Hacking OnlyFans for Unprecedented Growth

Keeping social content clean to drive demand for the dirty, building custom tooling to automate the funnel, and crushing the agency model

While I’m out on paternity leave, enjoy this previously Superlogic-only segment on #1 most-liked OnlyFans Creator Bryce Adams' Operating Stack. Check out The Business portion of the interview for a refresher.

The Stack

Content and Community Management

Membership, Community, & Transactions - OnlyFans

We never really looked at Patreon, because they’re not friendly to not safe for work.

Discord - I just never got into Discord, I've heard rumblings and I know different girls, different people use that quite a bit. So hopefully that's just an untapped resource we have yet to get into.

Past that, we did look at some of these other platforms but they didn't really have much of a fanbase or notoriety.

As far as community, Telegram probably is the biggest, especially creator-to-creator. There's a lot there and we've thought about trying to build a little bit more of a community with our fanbase there.

Customer Acquisition - Paid Social Advertising + Proprietary Software

Data & Analytics - Proprietary Software

The most mind-blowing part of Bryce and Jay’s operation, to me, is the extent to which they’ve built their own proprietary toolset. That includes connecting to OnlyFans’ API and, to some extent, hacking it to get access to otherwise unavailable data, improve their attribution for paid customer acquisition, manage their thousands of customer chats, and even track and deploy various content SKUs into chat to drive sales in real time.

We have an entire software suite that we’ve built in-house…OnlyFans gives you nothing, there’s no API, so we have to really do a lot to build those tools.

We have it automatically tracking all of our advertising links, and we've never come across someone who knows how to do that. A few people think they know how to do it but the math is wrong, and I can prove it. There’s certain conditions in which OnlyFans excludes or includes links that actually don't give you the correct picture, and they only recently added that. So we can track all our links specifically, we know where “Joe” came from. We can attribute that back to the specific piece of advertising so we know which advertising is profitable, which isn't. We have some algorithms running to detect when someone sells us bots and fake accounts….

So we have a whole sprayer system that pulls in all the data possible in real time, sorts it, and puts into SQL. We sort and pipe it from there into GSheets, into a custom template that we made so we can check daily on all our metrics, and that’s probably just half of it.

Community and Content Management - Proprietary Software

Bryce and Jay’s team has built a sophisticated community management toolset that enables a small team of 5 people to manage tens of thousands of fans through a revenue-generation funnel at any given time.

And they did it - again - by “hacking” OnlyFans, which has no outlet to enable this sort of sophistication, not even an API.

This is the sort of sophistication you usually see in e-commerce businesses; they’re taking the same principles and tools and applying them to the adult Creator space, to great effect.

We have an entire chatting system. It pulls up the entire chat log history which, trust me, is a big deal because OnlyFans takes a long time to load. It pulls it up in a second.

We have presets, so if you just came on the page, we might have an intro message that we can just click a button make sure it applies. You know, do a couple little tweaks, make sure it applies, because we always want to authentically be answering each individual thing.

It has all of our content uploaded, with inventory, with their own unique inventory SKUs, all searchable. So if you're talking about how you love chairs, I can say “chairs” and it'll bring up the 18 videos that have the word “chair” in the description. I click on this one because it makes the most sense. and it automatically uploads the sales pitch, the price, the media locks it, and I just hit the send button and then it tracks it once it is purchased - so it adds that person to exclusion list.

So we never spam fans with the same offer twice. We have some streaming tech that brings in streams from three pages into one central place so we can manage comments, tips, etc. We can connect to Wifi controlled devices in the room and connect that to fans’ tips and commands…Again, basic stuff you've seen on Twitch. It's just that's there’s zero to be found in this industry. We have auto-fulfillers - if someone sends a keyword in the DM, it'll respond with whatever we want to respond with when we’re running promotions or we want to give out free stuff to people who are engaged on the page.

Business Management

Credit Card - Karat

Eric Wei from Karat introduced me to Bryce and Jay, so big shout out here to Karat. Financial services are hard to come by for adult content creators, and Karat isn’t afraid to provide a credit card and other services to creators who need it! This is not sponsored content 🙂 

PayPal shut us down and will never open us again. Cash app shut us down and will never open us again. I don't even sell anything on those apps, I was paying people for promotions, which is the funny thing!

Eric started Karat because Creators are having problems with you know, banking, mortgages, whatever the case may be, financial instruments. Well, now imagine it being not safe for work creators - just times the problems by 10. There's probably a massive market opportunity there.

Finances - Bryce + Bookkeeper

We came from a business background, so we already had some existing knowledge. I've done our books since I was 17, but I reluctantly just gave them to a bookkeeper like three weeks ago.

Bryce

Team

Representation - N/A

  • OnlyFans has a unique agency system, where the “agencies” are actually more like studio businesses that handle everything from content production to distribution strategy, pricing, chatting with fans (hugely lucrative), and more.

  • These run the gamut from highly professional teams of marketing experts to sketchy offshore “e-pimps”.

They can't do it as good as us. The data kind of proves it… now again, if any agencies are watching, I got nothing but love for you. We’re friends with a lot of you. And their business model makes sense. But they can't take one girl to the absolute peak. We have the ability and the desire to take take our situation to it’s absolute peak.

If they have 50 people to manage, it’s not possible. They can't put the best people on every single account every single time; that doesn't mean it's not an awesome deal for that model or creator. I'm not saying that they don't provide value in the marketplace. That creator might only be able to take herself to $50 grand, and they might be able to go:

“Hey, we got you to a hundred grand and we're gonna take 15% or 20% for getting you to that hundred grand - so you made $30 grand more!”

In our case, we have the ability to take ourselves to one fifty and not pay a percentage. We'll build it and the stuff that we've built so far in this industry seems to be pretty top notch.

Given how good they are at growing a viewer/customer base and generating revenue from those customers, a logical next step might be to launch an agency of their own. When asked about that:

We have some very interesting people reaching out to us because of how transparent and authentic we are…Just for their sakes, I don't want to cross these lines, but like Safe-for-Work influencers who you would know.

You could look them up and see they got millions of followers on X popular platform, and they want to get into OnlyFans or whatever the case may be, and instead of an agency that has some bad press about them wants to take 25%, we're just cool to collab. We'll just collab, and I don't know, maybe we'll run all your stuff exactly how you want for 10%, and we don't need any contracts.

We know what we do is working month to month, here's all the logins, here's all the dashboards, you don't like something then delete it. It's your business. We have such a different attitude that we're actually getting a lot of interest on that level. So we're very much trying to figure out.

Content Production - In-House Team

Their social content approach is interesting because they shirk the usual “Instagram model wearing revealing clothing in seductive poses” model for much cleaner, more fitness-oriented content. Their observation is that by taking this approach, they actually create MORE demand for the NSFW content.

We keep our social media content clean. The riskiest thing we'll do is she'll put on a bikini and go work out. We have a gym right in the backyard. Or she'll do pullups from the back with no shirt on. But honestly, that’s bodybuilder stuff. It’s all kind of fitness content. So we never get into the whole nip slip stuff that everybody does. We keep it pretty Safe-for-Work. Pretty wholesome, all things considered.

So I suspect that helps…I'm just gonna say “algorithm” - I kind of hate that word - but I think it helps the algorithm a little bit. I think it creates that kind of tension in the fan. They really want to see more because they’re not seeing it here. so that is something a little bit different we do there as well.

  • 2 social media managers (content creation + planning)

  • 1 NSFW content editor

Community Management - In-House Team

  • 5 chatters

We have 700,000 fans on the page. I said from the beginning: “Let's be 100% honest.”

She physically can't answer that many messages. So, what we actually do is, we have a chatting team - which some people do, but what we do very different is we literally tell the fans “here here's our chatting team.”

We introduce them to the chatting team. Our chatting team has their own pages with their own content, almost all safe for work, so they can get to know who they're chatting with.

Every message starts with “Hey, this is hey this is so and so,” and every one of them is two hundred feet that way in our building. They’re our real-life friends, so we keep it super experiential. Super authentic.

Jay

Operations & Marketing - In-House Team

  • 5 people running paid advertising for customer acquisition

  • 1 webmaster

  • 2 developers

  • 2 operations managers

  • 1 executive assistant

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