QUINN, CAROLINE SPIEGEL: Audible Porn for Women
There are currently 2 billion women in the world who masturbate, but many may feel limited in their options of getting turned on in a clean, safe way. Founder Caroline Spiegel launched Quinn, an audible porn platform that is changing the way we listen to porn, stay turned on, and get off. Quinn is on a mission to help women expand their sexual imaginations with a new modality.
We talked to Quinn founder, Caroline Spiegel, about her journey of self-expression, creating content, and finding her passion for embracing one’s sexual expressions.
The Childhood
Born in Santa Monica, California, Caroline grew up with parents who were lawyers and a brother, Evan Spiegel, who ended up founding and becoming the CEO of a very successful tech company, Snapchat. As a creative child, Caroline loved planning parties, designing invitations, and setting the theme. She doesn’t describe herself as a very extroverted person and tends to swing on a pendulum from wanting to either be completely alone or hosting an event. Her latest obsession? Her Australian Bernedoodle, Charles.
In high school, Caroline worked in a robotics lab and was really interested in studying computer science, which became her major in college. The summer before her senior year, she worked for Protocol Labs which was a startup that was trying to decentralize the internet with huge cloud service facilities. As a programmer, she got the full experience to learn how startup operations looked and also was close to the founder to learn how he ran the startup that was non-stereotypical to the standard Silicon Valley startup. However, her path completely shifted when she entered her senior year at Stanford, and dropped out to become a full-time entrepreneur, as the founder of Quinn.
“We are changing the narrative about sex and making it more about the energy and vibe that you have with the person. It is more important to have that than all the other mechanical parts of sex. ” -Caroline Spiegel
Quinn was founded because life is not always picture-perfect, and creativity and freedom of expression have healing powers. During Caroline’s junior year of college, she struggled with an eating disorder, and this contributed to her dropping out the following year. “I took time off in my junior year due to this eating disorder – and ultimately, this was a wake-up call to my body and my sexuality,” Caroline shared. When she was recovering from the eating disorder, she had low libido and couldn’t sexually perform the way she wanted to, or felt like she was supposed to, and so she turned to porn to get turned on. Unfortunately, she found it very dissatisfying. “I started to feel like I wanted something that speaks to my actual desires and what speaks to me in terms of good sex. Late at night in my studio apartment, I stumbled upon audio porn, and I found tons of communities on Reddit, Tumblr, etc., where other audio porn users share and create content,” Caroline said. Most women tend to use their imagination or something from a TV show or movie to masturbate, however, it may be difficult for them to keep those images in their mind to continue the pleasure. This is what Quinn is set out to help solve, or at least facilitate – the imagination. Quinn sets the stage for your next moment of pleasure, for all women who want a new experience, and who are 18 years of age and older.
Why The Name?
Founded in 2019, Quinn started out as a blog with multiple iterations of the site. The name originated from Caroline’s friend who had a crush on a girl named Quinn and it stuck with her because it represented the sexy, clean, and unique vibe of the brand and the content of the business. In the very early days of the business, Caroline started out by putting all her favorite audios from the internet on a basic website and shared it with her friends and sorority, which helped it quickly go mini-viral. Since this was so popular during the beta test, Caroline decided to pull the trigger, drop out of college and pursue building Quinn full time since it was already taking up a lot of her time.
Founder, Caroline Spiegel.
After developing the product into an MVP, Caroline was ready for funding and successfully raised $1 million in her pre-seed round in two tranches. The first round was due to investors being excited about the opportunity and the second round was due to the growth of Quinn users. Today, Quinn has expanded into a mobile app from a desktop experience. As a subscription-based company like Spotify, and Headspace, Quinn offers unlimited audio content for $5 a month from content creators who are vetted. You really feel like you are in the bedroom with these creators with content categories ranging from teacher-student, strong language, spanking, butt stuff, romance, encouragement, and more.
What’s Wrong With The Industry?
“Sex is very taboo and conceptualized in boxes. For example, sex on the beach is hot, but sex in the bedroom isn’t. Also, our biggest competitor, Pornhub, creates a lot of erotic content that is free, but isn’t very clean or makes the user feel safe. The way we think about porn right now as a society is not aligned with how our users conceptualize it. Our users want to be connected to their sexual experience in a greater way and we provide them with an outlet to embrace their sexual desires in a clean, comfortable, and safe space. All of our content is super authentic to make it feel like you’re in bed with that person. There is a lot that goes into dirty hot moaning audio.”
The Advice
What does it take to start something on your own? Caroline shares some advice from her entrepreneurial journey:
Word of mouth marketing wins every time, but never underestimate the value of good press. Listicle articles featured on Bumble, Cosmo, etc., have really helped us grow.
Do out-of-the-box ideas to grow your brand organically. Quinn hosts special nights at Soho House for blind speed dating events and also likes to host creative salon-type events to promote creative content and creators.
Theodore Roosevelt once said something about “being the man in the arena.” I personally think you won if you are doing something at all. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just keep going -- as long as you are being and trying!
When there is so much advice out there, it is hard to figure things out. I think every piece of advice is worth a listen, but it is not worth an internalization of what that person said.
Try to collect as much data as possible on particular issues, ask a bazillion people questions, read everything on it, and also factor in your gut feeling. It is wrong to do everything your gut says but it is also wrong to just listen to Jay on Twitter. It is about finding the right medium for what is right for the business.
Interested in getting it on through audio? Check out Quinn and start listening and getting turned on at the same time.
Photo courtesy of Quinn.
Written by Christina Chao.