L34SH year 1
Hello hello! L34SH has just passed its first year anniversary last weekend, and we thought it may be a good time for a small* writeup about the state of the club, future plans, and changes we’ve made over time.
Successes over the last year
Over the last year, L34SH has grown incredibly as a brand. Started as a nsfw party off-shoot of our ChiParties, our community now has 1600+ members on Discord, with our regulars coming back nearly every friday to have a good time. Moving from a per-event format to our weekly format has been one of the most successful changes we’ve made, and it seems to have succeeded in creating a safe and happy second home for many members of our community.
Eventually, we started introducing weekly themes with activities and outfit guidance – this was also a hugely successful change. We typically have great participation rates for our events, especially by our affiliated creators. Our activities vary in intensity and participation per week, but we generally also get great participation there, providing a significantly different experience every Friday night.
While under our SFW brand chiparties, our team also led the organization of the Montreal ComicCon Afterparty, which turned out to be a thorough success with great feedback.
Next, we also ended up being a large component of Montreal Fetish Weekend – a 30 years running Fetish-focused festival and collection of events. From the feedback we’ve had, several of our events were considered some of the best that MFW has seen, especially for the younger kink audience. We took a huge space during the weekend’s biggest party, KinkXtacy, taking over the main stage with our games, furniture, and providing our DJs for the end of the night. We even had a huge presence on their aesthetic, with videos of our parties being used all night long by the VJ.
All in all, it has been a year of many experiments, with many successes that went beyond expectations. Though it remains niche (and that’s how we like it), L34SH as a brand and community is now fairly widely known across the city, and even neighboring provinces and states.
Challenges
With our many successes also came many challenges.
Financial
L34SH has always been funded by our adult creators – including several members of staff.
Between adult games to adult video sales, the start of this endeavor has remained primarily fueled by our other activities as we try to grow and monetize our activities.
Our audience is typically on the younger side, and this means there is a lot less spending money in our community than most. For example, even our silver membership is overall absurdly cheap compared to competition, amounting to $10 per themed event. This has led us to experiment with a variety of different monetization approaches.
Our memberships and in-person sales have been the most successful, bringing some amount of consistent income to the club by our regulars.
For a while, our L34SH content creation account also did well, but the revenue varied wildly and was primarily tied to fewer creators than we’d would’ve liked, leading to some issues among our affiliates when it comes to who was asked to participate. We also had to remove many videos whenever someone no longer aligned with the club. Unfortunately at a certain point we decided to cut this element of our monetization as it became too much to manage and too much risk for what it brought us.
Our market was another initiative which didn’t turn out so well – while we loved being able to provide a space for local artisans to be known and make some money, the revenue was not enough to justify having someone sit at the market during our open days.
For full transparency: No, L34SH is not yet profitable or stable. We are continuing to work on it, and we remain confident solutions can be found to ensure the long term existence of our club. We do ask you to remain understanding that for now this is primarily a passion project funded by a couple of creators who also have other obligations.
We’ll get there – and if we don’t, we’ll certainly have fun along the way.
Other Struggles
We’ve also had a handful of non-financial challenges, ranging from not-so-successful collaborations to understaffing issues. We’ve also had a fair share of (as expected…) prejudice, harassment, and drama against our unusual club. We even lost our main advertising source, our Instagram.
While very few of these issues are too major, they did cut into the team’s ability to monetize non-L34SH revenue sources, so we’ve had to refine and trim down quite a bit to ensure it doesn’t hurt our primary business. Recently, our change of manager and reduction of superfluous problems has significantly improved things.
The Future
We aim to keep resolving more problems with the club while doing our best to serve the community. Our goal is not to become huge, as we believe the best kinds of communities are curated and tight-knit.
Weekly Formula
We plan to retain our current formula for a bit longer, with one exception. While our themed Lounge Fridays are a proven formula, and our gaming Sundays appear to be growing a fair bit, our Saturdays have remained an issue.
Collaborations struggle to bring in enough to justify their burden, while our own events cannibalize our Friday nights. That part is within expectations – we know you like the club, but we can’t expect our regulars to party with us two nights a week!
Our immediate plan is to change Saturday nights to become more private, premium, and most notably, more kink-focused. Right now, our community serves as an entryway into the world of kink and fetish. Many of our regulars don’t even partake and are primarily there for gaming or socializing with like-minded weirdos.
We believe there’s a space here for events where all attendees feel more free to embrace the kink side – without worry that it will make anyone in their surroundings uncomfortable. With some looser rules, encouraged participation, and more specific amenities and games that support the kink-lounge vibe, we hope the saturdays will become an attractive premium event for those deeper in the scene. We’d also like to create more things like L34SH Jenga and Sinful Sessions to include in our Saturdays.
Simultaneously, our Saturdays becoming more adult will also allow creators to feel more free to intrude with their adult content creation – solving some major scheduling problems when it comes to our other funding businesses, most notably our lead Succubus’ streams.
We plan to start doing our Saturdays exclusively invite-only, and eventually move to an application + premium paid membership format. Most importantly, our first step will be to incentivize the right vibes, and the next will be monetizing.
L34SH Succubi
We are likely to rework our Succubus content creator system as it’s been outdated, and several of the original creators no longer come regularly. We want to make it easier to participate in the system, while also ensuring it doesn’t cause issues when some participants want to take distance or a break.
Simultaneously we would also like to make it possible for those comfortable with it to participate in L34SH Succubus related activities without having platforms of their own – most likely with pre-made consent forms.
Location
The rent at our current location is prohibitive to the club’s success. While it has provided us with a great central space with a lot of benefits, we are starting to believe it’s unsustainable with our other goals for the club.
We’re currently investigating a few options, including moving elsewhere within the same building, but something is likely to change sooner or later!
Conclusion
We hope this provided some much-needed insight into our activities, and we welcome you to provide feedback on our Discord server. We genuinely could use it – let us know what you think, and we’ll do our best for the community’s needs.
