Making sex better

Before he became a Silicon Valley multimillionaire, Rob Perkins worked for me at Naked Communications. Rob is highly charismatic, creative and curious. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he produced some of the world's best-known and most successful advertising campaigns. Rob loves ideas, has a passion for pushing boundaries and is always willing to intellectually go where others do not. This predisposition may have been encouraged in childhood; he is the son of a psychiatrist, as it happens. Rob reckons interesting people have generally been in therapy. It means they're more comfortable talking about uncomfortable subjects.

One of Rob's observations was around sex and the degradation resulting from porn culture. Porn used to consist of a Playboy centrefold passed around the schoolyard, but now there's a cornucopia of content a click away on the internet. The volume of porn has exploded. Unfortunately for young people, pornography is used as a surrogate sex educator. Many believe their partners will want sex in the way it's depicted in porn. Most partners don't.

Rob observed that sex education hasn't kept up with modern mores and is rather embarrassing and irrelevant. Because it's taught in a classroom, an in-depth discussion is mostly absent.

Rob has always believed in Peter Thiel's advice about innovation at a category level rather than at a brand level. If you innovate at a category level, you can achieve something more profound and disruptive. Creating an entirely new category allows you to have significantly more influence and interest, whereas creating a new brand within a category is just a fight for market share.

So Rob created the website OMGyes.com — the Science of Women's Pleasure, a series of online interactive instructional videos to make sex education shameless, open and effective. Actress Emma Watson revealed she subscribes to the site. And after reading this, you might sign up as well.

Rather than risk misrepresenting Rob and his achievements, I went straight to the source and asked him to describe OMGyes.com in his own words. Here's my chat with Rob and a demonstration of his brilliant brain.

• Adam: How did OMGyes.com start?

  Rob: It started as just a fun project — we'd ask our circle of friends to share their insights about specific techniques and the sexual pleasure discoveries they wish they'd known about sooner. And then we'd look for the patterns. You'd think this request to share would be met with raised eyebrows and different variations of ‘no thanks', but everyone wanted to be involved. The project grew fast, and we realised something in culture was changing. People were hungry to talk openly about this stuff and to understand it better. We did a bunch of thought experiments — and one was to imagine a future without the taboo, where this new openness and honesty we were seeing had grown and grown, breaking like a giant wave over all the cultures in the world. What would have to happen to get to that version of the future? And we realised these interviews, themselves, were transformative — not just for the person sharing, but for us, the interviewers. And if the world could see interviews just like these, this particular kind of openness would be contagious. After the initial giggles, with no-one cringing or uncomfortably changing the subject, it becomes obvious that hearing about the specific kinds of touch people like with their partners (or by themselves) is fascinating. And when you see it, from relatable people of widely different ages, it becomes clear: that's how it should be. The sky doesn't fall. No-one's trying to arouse anyone else in the conversation. There's laughter, but it's good, healthy, ‘I didn't know it, but I've been waiting for someone else to say that' laughter.

  In doing what turned into over a thousand interviews, we discovered not just the patterns in sexual pleasure techniques, but also a lot about the taboo. We learned about the rampant myths and misconceptions that are going unquestioned because of the silence surrounding the topic.

  Adam: Why does innovation best happen at a category level and why is it not generally born out of customer insight?

  Rob: We're big believers in the blue ocean strategy notion. That there are lots of red ocean areas where there are already lots of sharks (companies) competing and copying each other. And there are also lots of completely blue ocean areas — where no-one is yet. When building products in blue ocean, there aren't standard features or ways of behaving. You're making it up as you go along and picking and choosing some approaches from other categories. So we learned early on when we talked to potential customers that we couldn't rely on them to tell us what to build. Because their framework for what was out there and possible didn't include products like ours. When we showed them the product, that's when the light bulb went on, and they'd try to make sense of it. That was really valuable research — understanding how people would explain this new thing to their friends.

OMGyes is my favourite example of a brand creating the category. There's still nothing like it.

Bending an established category into a new shape

It's more common for a category to be disrupted and bent into a different shape than for a whole new category to be invented. As mentioned earlier, there's barely any brand differentiation between Australia's big four banks because the category has existed for a long time, as have the banks.

The eruption of financial technology (fin-tech) companies offering mobile-first banks is expected to challenge this. If one or two disruptive companies develop something completely new, it will bend the banking sector into a new shape. If my theory holds, they will also attract new customers. The bank that bends the category will attract attention and customers.

Stretching a pre-existing brand

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: creating the category is hard. But if you're innovative, that's where you should put your focus. At their heart, brands are ‘emotional', and this emotion allows them to stretch into all sorts of areas. It's why several serial entrepreneurs take their brands from business to business. For example, Netflix shifted from a DVD postal service to a DVD and Blu-ray rental business, to a streaming business, and finally a content creation company — all called Netflix. Sir Richard Branson's Virgin brand has always positioned itself as ‘the consumer champion'. An emotive promise can be parlayed into categories as diverse as airlines, music, bridal wear, gyms, finance and even to mobile phone plans.

If you work with a sizable pre-existing brand, I suggest you stretch the brand into a new category rather than starting another brand to match the opportunity. Brands often have far more stretch in them than people believe.

Be the category

Where possible, be the category. But the next best thing is to put a dent in an existing category. My tip is this: you won't create a category by asking consumers what they want. As Rob Perkins explained, potential customers couldn't tell him what product or experience to create because their framework didn't include products like his. Peter Thiel believes there are still unchartered frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. And if you crack any of those nuts, enjoy the ride.

If you're out in front in a category of one - enjoy it for as long as you can. Others will mimmick, copy, and be derivitive off your success. However, if you're first you have the opportunity to scale and have complete market share — and that's a great place to start.