? And it's just building a team of people that will really help you scale this and really create an environment or growth, curiosity, and constant development and innovation. As we do see a lot of people in our way, they really have an innovating concept and they really work on that, but then they fall off because they just can't keep on innovating. And this industry is so like volatile that you need to that constant innovation in order to scale and compete.

Francis: I to take a quick detour from the AI conversation and just double click on what you just were just talking about with team building. I think that that's something that is not necessarily undervalued, but maybe just there's just no awareness. think a lot of people come into this industry, myself included as solopreneurs. And if I didn't have a background in team building and especially like creative operations, I don't think it would have ever occurred to me. Like the problem here is that I don't have enough mind that's working on all of the problems that I need to solve. Yeah. This business. especially if you're a solo printer, it's really important. And that's like a skill that you have to develop. You who is managing this large creative team, you're pumping out content for 40 plus models. How do you personally approach that? Like as the leader of those teams, what are you doing to create that culture? What are your expectations of your employees? How do you like. And very high level here, we don't need to go...

Tristan: So it's firstly, it's just building the culture. like cultures, I really like to say is the frameworks at the agency. So it's like, what are we at this agency always do? We always focus on quality. Like you set up your core frameworks and the team follows these frameworks consistently till they die. The team must want to die for you and really like be there right beside you the whole way. And so you set up these frameworks. Once you have these basic frameworks set up. Then from there, you want to incentivize them. like actually, for example, the real editors, you pay them per edits. Like you really get them hungry to really make money. Cause at the end of the day, most people come to this industry. It's sad, it's a degenerate industry. And that's why the only thing I've seen a really best way to motivate people is through creating wealth. Like that's what we tell our team is you join this company, you want to get rich. Well, that's the whole goal of what we're trying to achieve here. so start.

Francis: And that gets people giving them that incentive also gets people mission aligned, right? Because when you're aligning the incentive to performance, and this is the thing that I think people also miss out on is it's like, can I hire the cheapest person? And then the cheapest person ends up being more work than if you had just not fucking hired anybody at all.

Tristan: So don't be cheap on talent. And another thing that people also need to understand is like the kind of talent you want to hire is not really skills. Like you want to hire more people who have a creative outlook. Let's say for organic, people have creative outlook. So you're going in page, want to have people who are like really methodical. You are hiring for characteristics, especially in this industry. Because I'll be honest, there's not really anyone has previous prior experience within this industry. Like it's something so unique. All the offers are different. You really want to hire, like here's a good tip is hire for EQ. you'll see with when you start building out your leadership teams, they're all going to be like high EQ and like big agencies, they'll start noticing that, Hey, my team is predominantly female or like transgender or whatever. But at the end of day, these people have high EQ. They understand what's the brand, the essence we're looking for here. And they really aligned with that. And one thing also is just like a little tip that can help a lot of agencies is looking to be more like. culturally diverse within their team and bringing unique perspectives. As like, for example, there's nothing wrong with hiring all, let's say all Filipinos or all Serbians, but there is a large cultural bias within these teams. And something that saved me a lot of time is just like diversifying your teams to different cultures and different viewpoints so that you can always have that honesty aspect within your team, your culture, that they always, everyone has their own different opinions, but everyone aligned to the work. And there's not going to be cultural biases.

Francis: Yeah, I love that. And it's especially important with creative teams, like hiring people who just get it because so much of what we do on the creative element is like, there's the structural elements, those variables that you're talking about as far as composition, but understanding like the way that images and especially video moves people and produces an emotional response. I think that is a really undervalued skill. It's one of the most important things in creative and you can hire the most talented on a raw talent basis, like mastered after effects, mastered premier, know, color grading and DaVinci. Like the most skilled person that doesn't have any taste is at the end of the day, only going to be able to produce a beautiful image, not something that actually moves people. And if your objective as it is in this industry is to like convert people into paying customers. You have to make them feel something because it's such an addiction based industry. It's an emotion based industry. You're fulfilling an emotional need for people. And if you don't, if you're not approaching every piece of content from that perspective, even if you have, even if you're able to, you have the most beautiful model in the world, it's not going to matter because that person is not going to be able to scale without some element of being able to connect with the viewer.

Tristan: Yeah, it's like you're selling the fantasy and most customers, they know that these things are fake. They know these models are fake. The average fan has been on multiple pages already. And so like you just selling that fantasy at the end of the day, and you want to sell that service and that experience. And so you need to hire people that are dedicated and actually properly incentivized. so understanding incentivization also understands people's motives. So you need to understand why are these people here? What are they looking for? What is their dreams? You need to allow them to achieve their dreams. And some of the best agencies, like they really have mastered this. Like I've seen some really killer agencies. They really understand how to incentivize their team, how to bring people towards the goal. And I really respect that. And what people just need to understand is grow this business as a normal business. Like that's just the most important takeaway here is don't be trying to do some shortcuts in that because I've tried all the shortcuts. I've mostly tried more shortcuts than most people. It's just not going to work. It's not. You need to build a team. You need to build systems. You need to read books. You need to learn all that shit. And if you want to make money, then do that. But if you want to make some quick money and quick money is little money at the end of the day. And one of my good friends, said something really good. He's managed the method of create agencies. He says simple scale, complex fails within this industry. And you've got to follow that to a T. And this is the biggest agencies in the world. Like the biggest.

Francis: Yeah, you can't achieve that skill without understanding something well enough to simplify it, communicate it to somebody and bring them on to that team. Like that's how you grow.

Tristan: Yeah. And then like one other thing is like what Steve Jobs would say is like this idea of focus. People don't really understand the idea of focus. Focus doesn't just mean like aligning with one concept and like one goal, but focus means ignoring things that would waste your time to and don't align with the goal. So if you see this new method, hey, your friend said, Hey, this is a new method. got to do this shit. Like if that doesn't align with the main goal you're trying to achieve, don't step away, like step away from that. And that's what we try to do with like our CRM and these kinds of products is We want to give data driven decisions. So it allows you to have this focus within your team. It allows you to see what is the things you should actually be focusing on to make profit. Cause you can always make a lot of money, but I want you to be taking home and what is actually working. So that you don't have to work your ass off 24 seven. Unless if you want to.

Francis: Unless if you want to. I mean, at the very least, ensuring that the effort when you're personally working in Ashen to managing your team, making sure that your effort is actually yielding the appropriate amount of value. I think that those are all really great insights. Let's take the conversation back to AI. You mentioned your CRM. I want to talk about your tech stack, but I want to save that for the very end. I think the question that a lot of people are probably going to be watching this for tips, like who are maybe thinking about starting AI agencies. And I think an equal number of people are going to be watching this that have absolutely no exposure to these AI concepts and are not integrating them into their business. I think it's pretty obvious at this point AI is going to be tremendously disruptive to the OnlyFans and the digital intimacy industry. Something that I'm personally investing time and money into right now is these AI harem platforms like candy.ai, secretdesires.ai. And my thesis right now is basically that the last people standing in OFM are going to be guys like you who really understand distribution. And then my approach, obviously I'm a little biased here, but my approach, is hyper differentiated, vertically scaled creators with a legitimate personal brand that are making great content. So my question to you, obviously that's my thesis. If you were running a regular OFM right now and you only had, you know, quote unquote normal girls, not AI girls, what are you doing in the next 12 months to sort of insulate yourself or create some sort of competitive moat? that protects you from these AI agencies that are able to scale and achieve huge distribution and network effects.

Tristan: Yeah. So there's two things is it's situational. If you're a normal agency right now and you don't have creators with established brands and they say like influencer models who have that base following in that big brand already, what you need to be looking at is AI. Like I'm not going to lie. And the reason why is AI is just a tool to scale your current operations. It's people need to understand that it's just a tool. It's not a method. It's a tool that allows you to scale what you're currently doing. So if you have current creators in that continue scaling that business model like Do what works. I'm not telling you to run AI. If you're making a shit ton of money running influencers, continue scaling and getting influencers and manage the influences. But what I would say is if you're not and you're trying to build creators brands from scratch, start looking at is the brands high converting? And if the brands are converting, then starting looking to if the product basically brand is your product. If the product's good, then look to scale the distribution with AI. That's the goal.

Francis: I think that's excellent advice. So now let's talk, let's get into the nitty gritty about the actual tech stack. So you're generating massive quantities of images, of video, you're turning out creative. obviously have to write, you're, you've got a creative team. So I would imagine that a lot of those are like a lot of the ideas or concepts that are associated with the content are from individual contributors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but What image gen tools are you using? What video gen tools are you using? And are you doing like AI assisted script writing or like AI assisted, let's say ideation. What does all of that look like on the creative side?

Tristan: So in terms of like creator side, we could get a little bit in depth here, but what I'll suggest is like any one is starting is just go to Higgs field.ai and like this platform is extremely good. Their models are really good. It's the reason why it's a good platform is that it has every, every generation software on here. You can use every model, every business model or whatever AI model it's all on this platform. Invest into the software, spend a hundred bucks and start just creating and like. People need to understand is, since this is such new technology and there's always new models getting released, you just need to have that culture in this in your team is whenever there's something new, test it out. See how you can recreate creatives with these kinds of tools and play around with it. You just need to play around with it. And then in terms of like, when we're trying to scale creatives and looking at tech stacks, is we really want to start looking at like breaking it down into these core variables. And once we break down into core variables, starting to look to scale these variables with, let's say like GPT, custom GPTs, content generations that will generate these prompts at scale. If they're, if you see a photo has these kinds of variables, then we have a tool that will change the variables and then generate that content again and animate it. And what we start doing is we're a little bit more advanced. We're working with Comfort UI workflows. So all of our AI is done in-house with these workflows. But I'm telling you like the quality on these platforms, they're perfect already. Like you don't need any special Comfort UI. You don't.

Francis: you advocate for any specific like video or image gen model on Higgs field right now or do you just say

Tristan: Literally you Google Nano Banana Pro, like that can generate any piece of content. Image to image, you turn any creator into your creator. And one thing is what I would say again is remember like Twitter is a normal creator. That means yes, you can always copy creators. Yes, that will be a very profitable method most likely. But you can also create your own creators brands. You can make this girl a cowboy. You can make her a police officer. Everyone keeps on thinking in this idea of methods. Hey, I saw this police officer creator. And this police officer crater, she's super crazy, super viral. No, the method is just having a unique brand. Like there's no secret source. You need to get that out of your head. You're not going to make any money if you keep on thinking of this tool. That's understanding the fundamentals.

Francis: And understanding like that's a great example too of like understanding when a principle applies to a specific creator as a consequence of their brand, as opposed to just looking at the thing in a vacuum and saying like, cop content is working. I need to make cop content. And you have created a, that's a total cream pot. Like it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense for her character. It doesn't make sense for her brand. And you're forcing her to do something that's actually brand dilutive and potentially harmful to her brand because you think it's going to go viral because you're in your mind. It's the top outfit that mattered and not the actual associations that are generated.

Tristan: Yeah. And I think the biggest takeaway to prevent that is just start doing shit yourself. Like stop trying to copy and just take a moment to think. Like you'd be surprised that it's such a simple method, but this will make you certain figures. Like if you just stop for one second and say, Hey, what is a different kind of variation of a cop? Or like you just break it down. she can be a bartender. She can be this like, just stop and be creative yourself. It's not that hard. The only way to be creative is stop copying. Firstly, step into that creative process and look at. What is variations of this? Everything has already been made in terms of history. Like there's nothing really that being created, it's more creative as variations. Like finding what is different angles, what is different views and unique about it. It's, but at the end of the day, it's like, it's still the same shit. There's nothing new. There's nothing getting invented really.

[Francis discusses the increasing quality standards and creative bar in content creation]

Francis: Very cool. Okay. Now I want to talk about your, one of the reasons that I want to have this call with you. showed me this incredible marketing CRM that you guys built. My understanding is this is an internal tool that you guys used. so maybe just some background for the audience and feel free to correct me or fill in gaps here. You're managing, you know, upwards of 30 creators. You have, I'm assuming hundreds of accounts across dozens of platforms, this huge distribution network and A problem that is endemic to that, not that everybody's operating at this kind of scale, which is why I'm explaining this. The problem that's endemic to that is that it becomes extremely difficult to manage, to have any kind of visibility over everything that's going on and tracking performance across a hundred pages. can't just be, you know, that's like, it's 20, 25 phones or whatever that you would individually be looking at every single account, looking at the metrics on all of those accounts. and so what accelerate has done is basically taken. all of those processes, integrated them into one place. That's what this marketing CRM is. And now you guys are offering it as a product. Is that correct?

Tristan: Yeah. So a few friends of ours suggested, Hey, you should make this a product and like sell this to everyone. And that's where we basically did. And we really spent a lot of time in development over like 10 months in development. And there's a lot of unique features about it. But the thing that people need to understand with the CRM is it's not just a tool. It's actually a place where you want to manage your team and scale your agency. And that's the way we're using it. And so we've designed it in really like a way to be very flexible. Like it's really flexible. But when I mean like your team is going to be onboarding, I'm talking about models, whatever kind of teams you want to look, you onboard them all to the CRM. And so I'll give you a quick rough breakdown of how it works. And if you see fit for this product within your agency, please don't be shy to message the support team we have. have like guides on how everything works because it is really a lot. It's so many features built into one tool because there's a lot to manage within an agency. the first thing you'll notice here is. You come to this admin dashboard and what the whole goal of what the CRM is trying to do is really to start integrating AI into your agency and it becomes a gen tech within your company. And I'll talk about that a little bit more depth and later. But the first thing is you want to start building out your dashboard. So how the whole tool works is you connect all of your data and once you connect all your data, then you can start building out dashboards and these dashboards will then show up and like show what's happening with your creators. I'm here on this demo account. And you basically start adding in your dashboard and you start like designing dashboards and each of these relate to a different aspect within your agency. So there'll be like Instagram apps, deep links, can set up a bottlenecks. But so here on the side, you can see these things that we call apps. So each of these apps will relate to a different aspect of your agency. So for example, the model register app would be to onboard models to the app. For example, it helps with the onboarding flow. Deep links app will help with deep links. OnlyFans, Apple help with OnlyFans, social media Apple help with social media tracking. Each of these do their own aspects of the CRM and that's what the goal is. And so what's really powerful about this though is when you start integrating everything into one ecosystem, this is where firstly you as your agency owner can start seeing what's going on in one big picture, but it also allows you to start getting AI to start getting involved. And currently I will be honest, the AI features not at the standard we want it to be at. And it's not really like crazy good. Like I'm not going to lie, but this is our goal of the CRM is to develop it to that standard where the AI can give you root cause analysis. So what that means though, is basically you, you start onboarding everything in an isolation format. So when I'm referring to isolation, what this means is how the CRM is designed is you connect one IG to the platform with one deep link with one only fans tracking link. Cause you remember we have everything integrated within the CRM. And so what to do when you do this. This allows you to see data and the performance from an isolated level. And why this is so important in like agencies need to understand this is data will not make you money, but what will make you money is making better decisions. That's the secret, Jan. That's what we're trying to do. So by isolating everything, this will allow you to start seeing an individual breakdown of decision making. And so once you've connected everything to the platform, this is where you can start integrating AI and AI can say, Hey, this model is making less subs today because you've got less clicks on the deep links. The reason why you got less clicks on the deep links. is because her IG videos weren't performing. The reason why her IG videos weren't performing well is because the team has been late or the model's been late in handling and their tasks and they haven't posted.

Francis: And that's like to be able to derive that manually for every single one of your models, even if you have access to all of the data in one place, the time that it would take to actually investigate that and make that analysis and that determination at an individual level is an extraordinary amount of time and effort. Yeah. Yeah. Versus having an agent that's embedded in this platform that can basically give you all of those insights. You can ask it questions. I'm assuming that over As it becomes more sophisticated, might even prompt you to say like, hey, this is something that you might.

Tristan: We want it to be agentic and that's the end goal is that says, Hey, we noticed that you're making less money here. You should do that. And so one thing that every agency really also needs to understand is like the most important thing with these kinds of tools is data privacy. like we understand that's really important aspect and customization. So we can go a little bit into depth of customization, but in terms of data privacy is the CRM is built to be run on your own server. So when you launch the CRM, not trying to sell anyone, but go to accelerator. agency, accelerator dot agency.

Francis: And there will be a link in the description, obviously, as well.

Tristan: Yeah, there'll be a link in the description. We're going to give Franz for the code. So anyone who joins through him can get a discount. And so what you'll see down here is you can get a plan. can see the plans are based off like your number of people. So you have larger teams, that's going to be bigger plans. In terms of value, it's already like, going to lie. It's already out competing most competitors because like the actual essential things like the marketing tools are all unlimited after the like mid, mid level plan. Like deep links is unlimited. Funnel analytics is unlimited. So you can go nuts there. And so let's go back to here and let's break it down a little bit more. So how it works is you assign these apps to your team. So let's say if you had a model manager, you would assign them access to the managed models or register model app. have a social media manager. want to sign them access to the social media register. And if you have someone who's managing deep links, you assign them and each of them will get their own, let's say sidebar navigation to like manage their tools and their processes within agency.

Francis: Quick question here, is this only for front end or is this fully integrated like an inflow or super creator might be?

Tristan: Yeah. So for backend, we do have our own OnlyFans API. So for privacy is all of our APIs are done in-house. So every API, our OnlyFans API was reversed, just like Inflow or OnlyMonster. Our Instagram API was reversed, just like most of these scrapers nowadays online. So this is really important for your data's privacy. And then once again, all of your data is stored on your server so that it's not accessed by us. And you launch your server when you buy a plan and test out the trial guys like going nuts. so.

Francis: very cool feature and something that I think maybe isn't well understood just as a quick tangent is that like when you onboard to a company like inflow or any of the other major CRMs, those people do have access to all of your models data like they have some of the most robust data sets, perhaps in the world on only those I think in my opinion, the CRMs probably know understand only fans better than anybody else, even the big agencies.

Tristan: I would do, yeah, that's correct.

Francis: And so you're basically like saying, hey, we're not interested in your data. We're actually just interested in making sure that you have the best possible product.

Tristan: Yeah. And the reason why we want to do that, if people are wondering the reason why is because like I didn't say, if everyone adds value to this product, it'll actually become something really good. And anyone who's in the ecosystem of the product will like, would use, receive the benefits of it. You want to say like something like that. And so like, if you join the products, we're happy to take in your ideas for innovation and say, Hey, I like this or this is shit. I want that to be improved. We're really like in that beta phase of just constantly developing it. And like in customization, we really want it to be your CRM. guess not. don't really give a shit about the accelerator brand. You will change this eventually you'll able to change this to your own custom domain, but you can brand the top of the logo in terms of like preferences. You, you brand it to whatever color you like, whatever style, go nuts in terms of like branding and utilization of it. And then like start really just getting used to using a tool where everything's in one location. And then what our goal is not just to do is. Not just to show like the actual, let's say your analytics of your performance, but we really want to start breaking down into the profitability aspect. So like in terms of the CRM, you can also start doing like company expenses. You have your own expense dashboard. start connecting crypto accounts. And if you're comfortable like bank accounts, whatever we use third party providers for the bank. So it's not done by us. And like you really start breaking down the profitability so that you can start making money as an agency owner. And really there's a cool features in terms of like models. If you want to use your clientele on board your models, the models get their own mobile app. So this is mainly iOS focused, but it's designed to be mobile focused. And what we've designed it to be is like a personal app that they get, which connects with the CRM. And what they'll do is then receive content requests. like from a, let's say professional standpoint is it's really good to just stop sending the creators like drive links. At a certain point where you can have something looking way more cleaner, professional. And I can show you a demo of the model app. don't know what are you interested in? Like from your standpoint, what do you think the viewers would be interested in? Cause there's so much here to go.

Francis: Yeah, I think that the, from my perspective, like the way that I ran my agency is a little bit unique and probably not like that's a challenge that I have with a lot of this, a lot of the content that I create is that like my agency was set up very different than most agencies. think that the model manager is an interesting thing because that's something that I had to build entirely separately. I just use like, you like no code apps and air table to do like custom assignments for a model. So let's see what the model management platform looks like, because I think that that's probably a salient use case for. Anybody? Yeah.

[Tristan demonstrates the mobile app for model management and task assignment]

Francis: Okay, that makes sense. Do a loom for this one too when you do the other one.

Tristan: I'll send you some links. So like one thing is just remember guys, like to keep your like deep links safe and make sure they're not flagged. The platform here does that too. So if you're onboard your accounts, you'll see why it says URL mismatches. That means that basically the URL that you have on your IG is not matching the deep link that you assigned it to. That'll just double check and do that error checking. So make sure that if you want to connect a deep link connected with that IG, make sure it's connected with the IG and that's assigned with the model. So that it's guaranteeing you to get that good quality data that is importing to the app and so that you can really get a good breakdown.

Francis: The level of detail and the thought that you guys have put into this is really, really impressive. Not to just glaze you for no reason, but pat on the back to you and the development team. This is a really, really cool project.

Tristan: Well, yeah, we've tried. the thing is people understand is this is what we're using in-house. Like this is not like something we're trying to sell or some third party like thing. This is really just something that we're using in-house that allows us to scale. And we want to start just opening this up to the market and getting people to improve it and really adding in the small details. And if you guys have any questions, just like reach out to us on Telegram or if you have like

Francis: I'll have the Telegram link in the description as well for sure.

Tristan: Yeah. So just reach out and say, Hey, I like this feature. Hey, does this feature do that? And like, just remember this is like a constant development. Like we're just constantly going to improve it and the agencies that will join will reap the benefits. If you like need any sort of workflow, the help guides actually contain workflows of like how you could actually be using the CRM. So there's the help center here and any information that you're looking for in relation to the product will be here. How to onboard your team with video breakdown and like text breakdown. And what I'd suggest is like, if you're interested in starting the product is just firstly, it's a free trial. So go on the platform, see what it's about. If you have any questions, ask the support and like just start seeing how this could integrate with your agency. If you start onboarding the staff, get the staff natively using the platform. Every single member on the platform will be building out their own dashboard in relation to what they do. So if you're a staff, you get staff breakdown. I can show you how this looks quickly. Let's say I go to this employee's account. This is a poster here. If I preview into this account, you'll now see that their sidebar is different, but they don't have that access level that I have as an admin. But then you'll also notice here is like their widgets are all related to like tasks, projects, KPIs, scaling their processes. And like they still have all the like custom integration once again. like the, example, like the preferences and customization. But it's really designed so that everyone in your team is like pushing forward and aligning with the data and feeding the data. So it's like showing who is late on their tasks, who's completing the task, which models are not doing well, which IG accounts are performing well, which deep links are performing well. What is the actual profitability of this company? Like that's where we're trying to get to at the end of the day.

Francis: I think that that inclusion specifically is really smart because think about, think an easy way to like paint a picture for the average audience member is think about like the frequency with which you check your inflow dashboard, right? Like you're looking at your revenue, you're looking at that number tick up, you're looking at how much you've earned every day and how motivating it is to have all of that insight. And then spreading that motivation to every single one of your employees so that they can measure their performance and have that drive to improve because they have visibility over where they need to improve. Very, very, very easy to underestimate the value of that. But when you have employees that are not only mission aligned, but are able to see in real time their progress, very, very good idea.

Tristan: Yeah. I'm like one tip I'd add onto that is really teaching your team this idea of leading and lagging indicators. Like everyone wants to see that inflow number to go up, but that only goes up from lagging indicators. So leading KPI, leading indicator would be like the revenue growth. How much money is the company making? How we're making more money. But that money directly correlates to how much content you're posting at quality. The lagging indicators is what are the teams delivering on? What is the quality of the content? These kind of lagging indicators create the leading indicators. So people need to understand this idea that if you put in the work on the base and the fundamentals, this will correlate to the revenue growth. This is how your company will scale and reach those big numbers.

Francis: the last question that I want to ask. You've obviously built a very impressive, you you've built a multi seven figure agency inside of four years and a very competitive industry. This is like, you know, there's, there's a lot of things that I really like about this industry. And I think that the lessons that it teaches about entrepreneurship are so pure. So what is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody that is maybe just starting their entrepreneurial journey or is new to OFM something that you wish you had known when you started?

Tristan: Now you're going to hate when I say this, but the secret source to making crazy amounts of money is doing what works and just understanding the fundamental. And like, if I turn this into actionable steps, what it would be is start with something like IG. And people need to understand is let's say if I start with IG, you're not going to be successful. And this is the problem with this industry too, is there is people that get successful off the bat. They do make that money because they get one bloody other pop tool. Try to understand what is working. If you know what's working, a business is just a system of processes plus a team, like a company of people that come to do a system of processes and you want to create a repeatable profit machine. That's why everyone's in this business is because it's a cash cow generator. So if you have a system that allows you to repetitively make money within this industry, that's what you need to be looking to do. And the only way you're going to do that is by just starting simple, start on the platform, make the content or do whatever the method is. And then when something fails. Try analyze and go and continue pushing through that. And I don't want to leak his name, but you do not even believe what happens if you put focus in this industry. I know someone who's done it from 10K a month to 1 million a month and around three to four months, just because they put that focus. Like people don't understand how fast the shit can grow. They just don't. And like, if you have that focus and alignment within your team and your processes, and you just get really deep into the details, you master that car. You specialize in that and you learn everything about that. You will get those revenue numbers and it's just how badly you want it at the end of the day. That's what I would suggest to people. Stiny Object Syndrome has wasted so much of my time, so much of my money. And it's like, what you want to do is just focus on your own thing. Don't worry about what everyone else is doing. Look at what's working. Look at the data and look what's profitable and just align yourself with that. And you'll make a shit ton of money. Like ask anyone who's making serious money. They'll tell you.

Francis: Love it. think that's fantastic advice. thank you so much for, for your time, for being on here. I will definitely, if you're, if you're willing to, I will definitely have you back to have that conversation about paid ads. It'll make sure that there are links to the accelerator CRM in the description. Again, this is a super impressive product that you guys have built. and if you, yeah, if you guys got value out of the conversation. and are interested in the CRM. It's an incredible product. If you're running any agency at any kind of scale and you want to grow, this is a tool that you should at least consider putting into your tech stack. And anything you want to leave the audience with before we part ways.

Tristan: Yeah, like just literally try out the tool, not trying to sell you anything, like this test it out, see where you can get value from this. Certain agencies, it may not be applicable, but like, if this is going to grow your business, look into leveraging tools like this. And if you want to develop it in-house, go in that. But yeah, we just here to see if we can help out people within the industry and help grow the Accelerator brand. And that's why we branded the CRM under our brand with our trust and like you're trusting us. with our product building skills. that's all I can say.

Francis: Alright, well, thanks again and have a phenomenal rest of your day, Oh, one more thing, really quick. I just launched a free Telegram community for OnlyFans creators and agencies. I still love it when people leave comments on my videos, but if you want real-time advice, I am on Telegram every day, posting tips, running polls for future video topics, and personally answering OFM questions. So if you want to get better at using social media to scale your OnlyFans pages, hit the link in the description and join us. Again, it's completely free.

Tristan: Thank you so much.

Xcelerate AI Agency: Scaling AI OnlyFans from First Principles