Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 215 with Chris Erwin of Beardfinder

Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 215 with Chris Erwin of Beardfinder

Chris Erwin of Beardfinder is this week’s guest on Adult Site Broker Talk.

Chris Erwin was raised in Illinois and now lives in Florida.

He joined the US Navy in 1996 and retired after 20 years of service.

He worked in the intelligence fields for his entire pre-beardfinder career, covering embedded operations to managing intelligence programs as a military contractor.

He started his BeardFinder journey in 2023 and the site launched in May of this year.

His goal with BeardFinder is to spread the opportunity for people with facial hair, to identify and monetize their content online.

Chris, the site’s founder and CEO, was a relative newcomer to the world of adult and fetish sites but committed to seeing the site come to life.

His idea was that there is a lack of site representation for people with beards and facial hair and their ability to generate income or a little extra money on the side through the creation and marketing of their own content, similar to that of other fan sites.

Chris got his inspiration from popular sites like OnlyFans, but was particularly struck by the popularity of FeetFinder, which has been a huge success.

BeardFinder.com became the first digital marketplace directed specifically at the popularity of all facial hair types and aims to be the ultimate place for everyday people with facial hair to make a little or a lot of extra money by just being themselves or becoming whatever their prospective customers want them to be.

Their slogan is “Turn that Beard money into Beer money”.

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Listen to Chris Erwin of Beardfinder on Adult Site Broker Talk, starting today at www.adultsitebrokertalk.com

Bruce F., host of the show and CEO of Adult Site Broker said:

Chris was a fun guest. He's a really interesting guy with a fascinating past. His shift to our industry is quite a change from where he's been the rest of his working life.

Tabs

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Chris Erwin of BeardFinder. We’ve doubled our affiliate payouts at ASB Cash. Now when you refer sellers or buyers to us, you’ll receive 20% of our broker commission on any and all sales that result from that referral for life. Check out ASB Cash for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles from industry websites as well as mainstream publications. It’s designed to raise awareness of our industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on our industry. You’ll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. Now time for our property of the week that’s for sale at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to offer a white-labeled cam site that’s rapidly growing month over month. It’s tracking to more than double its business from 2023 to this year. This is an excellent opportunity if you’re already in the live cam business or want to enter it. All traffic is either direct or organic. This is excellent for a company with cam traffic or one willing to purchase more traffic for the site. Most of all, the site is easy to maintain. Someone could easily add additional sites through the admin system without doing any more work. This gives you truly passive income with zero hours required to maintain it. Only $479,000. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Chris Irwin of Beard Finder. Chris, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thanks for having me, Bruce. Pleasure to be here. It’s really nice to have you. Chris was raised in Illinois and now lives in Florida. He joined the US Navy in 1996 and retired after 20 years of service. I want to thank you for your service, Chris. You’re very welcome, Bruce. He worked in the intelligence fields for his entire pre-Beard Finder career, managing intelligence programs as a military contractor. He started his Beard Finder journey in 2023 and the site launched in May of this year. His goal with Beard Finder is to spread the opportunity for people with facial hair to identify and monetize their content online. So Chris is the site’s founder and CEO. He was a relative newcomer to the world of adult and fetish sites, but committed himself to seeing the site come to life. His idea was that there is a lack of representation for people with beards and facial hair and their ability to generate income or a little extra money on the side through the creation and marketing of their own content, similar to that of other fan sites. Chris got his inspiration from popular sites like OnlyFans, but he was particularly struck by the popularity of Feet Finder. Patrick was featured from Feet Finder on our podcast before, and of course, Feet Finder has been a huge success. Beard Finder.com became the first digital marketplace directed specifically at the popularity of all facial hair types and aims to be the ultimate place for everyday people with facial hair to make a little or a lot of extra money by just being themselves or becoming whatever their prospective customers want them to be. Their slogan is "Turn that beard money into beer money." I like that, Chris. And all you people in the audience, please turn your phones off. Chris, as mentioned earlier, you grew up in Illinois. How did that affect who you are today? Well, I’m from Decatur, Illinois, and it’s a very interesting place. We’ve been seen on such movies as the Informant. Matt Damon brought a little popularity to Decatur, and it’s love of soybeans and corn processing, and you can thank Decatur for 10% of ethanol in your gasoline. But as a kid from the Midwest, it was a normal everyday town. Grew up. My parents were factory workers. I was the youngest of seven kids, so I couldn’t get away with anything, and my parents never had cable. So, essentially, I grew up there and started as an AB student and gradually moved down to a C student. So colleges were out. So joined the Navy and saw the world. My dad was in Vietnam. My brother was in the Navy 10 years prior, so it seemed like a logical choice for me, and it worked out. I got to see the world. A lot of bad places, a lot of good places, but you get a better understanding of where you come from and where your place is in this big blue ball. Yeah, of course. So how did that impact who you are? Well, I think a lot of how I interact with people and the military had a big part in this, is just accepting different points of view and trying to be as open to new ideas and different, obviously, the way people act around each other. Everybody tries to get into their own vacuum chambers, and they don’t really branch out much. I had to live with Iraqi police for the better part of two years, and talk about a culture shock, and through multiple deployments between the Middle East and Southeast Asia and Europe, you just get a better sense and understanding of what makes people tick and how you can interact with them. I think bringing just those humble beginnings from flyover country, if you will, just accepting people the way they are. Yeah, I bet. So what made you leave your hometown? Just didn’t see too much indicator. I mean, you know, it’s a beautiful place, the original home of the Chicago Bears, but the biggest thing was I didn’t, I wasn’t really made for construction work or factory work. My parents, like I said, were factory workers, but I thought there was something bigger for me out there. And I think the only way that that was going to ever happen was joining the military and getting to travel on their dime. Yeah, absolutely. What are some common misunderstandings about your previous profession in the military? That we know everything there is to know about aliens. We spent the better part of 27 years in the intel community, and I won’t be able to say certain things of what I’ve done for many decades. But even my own family thinks that I’m super locked into everything that runs across the media streams, and it’s really not as bad as you think, or it’s extremely worse than you think. But ultimately, I’m not going to be the conduit for that information. Right. But I mean, what do people, are there any other misconceptions about military? I would think there would be. Well, I mean, I did interrogations. I was down in Cuba, like I said, I spent time in Iraq, and they think when you interrogate something, it’s always about like, oh, you’re putting bamboo spikes under their fingernails or something like that. It’s not. You don’t? Of course not. It’s not waterboarding if you use diesel. All joking for anybody listening that thinks I’m serious. Of course. No, it does think that the military has the answers to a lot of things. And realistically, we’re doing what we can to get by if we’re put in stressful situations, especially from the intel community. We’re better off when we don’t know what we don’t know. We’re actually smarter if you don’t know something, because then you have a place to start out from and work towards to know something. And if you go in with that mindset, you’re going to be much more open to information. And that leads to knowledge. Yeah, that’s very true. And you learned a lot, I’m sure, from being in the military. What were the greatest lessons? I think the biggest one is humility. I may try to carry myself as people that know me or know are in my group of friends that I may be the smartest guy in the room. But believe me, I’m not. I’m just the first one that’s open to listening and understanding things and trying to apply past experience to current situations. I mean, history doesn’t really repeat, but it does rhyme from time to time. Like I just did. Everything comes back around. And if you’ve seen indicators before, it’s likely going to rear its ugly head again or beautiful things can happen. People don’t usually change from their environment. Yeah. You were in Iraq a couple of times. What was that like? It was dusty and cold. A lot of people think of the desert as hot. Well, in the summer, it’s hot, but it gets cold. And I was in Al-Ambar when I was active duty. That was shit almost 20 years ago. But it’s not so much different. I mean, they have population centers, but I think a lot of the things people didn’t understand was the history of that area. And I took it upon myself to read up on it before I went there and try to understand the Sunnis, the Sunni Muslims before I got there. And realistically, they’re just like us. I mean, yeah, they’re a little more traditional where we have religious people. They take it a little bit further. But realistically, they’re all about family and trying to keep their way of life. And unfortunately, their way of life was at odds with what we were trying to do. Yeah. I mean, when you look back on that experience, what was your biggest takeaway? Biggest takeaway is that we can... This is not really... I don’t like to get into disagreements with foreign policy, but we’ve been really horrible at understanding the human condition in some of these countries. And our foreign policy has actually led to an exacerbated situation where we make things worse. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t answer it. But realistically, just trying to understand the culture of the people and do everybody a good thing to do that every once in a while. Take five minutes each day and just try to look at it through other people’s eyes. Try to get their perspective. Did you find that most of your colleagues took the same attitude as you did? I think they went... If it was their first time going into country, they had a predisposed view of things. But then, I was a little unique in where I actually lived in the police station with these guys. And so, I mean, sun up to sun down, we were always integrated trying to do something with them. And you got to know them on a more personal level. Now, most of the guys in the infantry battalions that were operating out of outposts and stuff like that never had that detailed interaction. But I think a lot of the stuff we did there was good. But ultimately, we were only going to be there for eight months at a time. And then once we ultimately pulled out, I mean, there’s anarchy followed. Yeah, not the best chapter in American history. Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, hopefully there’s many more chapters to write. It’s just... I mean, I feel bad because we go in and we do so much good. And then those poor Kurds that we always leave afoot. Yeah, absolutely. So moving on, what was the most important lesson you learned in the past decade of your life and how have you applied it? Transitioning out, retiring from the military and going right into the contracting world worked at DITRA and went back over to Northern Iraq with special people. It’s a second nature thing for me. It was just basically going from a uniform to growing my beard out and looking like the Syrians in Iraqi. So it wasn’t much of a change. I tanned well, so they think I’m some kind of rare half Iraqi, half US alien that walked through. But I think the biggest takeaway and the challenge that I dealt with was when I made this leap because going into defense contracting, like I said, is second nature. The contracting world is a lot different because you don’t have the safety net. The contract may fail and you’re out of a job or they find you another contract and you jump through the meat grinder again. That was the most challenging because I married, you got two kids, three kids, I got a grandchild that was just born. So you know, there’s that safety net needs to be a little more stable. And that’s ultimately what I was looking for. And I didn’t find it in contracting. Yeah. What preceded the idea of starting your own website? I really don’t know. I mean, I was managing a program for the Air Force and I was again, goes back to the second nature thing. I do that in my sleep. But I was looking for something to break away from government service. Even as a contractor, you’re still serving the DoD or you’re the government in general. And you know, after 27 years, my brain started to synapse and started misfiring a little bit. And I think I just, I guess the easiest way to put it, I got bored. Yeah, I bet. Being as a government contractor, that must really open your eyes about the whole government process, doesn’t it? I think, and if anybody from the military hears this and gets out, the best advice I could give is just to go into business for yourself, even if you’re going to contract with the government still, because ultimately you may make 150k a year, you may make 200k a year depending on your skills and your education experience. But ultimately, every labor hour that you build, you’re only getting a quarter of it, a third of it. It’s got to go overhead and everything else. So work for yourself, set your labor rate and you’ll have much more appreciation for your value. But I mean, what about the competence and the overall process of the government and the Defense Department? I mean, what was your takeaway on those things as a contractor? Well, I could always go the whole thing of going around to the VFWs, my grandma, the World War II veterans, the Korean veterans, back in my day. And I wasn’t that far retired, but I saw some trends that were my last few years of active duty that, and I think it more aligns with the societal shift of things. The new generation coming up have different learned values or societal values that they bring to the military. And for a lot of old salts like myself, they may not look at it favorably, but that’s going to be their thing. They have to chart their own path under our guidance, but it may ultimately be the wrong path. I think what I saw for contracting for seven years after retirement was that as much as the military tries to change, the more it stays the same. You still have cost overrides. You still have mismanaged personnel, but they still get the mission done. Even haphazardly, they still look after each other. Yeah. Okay. What’s the one skill you believe is most important for success in both your original field and your new venture? Adaptation. I’ve had to be a gecko. I’ve had to be, not to go into comic nerdery here, but fantastic for Reed Richards, where he can just extend his body in multiple different directions. I’ve had to not learn that, but I’ve had to adapt to multiple things at once. The military actually helped me out quite a bit for this last year of challenges that I faced. Not necessarily monetarily, but understanding laws and understanding adult isms, whether it comes to transactions or just putting out a product and then having that product be looked at not only by the federal government, but international government and state government. You basically have three levels where you have to get through filters, and it’s a challenge. I think the military helped me mentally prepare for something I didn’t know I’d need to prepare for, but it helped me adapt to it quickly. How has the transition been? One day you’re a government contractor, and the next day you’re working on an adult website. I went through about a week of kind of zoned out. Not really zoned out. I had a bunch in my head of next steps, the next month, the next six months, where I was going to take the site and what my PR strategy is, what my social media strategy is. All that was in my head, but my actual optic functions, my eyes, my hands, all the nerve functions just halted. For about a week it stopped, and then working from home, I mean, everybody remembers COVID, and I was in Virginia at the time, and everybody worked from home. It’s kind of hard to be an Intel person working from home when you’re used to working in a secure facility. It’s not a new experience, but it is kind of, okay, I got a new experience. Okay, I got to do A, B, and C today, but then D comes along, and it’s much more fun to get D done even though I’m neglecting A. So it’s conditioning. You have to be disciplined to stay on top of things. I think I’ve done okay with it. There’s a lot of things I’d redo if I had a time machine. Let’s put it that way. What resources helped you on your journey with the new project? I think initially, last year I started in earnest trying to figure out, and I was applying the Intel Analyst Principles that I had learned. I’m like, okay, data metrics, research, analysis of the whole thing, and that got me to a point, and I could see numbers, and I could see traffic. I understood the idea of hits on the domain and how a website was doing, and then trying to pull those numbers into what might happen with my product. I think if I would have reached out to, let’s say, somebody like you or other people in the industry eight months ago, I would have been live eight months ago. But I think the biggest challenge was just trying to say, okay, I know this, but I don’t know this, but what I do know will get me through, and that was actually a mistake. What I should have done is instead of saying, well, I didn’t know that I’m ignorant of this, you have to kind of remove that ignorance before you push forward, or you’re going to be throwing bad money after something. That’s very true. So, I mean, what were the best resources? You were one. When I came across your website, it wasn’t by chance. I was actually looking up. I’d seen your name when I was looking into Patrick, and I saw his podcast, and I started looking at you, and that’s when I reached out, because I was like, I was already at a point. The website was pretty much done outside of legal stuff and integration of the payment system, but I was still missing a key element. For me, being a novice or essentially a toddler walking into MIT, entering in the adult industry, I was like, I should have had a resource that I could rely on, like, hey, I’m thinking about this, what do you think? Because that’s something that’s a good investment to have, because I wouldn’t go into Iraq if I didn’t have a source there that could at least give me some type of resource to understand what I was getting into. Right? And that goes for everything in life that you do. So, I mean, prior to working with our consulting company, and I’ll put the plug in adultbusinessconsulting.com, so before working with our consulting company, where did you go for resources and what did you find? Well, so I had some people I know that had these accounts on other fan sites, and I was pulling every, I wasn’t interrogating them, but I was extracting as much information as I could from the user side and from the seller side. So I had the core tenants in place, but what I was having issues with was how to put all those pieces of the puzzle together in a clear, concise way. That way, I wasn’t saying, okay, I’m going to pay this for this fee for this service, but I don’t need this service eight months ago. I need this service a month before I launch, that way I don’t waste money. But having the, I guess in the military, we call it tactical level experience to pull from that helped me understand the bigger problem of, or not the problem, but the problem set of like, this is the user experience side. You want to make this the most enjoyable thing. And it was all basically utilizing skills I had attained over a couple of decades, just trying to say, okay, my developer, I want it to look like this. We need to implement this. And then I got to that point, I was still missing some things. I started reaching out, looking at different sources of information, whether it be for ex-biz or for it was some other, other source sites or people, I would reach out to all sorts of email addresses and some would never reach out or, you know, reach back out. But I started reaching out to a lot of people and some that reached out were vital for me. Interesting. Any you want to mention? I have a few, but I don’t want to name them just yet. I will whenever I do get up and fully arrived. Yeah. I mean, the people in this industry are very helpful. You’ll find that when you go to a show, when you go on ex-biz.net, places like that, you’re definitely going to find people more than willing to help if help is requested. Right. And that’s the biggest thing for me is remaining humble. And I’m almost, I learned a trick to be self deprecating like, "Hey, you know, I am a lot smarter than I look, but hey, I will be upfront and honest." A lot of people like, "Tell it to me like I am a five year old because I don’t understand the core parts of this. Like I can tell you how I could take a key to a car and start it up and I can put the car in gear, but I can’t tell you what’s happening in the transmission. I can’t tell you what’s happening in the engine. I just know it goes room and I go forward or backwards." So understanding that and knowing that I need to understand at least what the transmission does during each action, that really helped me expand my question set, which helped me get a lot more in depth. So did you ever feel stress or did you feel overwhelmed during the creation of Beard Finder? And if so, how did you find that mental balance? It still happens every day or two. Wake up in the morning like, "This is the worst idea ever. What the hell are you doing? This is not your wheelhouse." No, I think in its infancy, I had a lot of optimism. And then as the toll over time, because I was relying on third parties to do certain things that I couldn’t do myself, clear communication saved me. And then starting to talk outside of my friend group into different groups, because ultimately what I was doing at that point, something I learned doing cool Intel stuff was getting disassociated human groups to give me their own feathered opinions about something, a topic. It’s a control group. It’s just like a poll. But I put it, I churched it up how it’s actually done. But getting that piece of advice or that opinion of one group versus another group helped me tailor like, "This is the direction I want to go. And even if I’m 30% successful, that’s at least enough to establish me." And I can survive. And then I figured, I’m putting a lot of hope into, "Okay, the product’s good. Once I’m established, then in earnest start pushing heavy on PR, marketing and everything else. All the while pushing it as much as I can. But even then, I can tell you right now, trying to boost a post on Facebook or Instagram or X is worlds away different than trying to do a sustained marketing campaign. It is not the same. No, it absolutely isn’t. What advice would you give to someone who was starting out in our industry, maybe even starting a fan site, having the experience that you have? What advice would you give them about getting started? Well, the first thing I would do is just ensure that you have a solid base. I’m self-financing the entire build and things like that. There is a cost associated with it. If you’re not aware that you think it’s going to cost X, it’s going to cost every other letter in the alphabet before you get to where you need to be. So first starting off your idea, you need to map out almost Starlight map it where, "Okay, I have the moon. Well, I need to know the million stars surrounding the moon in the night sky at 10 o’clock at night." And you need to have an idea and then run your idea against a critic group to understand, "Can you make this elevator pitch without failing?" If I try to pitch Beardfinder, it’s like, "Well, you know, a friend of mine posted something on his things, but it’s like feet before your face." And I was like, "Well, that’s a great line, but it’s actually true that that wouldn’t be a great elevator pitch. It might be for a certain group." But ultimately, you have to run a stress test against it. And when I say stress test, you have to stress your idea to a breaking point to where it’s like, "Oh, okay. Now I’m not so optimistic, but what do I need to change?" And I think my advice to anybody coming from a non-media marketing or industry standard because I am a complete novice when I started this process. And I’m not even saying I’m above the novice level now, but knowing the right people and being as open as possible and just, I’m not saying spam email every professional you see, but at least try to be somewhat open to, "Hey, I don’t have time for this right now, but oh, hey, well, do you have anybody in mind or one of your friends that can help me just be humble about it?" Because people are wanting to help. It’s just, you can’t go it alone. You will need some help along the way. Yeah. And you should not only ask professionals, but you should also ask just general people who might be customers, right? Exactly. Well, in my case, that initial group was a bunch of Harley riders, and of course they were all about it and half their wives were all about it. And then the other half, their wives are like, "Matt, I don’t think so." Interesting. And the Harley riders thought that Beardfinder was a good idea, huh? They do. And they are just waiting. And I think here’s the kicker is, their wives are the ultimate authority. And again, that’s the risk you run into is like, "I’ve actually pushed my wife to sell pictures of her feet because she’s very conservative. She doesn’t want to show her face anywhere and I get it." But I was like, "It’s harmless. It’s feet." But she said no, and I was like, "Well, obviously I respect that. I don’t want her to do it if she’s not comfortable with it." But that’s the ultimate risk is like, people may not want to put themselves out there. It reminds me, I granted I was born in the late ’70s, so I wasn’t around for this Marine Corps poster. It’s like, "We don’t promise you a rose garden." But at Beardfinder, I can at least, you might get some extra gas money for the week or the month. Who knows? Exactly. What values and ideas are important when you think about the establishment of Beardfinder? Dedication to it. You have to be dedicated to it. You have to see it through. And this isn’t one of those things where you’re playing baseball and you can just get first base. You have to pay your taxes to your service or something like that. You have to pay your dues. I’m not saying there’s monthly dues I pay to be in the adult industry, but there is certain things that you have to, the bases you have to touch, the people that you do need to know because eventually they might be able to pull you out of a bad situation or get you in the right headspace to keep you out of a bad situation. Do you have any lessons learned from putting together Beardfinder? Yeah, I think, like you said, if I could jump in the DeLorean and hit 88 miles an hour, I would have mapped out a lot of things differently when it comes to verification. You know, thankfully, Walter’s law group was very gracious and giving me info without requiring me to pay him. I ended up paying him anyways because they are a great organization, but they educated me in the very short time about the ever-changing privacy laws and the ways that the industry is affected. And basically every month now, a new state’s coming out with a new law about users. They’re telling me some of the pitfalls I might run into and essentially I have to run the risk of saying, "Hey, if I don’t geo-block a certain state, I might get sued, but if you get sued, then your face is in the news and any press is good press, right? Bad press, good press." Now, I don’t mind being out in the public eye, especially spending so much time in the military and everything. I’ve been a professed libertarian pretty much ever since and there are certain things I fully agree that is not the government’s job and I have children. It’s my job to see and kind of fleece what they have access to until they’re old enough to understand it. And if they do see it, so what? My job as a dad or as a parent to say, "Hey, you see this? Okay, you have questions? This is my take on it." I explain it to them and I think we need more of that. Instead of trying to say a law like, "Hey, don’t do that," well, that’s not your job as the government. It’s pretty simple. No, it absolutely isn’t. The whole thing is really ridiculous because having state age verification laws do not stop kids from getting on the most extreme porn sites, first of all, because kids understand technology better than anybody else and they’re just going to use a VPN to be somewhere else to the site. You’re talking to somebody in 1994 who saw his first pair of breasts, you know, line by line and dial up. We found it back then in its infancy to the average user. So there’s only so much a parent can do. What’s the government going to do much more efficiently than a parent? They’re just trying to get rid of our industry. That’s the goal here. And let’s face it, the legal industry is doing everything they can to keep kids off of their sites. They don’t want kids. Our people don’t want kids. We don’t want kids on our sites. Plain and simple. Exactly. I mean, there is nothing there that would even constitute saying, "Hey, let’s get a little Timmy over here to do that." I mean, no, nothing is geared towards that. And ultimately, this just becomes another issue where I’m just starting out. I’m still in my infancy. I don’t even think I’m crawling right now and not walking, but they’re going to, Tonya Harding, my kneecaps before I can even get walking. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s just part of the overall religious right and what they’re trying to do to the industry. And the thing is, if they get rid of all the legal porn sites, then the illegal ones from overseas will be all the kids can see and they’re not going to comply with any laws. And they’re a lot worse. And they’ve got all kinds of bad stuff on there like snuff and bestiality and rape and all the things that the legal sites don’t do. It’s great when you can’t see the forest through the trees, right? And you just run headlong into the first tree you see. It boggles my mind. I think a lot of that shaped. I was raised in a Lutheran household, my parents, conservatives. And then as I grew up and I did my 20s in the military, I saw the bad ends of policy. And honestly, if people really think about it, the party in power in a particular lever of government, there’s nothing really changes. The only thing that changes is the debt clock and the money that comes out in restrictive policies. And I see this coming and it scares me because I’m trying to get into the industry that they’re trying to essentially put a paper bag or not paper bag plastic bag over and strangle out. Exactly. What would you change in the process of building the site if you had your current knowledge starting out? I think it would have come together a lot faster. The biggest thing for me and I think this is a challenge for, you know, again, I’m the new guy speaking to industry professionals. I think AI is going to turn a lot of heads. And as a service, AI is perfect. I can utilize it for content moderation and many things else. It learns, it’s fast. But if I had that knowledge eight months ago, I would have been, I hate making up more analogies, I’ve used several, but I would have been cooking with Teflon already, you know, by last summer. And I think it is the wave of the future for the net in general. But when it comes to like content creators and things like that, I think it’s a scary proposition because you may have some people that I would love for like a big time star to come over to Beardfire and create an account. But if then somebody takes his likeness and then starts making content with an AI generated model, it does government get involved then? I mean, are they worried about that? Scarlett Johansson, I guess she was upset because they used her voice and I was like, wow, that’s touching you for me. I’m not a legal minded person, but I slept on enough law books in my day to understand that it’s very hard to trademark your voice. But it’s something I think, at least from my freshman perspective, that I do foresee it’s it’s terror that is going to enact on certain industries. And I finished my bachelor’s late in life, actually about three years ago. And yeah, it’s international affairs degree, global security. It’s funny to have, you know, 20 plus years of experience doing that job. It makes writing a 12 page paper a lot easier. I think a lot of it is going to run along into issues. And I think we’re already seeing that in the movie industry as well. Oh, of course. What are your long term goals for Beardfinder? I want to get it to a point and like I said, I would like to emulate Patrick’s success from Beardfinder. I mean, I think I look at that and it is amazing to me because most lay people, I’ll have conversations with people out in here in the pan, Florida, and they give that little devious look like, oh, yeah, I’ve heard of Featfinder. And you know, it is crazy because the popularity and when people understand that, you know, a recession proof industry, all it is is you go into the beach or doing something else with your feet. It’s crazy. So trying to emulate that success, even if I got to a quarter or half of the success Befinder did in its formative years, I’d be happy. Long term, you know, I mean, three to five years, we’ll see what we’re doing. Exactly. How can our listeners support you on your journey? So initially, you know, since I started this endeavor on my own, I didn’t ask for outside, you know, assistance, money or whatever word of mouth. Tell your friends, you see somebody that’s got a beard, a mustache, goatee. Hell, if they’re carrying peach fuzz from their teenage years and they’re in their 30s, I send them over to beardfinder.com or send them over to socials and tell them to make an account. Okay. What is one final thought you want to leave our listeners with? I think the idea and this, you know, runs into the risk of getting into this industry and with a niche, niche idea of Beardfinder, you know, it’s like, oh, well, there’s Instagram models, there’s people on Facebook with beards, putting yourself out there and, you know, trying to, you know, I’m not saying you have to become the next big porn star. You don’t have to be. Take a shot, you know, I know what I would love it to have an extra 60 bucks, 100 bucks to fill up the gas tank, you know, with the way everybody spends money nowadays. Guys ultimately never, we’re always the advertised. We never, we always see those spicy links and it’s like, ooh, I love seeing that, but then can guys have spicy links? There are some that do and why not? Why if you have facial hair, why not have spicy links? Absolutely. It shouldn’t be only for the gals to make money on their bodies. I’m all about, you know, equal exploitation under the law. Exactly. That’s good, Chris. That’s a good point to leave it. I’d like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Say Broker Talk and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Most definitely, Bruce. Thank you for having me. Thank you. My broker tip today is part six of how to buy a site. Last week we talked about the sales agreement. So now both you and the seller have signed the agreement. What comes next? There needs to be an escrow setup where you send the money, whether it be a one time payment or a deposit, if you’re going to be making payments. The seller for their part puts the assets of the sale into escrow, namely the domains being sold and any other tangible assets. Your attorney can give you more information on that. We recommend escrow domains for escrows. They’re a firm out of Washington, DC and no, they’re not paying me to say this. I just use them, trust them and am delighted by the work they’ve done for us. Either an escrow agreement will be drawn up by them in the case of a custom escrow or if it’s a simple one, it can be done right on their website. Then you, the buyer, the seller and the broker will be contacted by escrow domains with further instructions such as wiring information. The escrow is opened and either the deal closes within a matter of days or an inspection period is allowed. It all depends on what the agreement calls for. Whether you need an inspection period really depends on whether there’s still some information you need to find out prior to the deal closing. Your broker and your attorney can advise you more on this and it’s on a case by case basis. Then the money is transferred as are the domains and the deal is closed. Now in many cases, in fact, most of the time the seller either stays on board for a period of time to help with the transition or is at least available on an uncalled basis to answer questions. This is something most buyers should ask for. But at this point you pretty much own the website. What do you do now? We’ll talk about that subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with Sam Gibbon of Wick. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Chris Erwin of BeardFinder. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]

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