How former Hinge and Bumble execs built a new platform helping women make money

As the size of the influencer economy grows, so too does the number of people relying on opaque content moderation policies of the large social media platforms.

Statista suggests the size of the global influencer marketing sector has more than doubled since 2019, and in 2021 was worth US$13.8 billion ($18.6 billion).

Of course, for creators, social media is more than just an advertising channel. It’s a way to build an audience and community of their own. In the case of OnlyFans and Patreon, it provides creators with a way to directly monetise their content, by offering subscriptions to fans. The former’s decision to turn its back on the sex workers who helped build it’s platform, before deciding to reverse course, speaks to how fraught that relationship can be. 

It was while spending time in sex positive online communities that Australian entrepreneur Lucy Mort became fascinated by creators building audiences centred on sexuality and femininity. Mort, who led design at dating app Hinge, noticed a gap in the market. 

She was speaking with female and non-binary creators who wanted to monetise content that wasn’t pornographic, but would run into problems with more conservative content moderation policies on platforms like Instagram.

Enter Sunroom, a new platform founded by Mort and her fellow Australian Michelle Battersby, which aims to provide these creators a place to monetise content via monthly subscriptions, tips and cheers. It launched last month with 100 founding creators, following a $3.6 million seed round that included Australian venture capital firm Blackbird. 

“It’s really about identifying a group of creators who didn’t feel like they could monetise their audience on any existing platform,” Mort tells SmartCompany Plus.  

Those creators include women’s health advocates, artists, athletes, singer song-writers, sexologists, and ‘mummy bloggers’.

“There are a lot of mummy bloggers. We spoke to a creator the other day who lost her Instagram account with 50,000 followers, after she shared a story on child birth and was de-platformed,” Battersby says. 

Battersby, who was working at dating app Bumble before co-founding Sunroom, onboards every one of Sunroom’s creators. That number has grown to about 200 since launch, as the team cautiously expands its creator roster from a waitlist.

“What I learnt at Bumble was what could happen when a brand collides with a social movement,” Battersby says.

“The fundamental product differentiator on Bumble was women making the first move. And that really came to light in the era of #MeToo and #BelieveWomen, at a time when gender dynamics were changing.

“Women make the first move on Bumble. But what would happen if they took that behaviour and applied it to every other element of their life?

“I knew that there were a lot of creators on Instagram and TikTok who wanted to monetise their content, but they all were saying the right platform for them didn’t exist. Every creator had a story about being unfairly censored, judged, or trolled on these larger social platforms.

“That’s when it started to feel like a big opportunity.”

Learning from doing

Those insights were interrogated during a research phase which lasted around 12 months. A startup’s early stages are tough, Mort says, but she encourages founders who might be having doubts about their own ideas to stick with it. 

“There were stressful times, when I thought to myself ‘Oh my god should I go get a job?’,” she says.

“It felt like that’s what I should be doing because you kind of just have to go without income for a while. Everybody’s looking at you thinking ‘What the fuck are you doing with your life?’

Mort and Battersby are non-technical co-founders and with that comes some hard-won insight. For fellow non-technical founders they have some simple advice.

“Early on, hire senior people, who know exactly how to build what you need,” Mort says.

Battersby laughs and agrees: “Even if they cost more. Just do it.”

“I really do think we just needed to bring in people who weren’t right, understand the way in which they weren’t right, and not do it again,” Mort says.

“We made some hiring mistakes. We followed some advice about hiring contractors or people from dev teams that turned out to be not great advice. So there were a couple of painful learning moments in there.”

‘Is this going to help women make money?’

One feature that team helped build is ‘Sunbloc’, Sunroom’s anti-screenshot technology, which aims to prevent content being stolen and shared off-platform. That, along with zero tolerance for bullying, harassment or hate speech, and women-led moderation, is how the platform plans to build private, intimate spaces for creators and fans. 

“A lot of these adult platforms have been built by men, and there’s a different tone to that,” Mort says.

“Our investors really like the fact that women are building this. They also like that we’re building a mobile-first product.”

In the coming months Sunroom will continue to add more creators to the platform, improving the member experience, and is looking at ways to build more passive income streams for creators.

“Every decision is going to come back to this,” Battersby says reflecting on Sunroom’s future direction.

“Is this going to help women make money?”