We recently connected with Cardano Slim and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Cardano thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

The story behind how StripperCoin was created isn’t a usual one. It has gone from memecoin, to utility token, to a larger overall web3 adult brand. It began during the meme-coin hype of 2021, which would have been around March. Dogecoin was pumping, and tons of other meme coins were reporting record gains – and I had only just begun my journey in to crypto. Tweets of the Eternal King Doge, Elon Musk, were moving markets and creating millionaires, and pixelated jpg’s of almost anything were being traded with high price tags. We had obviously just moved in to a new era of humanity after the “pandemic”, and the opportunity to build something new was palpable. I was still digesting as many whitepapers as I could during my time at work as a IT Systems Administrator (as a business owner, I now look back at this and cringe – while smiling at the same time), then coming home to inundate my wife with all the new information I had just learned about whatever token or blockchain I was learning about. We had just had our first child, and I was beginning to see and understand blockchain as the new wave of web development that many parts of the economy and life would soon be based on. And it wasn’t all just marketing – although much of it was – I was finding there were a few blockchain and token projects with some real world utility and promise. That’s when I came across Cardano – a blockchain that felt different from the rest. While most blockchains wanted to ‘move fast and break things’ – Cardano had a research first, paced level of development. Having lived through the dot-com bubble era, I knew that if a new product moved too fast in their development it had a real chance of never meeting expectations and failing. Basically, growing too fast to keep up. Cardano wasn’t like that. Their vision for how each development phase would improve the chain and make it much more powerful and scalable was easy to understand, and just made sense. It didn’t feel like it had the ponzi economics many other blockchains did, and the ethos of it’s founder (Charles Hoskinson) was close to my own. Not to mention he was also involved early in the life of Ethereum’s development, and had been involved in crypto early on. So I continued to read as much as I could about Cardano and get involved in the Twitter community. Before this, I absolutely hated Twitter… now I’m a daily user.

Since my wife and I had just had our first child, I was dead set on making the best of the opportunity I saw before me. Every day as I learned more about Cardano’s current, and future capabilities, I would discuss them with my wife in the evening. One day at work we were discussing the absurdity behind some of the tokens available on Ethereum. Since one of my co-workers had previously been married to a stripper, we began to joke what it would be like to create a coin just for strippers. It was a hilarious concept, and everybody got a good chuckle out of it. That evening when I returned home, I went in to my usual rant telling her about the new idea for strippers. It would be a touchless, and non-degrading form of payment. It fit right in to the new world where we had to remain 6 feet from each other and coins with funny names were all the rage. She was quiet at first, and then told me very seriously that she thought this was a great idea and I should focus on it and see what I can do with it. Yes, you heard that right… my wife signed off on this! So that night, I minted a few million of them. At that time, I had only tested minting a handful of other times, and was just fooling around. That initial mint, there were no decimal places and the policy was unlocked forever. But it didn’t matter, at the time they were simply a joke between me, my wife and a few friends.

Fast forward 8 months, it was around Thanksgiving – I had sent a few million StripperCoins to various friends as jokes, and discussed the idea of my coin with a handful of people in the Cardano community. One of which was a community developer who minted NFT’s and hosted sales – somebody who would later become a close friend – Freddy from TAILS (Now SCM) stake pool. (Insert shameless plug to STAKE YOUR ADA TO SCM POOL HERE!) Since smart contracts had just launched, and there were a handful of exchanges about to launch on Cardano – meme coins started to become big. People were filling their bags early so they could profit once the exchanges finally launched. Hosky had just made a few million ADA with token sales, and even more with NFT sales. At this time, Freddy reached out to me and encouraged me to launch a token faucet with my StripperCoins and see if there’s any interest. We did, and only a few people pulled coins at first, but it slowly began to pick up. At this time I was reached out to by somebody named Venom on Twitter. I had never interacted with this person before, but they advised me on changing the way my faucet was distributing coins, as well as encouraged me to open a website and write a basic whitepaper. Venom would later become our first Discord moderator, and a friend I spoke with daily. The problem was he lived in Nepal – where crypto was illegal. Venom was reliable, and always full of great advice. I took him up on creating our first (very basic) web page, and wrote a tongue in cheek whitepaper that served to inform people what StripperCoin was.

Sometime during this time I had also filled out a form to have StripperCoin be one of the first 10 coins to be listed on a new platform called DripDropz. I had been aware of many of their team members prior to this and thought this would be a good place to participate within the Cardano Community. It turned out to be one of the best moves we could have made. We were accepted (after much internal discussion I’m told) to their first 10 tokens list – and they were launching at midnight on New Years Day. At the time, I didn’t realize how significant this would be. When DripDropz launched, the number of wallets that held StripperCoin 100x’d – and we were soon in 10k wallets in the first day of the New Year. The faucet was also being drained as people learned about the coin and wanted to pick some up. This was when I knew there was something special with StripperCoin. We quickly revamped the website and started building our community. We opened LP’s on 2 DEX’s so people could trade StripperCoin – with the community owning the majority share and the project contributing the majority of it’s funds. Things were starting to heat up.

It was about this time that I made the decision to move away from being just a meme coin, and see if it could be turned in to a serious project with real utility. In order to do that, we had to bring on some Ambassadors. Women who were professionals in the space and saw the same opportunity that we did. It just so happened an Exxxotica conference was happening a few hours away – so I decided to take a day off work and travel there to see if I could find an Ambassador. This is where I first met Emiline. A few weeks later, Casey Castille emailed us – and both of them officially joined the team in July. At this same time, we’ve been collaborating with music artists to create strip club themed music that mentions our coin – and working on becoming a classy adult brand for the web3 space. We have designs on creating metaverse portals to access adult content creators, StripperCoin branded merch, and utilizing NFT’s as a new and fun way for creators to interact with their fans – all being available for ADA or StripperCoin. We want to position ourselves to be the brand that creators looking to get involved in web3 come to first. We intend to be creator-focused, all while remaining classy and sexy. Want to mint an adult NFT series? Come to us. Want to give that NFT utility by giving special access to your fans? Come to us. Want to access some premium adult content in a new and fun way? Come to us. We aim to be the innovator at the intersection of adult entertainment and web3.

Cardano, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been an IT Systems/Network Engineer for 25 years. I’ve always been looking for new opportunities where I can create something new and unique. I always felt I missed the boat on the dot-com bubble, and have been searching for something similar ever since. When I discovered blockchain and crypto, I had the feeling that a new revolution was happening, and I could lend my engineering skills to build something really fun and entertaining. Aside from supporting IT systems, I’ve often been involved in designing and deploying new IT systems for large clients. This meant understanding the end goal, developing a plan, assembling a team and executing the plan to accomplish the ultimate vision. This often involves hardware and software solutions being combined, backed by a team of specialists who can get the job done. This is the special skill I bring to building my company. I can identify the incremental steps necessary to reach a goal – and execute them – all while remaining flexible when plans change. At StripperCoin, this has been especially valuable – as these exact skills have been important as I build up a team to help make the project successful, and identify our next steps to deploy our latest idea. In essence, StripperCoin is an experiment in to how Web3 technology can benefit the adult industry. We intend to do this in a way that lifts up others and gives them ownership of their content and direct royalty payments. What this means, is that StripperCoin never takes a cut of any royalties from content produced by one of our creators. Our mission is to help adult creators interact with their fans in new and fun ways – enabled by blockchain technology. We will do this by building a metaverse franchise, as well as develop a website and app that allow tipping, as well as adult NFT collection minting. We plan to have many avenues of way an adult creator can do something fun with their fans – from NFT reveals, to upgradeable NFT series, and even real-world access passes for VIP party entry. We aim to create a fun and classy brand that is involved in many different aspects of the blockchain revolution.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

Marketing for StripperCoin is difficult. Many ad platforms outright ban the word “Stripper”, and the only places we can advertise without some kind of limitation are pornography sites. While we completely understand the position of the ad companies – many of the eyes on their platform are children’s – we decided we would often take the road of ‘Gorilla’ promotion to get the word out about what we’re building. Our first foray in to gorilla marketing, I decided that since strippers were often the subject of rap music – that having one or two songs produced would be a good marketing idea. I had previously worked with a rapper/producer named Chillz Muzik on an intro for my YouTube channel – so I hired him to create our first song. I then created a lyric video with Adobe programs (looking back, it’s a trash video) – and our community responded positively. So I decided to have another one produced by Chillz. This second one is called “Feelin’ Bullish” and is still one of my favorites. (You can find it on YouTube or Spotify) At this time, the music scene was also just starting on Cardano – and I had the song premiered in a Twitter Space called “The Listening Room” which featured crypto focused musicians. The song got great feedback… and before I knew it, other artists were approaching me with songs they had also created about our coin. Alternative artists, techno, kpop, and other rap artists were all producing StripperCoin songs! You can find a listing of our released songs at strippercoin.io/music – we’re still releasing new songs!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I believe there are a few things that contributed to our reputation within the market. The biggest and most obvious is that we were early. Being the first adult-focused token on Cardano, as well as one of the first tokens distributed on DripDropz, this gave us a huge reputation boost. Another part of building our reputation is that the name of our token is entertaining. Soon as most people hear about it, a smile creeps across their face and they are driven to learn more about what we’re doing. Once we’ve entertained them… then we show them we’re serious about building! The next step in building our reputation was hiring 2 Brand Ambassadors that are actual professional strippers. Both of their social media followings are large, and mostly other female entertainers. This gives us a large pool of talent to onboard as we scale our operations, as well as experienced entertainers to help us drive a successful operation. All of these things really added to our reputation of being a serious, OG project within the Cardano Community.

Contact Info:

• Website: strippercoin.io
• Instagram: isntagram.com/strippercoin
• Facebook: facebook.com/stripppercoin
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/strippercoin
• Twitter: twitter.com/strippercoin
• Youtube: youtube.com/@strippercoin