Written by 3XWest
We’ve talked a lot over the past 4 weeks about where our ideas for new series and films come from – whether it be a labor of love from a passionate creator with a message to say; an attempt to shake up the porn industry and challenge the status quo; a leap of faith to venture into a new and underserved market; or an opportunity to grow our reputation with our customers, our industry peers, and our staff as a platform known for its massive content library of brands old and new that are beloved by all.
But there’s one method we haven’t talked about yet that any aspiring entrepreneur can follow our lead to launch their own surefire product guaranteed to succeed. And the best part is that you don’t need any special tools or teachings, because all it requires is something you already have.
…a predictive mind?
…a creative soul?
…an instinctive gut?
Nope, toss ‘em ALL away. Because sometimes all you need is a good ol’ set of eyeballs.
It might sound silly, but the truth is that sometimes an answer might be staring you right in the face – you just need to look at it. Surprisingly though, it’s easier said than done. Our busy, hectic lives can sap us of the time or energy we need to take stock of our results and recalibrate where needed. We might overlook or dismiss obvious insights because they conflict with our preconceived notions and biases, as we assume we know better because we’re pros and veterans in our fields. As adults, we don’t condition ourselves to be attentive and curious like we are when we’re young, always on the lookout for information that is new, contradictory, unexpected, or perplexing and asking ourselves “why?”
It takes practice, discipline, and a willingness to be proven wrong (although I like to think of it as “be surprised at every opportunity” as that has a more optimistic slant to it!) – but if you are truly committed to keeping your eyes and ears peeled and your mind open, you might start to notice that valuable observations are everywhere, ripe for the plucking.
This was the case for our series Lez Be Bad, a series that frankly we never had any intention of making. It was not on our launch roadmap, it wasn’t linked to any of our company’s strategic objectives for the year, and it wasn’t a passion project or brainchild that any of us championed to get made. Its conception was far more organic, born out of seeing more and more signs that there was a growing interest in lesbian hardcore and just acting on those insights.
To illustrate, here’s a rough timeline of how things went down – and a peek behind the curtain towards how Lez Be Bad developed naturally from a happy accident to a new fan favorite:
- September 2021: We produced a piece of content called “The Rule Of The School”. Little-known fun fact, this was originally intended to be an episode of our up-and-coming imprint Modern-Day Sins launching at the end of the year. We were still working to perfect the formula, and this particular episode alongside a handful of others felt that it strayed a little too far from what we wanted Modern-Day Sins to be. Most of these early prototypes were rebranded to other series, but there wasn’t a good existing fit for this one – but we had also just greenlit an initiative to shoot and release a series fully dedicated to pilots and prototypes, so we felt this could be branded under that umbrella.
- April 2022: A full 7 months later (much longer than our usual turnaround time from production to release) we put “The Rule Of The School” live, giving it a broader series title of “Lez Be Bad” in case we ever wanted to produce more episodes presumably outside of the classroom setting, exploring other extreme sex acts between lesbians. We braced for the pilot to be polarizing, because it was so different from our usual lesbian fare – no cunnilingus (unheard of in our lesbian content otherwise), heavy toy use, and sex that was much harder and more extreme than the likes of Girlsway or All-Girl Massage. But we were pretty impressed that the reception was more positive than we were anticipating – yes, it had more downvotes than a usual release, but it also had a higher-than-usual amount of upvotes leading to a pleasantly high approval rating in the lower 90%s. Not bad for a last-minute pivot!
- May 2022: At the turn of every month, we perform content analysis on the previous month’s releases to identify what went well and poorly, make recommendations for future ideas to shoot, trends we might want to capitalize on, and similar. The Lez Be Bad pilot had already been on our radar for defying our expectations, and when we reviewed the results together we took special note of its above-average performance with our member base. Even still, at that point it was just a single point of data – we weren’t about to heavily invest yet in a concept that we only had an early inkling towards. We resolved to keep an eye out for any recurring patterns within the lesbian market, and in the meantime I decided to run some mini-experiments within our existing lesbian lines to test the waters further.
- June 2022 – February 2023: Over the next eight months amidst our business-as-usual operations, we started to see more and more indications that reinforced our early hypothesis – lesbian extreme sex (and especially strap-on sex) was seeing a resurgence. Historically, on Girlsway especially, toy use was extremely polarizing, and so until then we had used it only very sparingly. Subconscious biases crept in that made us assume toy-play was not worth producing en masse, and this created an echo chamber on our platform to reinforce our thinking. Now that we knew what to look out for, it was easy to spot. The “Dyked” partner channel that we introduced in May 2022 was gaining strong traction, and featured strap-on sex more heavily than any of our original series. Our continued content tests, like “Anal Envy: Two-Timing Client”, “Mommy’s Girl: Your Stepsister’s In Charge”, and “Girlsway: Immersive Experience” were seeing high viewership and less negativity than strap-on content from past years. Our tubesite team reported back with similar findings to our own platform, that they were seeing an uptick in virality for strap-ons and hardcore sex acts in their own clip uploads. What started with one errant data-point had led to discovering several others that formed a pattern, one we could easily have missed if we treated each of them as an outlier instead of connecting the dots.
- February-March 2023: With our suspicions confirmed and an easy course of action ahead, we got the green-light to transform Lez Be Bad from a pilot into an ongoing series, even making room for it in our catalog by having it replace some update slots of underperforming lesbian content from other series. It was a bold decision, but one backed by plenty of evidence and research to justify doing so. Within a month we put together a vision and first batch of scripts, and kickstarted shoots to begin in early March. We tweaked the recipe along the way, figuring out the best formula for success and for scalability of production (voiceover narration for the intro instead of dialogue, reintroducing some erotic elements to complement the rough sex, rethinking the logo, and similar) and quickly settled into what would eventually be the Lez Be Bad brand conventions that helped define the series and give it a unique identity amongst our other lesbian content.
- May 2023: Our first new episode was released in May, and by June we were full-steam ahead with 4 monthly updates of our newest series. From the original pilot going live in April 2022 to May 2023’s follow-up, it took barely over a calendar year to go from an unplanned release of a unique piece of content to a tried-and-tested series launch that we had full confidence in thanks to our measured approach.
And that brings us all the way to the present of April 2024. Now at the time of writing, almost one full calendar year yet again to mark the occasion, we have seen Lez Be Bad be happily welcomed by our lesbian-loving audience in ways we would never have predicted a scant two years before. Bondage, extreme insertions, fisting, and other hardcore acts that were a little too off-brand for our more vanilla products are becoming the series’ bread-&-butter, exciting and delighting many of our subscribers who were craving a little extra edge. And truth be told, we didn’t do ANYTHING special to get here – we just used our eyes and ears to spot an opportunity, and seized it, the same as anyone could do in their own business if you pay attention to the clues that fate has laid out in front of you. We said “Lez Be Bold” – now, so can you!
Click here to watch a full Lez Be Bad scene!
