In October, 2021 PLBY Group Inc, the owner of Playboy, announced that it has formalized a deal to purchase Dream – an adult entertainment content platform that provides creators with tools to interact directly with their fans. The business journey of Dream started in June, 2020 when the platform was launched with the Scrile Connect $10 startup subscription plan – a turnkey full-featured software for starting a private website for monetization of private content of creators. Dream was purchased by PLBY Group to serve as the basis for their new content creator platform – Centrefold.
As Bloomberg and Forbes stated, the agreement was reached for as much as $30 million to be paid primarily in stock. The platform and its infrastructure will serve as the technology foundation for the launch of Playboy’s new creator-led website, Centerfold, to rival OnlyFans. The company intends Centerfold to include multiple potential revenue streams like cryptocurrency usage and NFT applications, as well as an e-commerce connection with the Playboy brand, with Cardi B named a Creative Director In Residence at Playboy and a founding member of the platform.
Dream: from a $10 Startup to the World-Leading OnlyFans Rival
Dream is a high quality content creator platform similar to OnlyFans with a sophisticated infrastructure and multiple content monetization tools for adult creators. The website was originally based on Scrile Connect which provides a turnkey full-featured software for starting a private website for content creators and their paid subscribers.
The business journey of Dream started in June, 2020 when Mike Dow, Dream co-founder, reached Scrile to get a $10 startup subscription plan of Connect platform.
From that very moment and along all the way up to the deal with Playboy, Scrile has been providing technical support in the implementation of new features and development of custom solutions for the platform.
On the way from the start and the whole development process, the project has gone through several rebrandings. Scrile’s web designers worked on custom design layouts and logos for each rebranding and gradually improved the UI/UX design according to the needs of the target audience.
We have been providing support and assistance for the deal with Centrefold (PLBY Group Inc) and even after it, preparing the source code for transfer to a new company so that they could independently work on their own technology platform.
How We Develop our Product to Become a Technological Backbone of Million-Dollar Startups
Scrile is a tech company that traditionally develops solutions for B2B enterprises. With the help of Scrum and Agile approaches we make it possible to successfully develop such scalable projects with complex environments like Dream in relatively short time frames. We focus on keeping the process lean and creating minimum viable products that go through a number of iterations before the final stage, instead of trying to deliver it all at once at the end.
We follow the approach of client engagement into the process of team collaboration throughout a continual dynamic development where everyone is working together towards one goal. Only in combination with modern technology stack, attention to code quality and an experienced development team, this approach allows us to achieve our goals and produce high-quality IT solutions that bring outstanding value and financial success to our clients.
Scrile Connect Product Owner, Olga Cherenkova, shared the principles of the approach to building Enterprise projects based on Scrile Connect platform:
“We’ve created a strong chain of communication processes with the client. Every week we have regular Scrum procedures like weekly synchronization calls when we discuss features that will be developed during the next sprint. As a product owner, I support three backlogs (lists of all things that need to be done within the project), the first is for the client’s project roadmap, the second is the internal backlog for the development team and the third is for the design team. Before the new feature is developed and released, we always discuss the roots of the problem and client’s need with the development team in order to provide the most effective solution that we can offer. We use an iterative way of development because every new feature always means a hypothesis, and there is no reason to implement a high price feature right away as you need to test it and get feedback from users in order to make a solution about the new iteration to get the final result.”
Talking about the development of Scrile Connect core software, Olga added, “Scrile Connect is on the active growth stage up to now and we use different ways to learn and clearly understand our target audience needs – customer development interview, usability tests of the essential user flows, special features testing methods. Statements, Vault, Subscription sales, paid content in messages, referral program, – this is far from the full list of the features which appeared in the product due to testing feature hypothesis in iterative way. Scrile team always takes into account the specifics of the target audience, that is, those who create and purchase the content. We always follow market changes and global trends and monitor every tiny important part of the features that world-leading services like OnlyFans have.”
Our top priority is to offer a wide range of customization features of the platform interface and provide an excellent user experience with the modern UI/UX design. The Connect interface is adapted for different devices, so it looks great and is easy to use both on mobile devices and desktops. The modern technology stack allows us to provide an interface that works quickly and remains responsive to any task.
Lead of frontend development team, Max Ilin, shared the features of architectural interface of the platform:
“With the help of a specially developed editor, you can create a unique landing page or any text page from scratch without writing a single line of code. You can easily replace the logo, favicon, or even completely change the color scheme of the website in just a few clicks. Enterprise clients can apply more significant changes to the appearance of the website, develop custom design layouts and our team of designers and developers is always ready to help with this.”
As our Enterprise projects were getting bigger, attracting celebrities with huge fan base like Lottie Moss which made a boost in attracting traffic to the website, we have challenged the capacity limitations of the Scrile Connect system in order to make it scalable and highload resistant. We have managed to prepare a reliable technological foundation for such projects like Dream, as Forbes stated that “The Dream infrastructure will effectively serve as the technological backbone of Centerfold.”
Scrile CTO, Oleg Kolychev commented on the technical background of Scrile Connect:
“We are focused on using the latest versions of the tools for building software products, which keeps us constantly at the forefront of technology. The microservice architecture, on the basis of which we have built our product, allows us to achieve high availability and painless scalability during high loads. Kubernetes cluster lets us easily manage installations for hundreds of our clients, and our own server cloud and agreements with data centers allow us to keep hosting prices affordable.”
In addition to custom development, management, maintenance and technical support, we provide assistance in business procedures along all the way such as preparing documentation for potential investors, compliance review with Mastercard standards and arranging the source code for transfer to a new company, so that they could independently work on their own technological platforms.
The industry of content monetization and subscription platforms is growing and evolving at a fast rate with new big players entering the market. Many of the new platforms are powered by blockchain technology, using cryptocurrency and NFTs, allowing a new kind of decentralised digital asset to be built, owned and monetised. We believe that it is a great success for the Connect team and Scrile in general to be involved in such ambitious projects like Dream and we always do our best to provide our clients with outstanding solutions for their projects to stand out of the crowd and become leaders of the industry.
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