16. Talk about Virtuagirl and Herve
As I explained before, we were both working in the videogame industry before VirtuaGirl. We get bored and decided to ride the Internet wave. We had a friend at that time that started a small porn website and he was making money with it. Not loads, but enough to show that clients where there and it was possible to bill them. First idea was to do a free dancing girl that we would use to advertise for adult paysites. After filming the first girl and watching her dancing / striping on our screen, it was obvious that we could sell it as a stand alone product. That's when the third guy, who had an adult website decided to bail and leave us alone with the project (talk about bad decisions...). So we released the product with one girl, she was in 63 colors only (32 for the skin and hairs, 31 for the swimsuit), size was 1.4Mb (to fit on a floppy disk). At that time there was no real video on the net, best you could get was a stamp sized bunch of moving pixels if u had a fast PC. So it was really impressive and we did our first sale a few hours after puting the thing online, no idea where the people where coming from as we were buying no traffic. We quickly got reviews and article and our number of visitors rapidly grew as well as our sales. Did I mention we were processing with iBill at that time? lol. We had to change servers twice the first month as we started buying some advertising. One day the banners we were buying on TheHun were down so Patrick offered to comensate by publishing a galley for us. We managed to gather enough still images to do a gallery and he posted it, servers crawled and we did over 150 sales with that one post
GOOD old days! We started to produce new girls and to buy prepaid listings on all major TGPs. We grew up very fast from there, we were doing 20 to 30% more each month, sky was the limit. Our peak was I believe around the end of 2001, processing over $1M a month. Not too bad for a little dancing girl
Then we reached a plateau and went down slowly, (with a peak at each new product release) to $400k a month in 2003 which we are still doing.
I know most programs don't show their numbers, I personaly don't care, our conversion and retention are available in real time on our site (
http://www2.totemcash.com/free/figures.php ) and we are a French company, our numbers are public. I never wanted to enter the PPS game and have to shave to pay $50 per signup, so my only other option is to be very honest and show all my numbers. Might loose affiliates looking for quick buck, but I'm more interested by the ones thinking long term.
What else? mmm, we're now working on VirtuaGirl HD, the next version of VirtuaGirl. We're bringing HD (girls are up to 1000 pixels tall), automatic downloads to the user's desktop, interactivity with the girls and are building a community of people collecting the girls (to use them as a vector of distribution). Have no doubts I'll post more before the release
Any other question on the VirtuaGirl story or numbers?