When faced with a crowded, competitive market, many entrepreneurs setting out to launch a new product or platform will seek a narrow niche that’s underserved – a nook where their creation might have fewer potential customers, but where they will also be fighting for attention with fewer rivals.

Some companies take a decidedly different approach to a congested market; rather than shy away from well-established competition, they target a customer-rich space and look for ways to outshine the currently dominant brands, or to offer something existing platforms do not, with the newcomer carving out a place for itself by emphasizing its difference.

The emerging platform Cherry.tv falls squarely into the latter category, as it seeks to establish itself at a time when its founders know they’re plunging into a highly competitive space that features both well-established platforms and plenty of other newcomers vying for the same consumers’ eyeballs.

According to Paul from Cherry.tv, the company’s Vice President of Business Development, it’s a challenge that his team isn’t just prepared to meet; it’s a task that’s built into their corporate DNA.

“The Cherry.tv team loves building social and community-oriented products and has been doing so successfully for over a decade,” Paul told YNOT, adding that “in traditional social media, we have seen the trend towards community-focused products becoming less of the exception and more of the norm.”

As Paul sees it, the growth in community-focused products is more than a trend – it represents a fundamental shift in the expectations of many modern consumers.

“There is a reason why platforms like Twitch have grown massively over the past several years, despite the fact that most content streamed on Twitch can just as easily be viewed on YouTube the next day,” Paul said. “Watching pre-recorded videos just doesn’t cut it for many people anymore.

“Content consumers yearn for a more personal connection with their favorite performers, and, in many cases, other like-minded fans of that performer as well,” Paul continued. “This has become just as much the case in the adult industry as gaming and other social media, and many platforms have risen to the challenge, both in cams and more personalized content distribution sites like OnlyFans.”

Stepping into this market is something Paul and Cherry.tv are doing with their eyes wide open, fully aware of the formidable competition they will face.

“Despite the competition, we feel there is still a ton of opportunity in this market,” Paul explained. “While the big players in the industry definitely boast some seriously impressive user numbers, a lot of the products have started to feel stagnant, ‘set it and forget it’ cash cows for their creators.”

While the adult cam space doubtlessly is crowded with competitors, Paul looks at that jam-packed market and senses stagnation – a stasis that presents opportunity for those who embrace innovation and endeavor to keep their platforms both fresh and focused on the creators and performers whose work drives the cam sector forward.

“The last great cam site product innovation was probably integration with Lovense and other smart toys (which I still believe to be one of the most brilliant product ideas ever – both inside and outside of adult),” Paul told YNOT. “We feel that regardless of the industry, products should continuously evolve with new features and technology. It has been amazing to see just how slow many cam sites have been to adapt to obvious trends such as mobile. Model experience and interests should always be put front and center, and we aim to keep that as our guiding principle.”

The other thing that will help Cherry.tv stand out is the Cherry.tv team itself, Paul added.

“Despite this being an incredibly competitive industry, we feel that our background, specifically the fact that we have NOT all been working in adult for the past decade, (though we do have several industry vets on the team), gives us a fresh perspective of the market,” he said. “We aren’t coming into the business with any preconceived notions of what is ‘industry standard’ and what is not, nor, to be honest, do we care.”

Whether they are the norm or not, Paul explained that some facets of the Cherry.tv approach, “like escalating revenue tiers, instant payouts, and 24/7 personalized model support just seems like the right thing to do for us.”

“We don’t see any chance of success in creating a platform where the models are not the center of every decision, or they are thought of as simply numbers in a spreadsheet,” Paul elaborated. “When it all comes down to it, the two most important factors determining whether or not a cam platform can succeed are #1) Can models earn more with their time than they could somewhere else? and #2) Are users having a better time on the platform than they would on a competitor’s? (Will they stay?) The relationship between these two factors is correlated. This is where our diversified experience really kicks in.”

Paul also noted that Cherry.tv’s core team is “made up of mostly game designers with decades of experience and billions of dollars in revenue under their belts,” which has also informed the company’s approach to building the platform.

“User experience design and monetization are our bread and butter,” Paul said. “Properly introduced gamification elements (things which you might find in many of your favorite video games such as a level systems, achievements, collections, live events, etc.) allow users to have more fun, leading them to contribute more to models, which means models earn more, which means models are happy, which makes users happy. It is a very positive cycle that benefits everyone in the ecosystem. While it may take some time, we are confident that a model streaming to 500 users on Cherry.tv would be able to earn more on average than streaming to 500 users on any other platform.”

The approach is, in many ways, a ‘traditional’ one – albeit it a space many people might not think of as traditional. As Paul also observed though, it’s a space where certain stigmas and preconceived notions seem to be falling by the wayside over time.

“The adult industry and cam platforms in particular are becoming less and less of a taboo that nobody talks about and more and more mainstream and a part of our popular culture,” Paul said. “We aim to break into the industry by treating the business just as we would any mainstream business – by putting the customer and, most importantly, models first.”

As Cherry.tv moves ahead towards its official launch early in the new year, Paul said the company’s focus is on responding to feedback from its alpha testers – a focus that will remain in place as the company absorbs suggestions and criticism from early adopters of the platform in the months ahead.

“We want to do everything we can to ensure your Cherry.tv experience is as rewarding as possible,” Paul said. “Especially as a new product, we want to hear any and all feedback you may have about the platform. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter. Tell us something looks like shit and we’ll be sure the feedback goes straight to the designer. Tell us that something isn’t working properly and an engineer will look at it as quickly as feasibly possible. Cherry.tv is built for you, and we’d love it if we could grow the platform together with our users and models.

“Cherry.tv is built for you, and we’d love it if we could grow the platform together with our users and models,” Paul continued. “We have a model Discord server and all of our team is in there to answer any questions or resolve any issues you may have. We value transparency and will keep the model community up to date on things just as we would our own team members.”

In exchange for the responsiveness and support offered by the Cherry.tv team, Paul hopes models and users will reward his company with patience and faith in the future of the platform.

“Our biggest downside at launch will be, obviously, having a smaller base of users compared to competitors,” Paul conceded. “We ask that you please bear with us, as this is a challenge any new product must face. Rest assured that we have the will and (more importantly) the budget to see this through, and we’re confident that we will scale fast. From everything we’ve seen in the past (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), there is a big advantage to being an early adopter.”

Clearly, launching a new platform like Cherry.tv is a major endeavor – and in 2020, it has been one that Paul’s team has been forced to undertake while also dealing with a global pandemic. While that has been a less than ideal circumstance, Paul can still see the bright side of the platform’s launch, from his team’s perspective.

“Just like a good portion of the global workforce, most of us have been working from home for the past 10 months,” Paul said, noting that “international travel has been essentially impossible.”

“We live and breathe Zoom and Slack just like everyone else in the midst of a pandemic,” Paul added. “While this is certainly an annoyance, we’ve learned to adapt. We’d much rather be starting a cam platform in 2020 than opening a restaurant or a travel agency.”

Paul even sees one major way in which the realities imposed by the pandemic has benefitted the Cherry.tv effort. “With nobody going into a physical office anyway, we realized that there was no real need to limit our hiring to only people within a certain geographical area.”

“Instead of only hiring talent in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Berlin, why not just find the best particular person for a job no matter where they live? If everyone is going to be working from home anyway, it doesn’t really matter how far that home is from ‘HQ’,” Paul added. “This has led us to be able to hire some seriously talented product designers, engineers, and marketers from around the world that we would probably have never had the opportunity to work with if not for COVID. We plan to stick with this model even after the virus is under control.”

With the official launch of Cherry.tv looming in the weeks ahead, Paul’s goals for the platform in 2021 are less about revenue or traffic metrics and more qualitative in nature. He said he wants Cherry.tv to enable “our models to have a more positive experience and earn more on Cherry.tv, all things considered, than they would somewhere else” adding “it’s really that simple.”

“This is especially true for the models who join us from the very beginning, when nobody knows who we are nor has any reason yet to try us out – when a site function may not work as intended, or a room may only have a handful of viewers,” Paul said. “They have put their trust in us, and we will do our utmost to make sure that trust pays dividends for them.

“We really do believe that trust is the key word here,” Paul added. “Our goal for 2021 is to gain the trust of our models and users, implement their feedback, and work our hardest to build the best cam site and adult community out there. We plan to start with a soft launch in January to get all our technical kinks worked out, then by Q2 push to get the product out to as many users as possible.”

To win that trust would be the culmination of months of intense effort by the Cherry.tv team, a well-earned reward for their laser focus on building a system catered to the needs and preferences of the models and consumers they hope will flock to the platform.

“We’ve been working around the clock building Cherry.tv for over a year now,” Paul said, adding that there’s “not much else we can do in 2020 honestly.”

“It’s hard to express how incredibly excited we are to finally get the product online and start hearing what you guys think about it,” Paul concluded. “We’re in this for the long-haul and really want to build a product that models love. Check out our Discord, come hang out with us, and let us know what you think. We’re confident you’ll like what you see.”