🅾️Origin of Oh

Oh began in April 2024, but the idea was born in February 2022.

At the time, PornHub was dealing with the aftermath recovering from Mastercard and Visa pulling support for payments on the platform and the subsequent take down of ~80% of the content on their site.

Huge stars such as Lana Rhoades and Mia Khalifa were very vocal about their experiences in the industry, slamming the experience of creating the content itself, the unfair amount that she was paid and their desire to have the content taken down, but not being able to do so as they don't own the rights.

We felt that Web3 provided obvious solutions to these issues - crypto payments meant Visa and Mastercard couldn't dictate our destiny and NFTs, on-chain rights and IP and removing humans from the adult content creation process would make it a whole lot more ethical, anway.

At the same time, it was peak JPEG mania and whilst we loved the tech behind NFTs, we didn't really connect with the high profile use cases at the time - JPEGs dropped in 10K collections and traded for crazy prices. We felt that the tech was more suited to being a background way to power verifiability, tradability and interoperability and enshrine IP/rights onto the blockchain.

We therefore began initial R&D into generative 3D models of humans, represented in NFTs, that could plug into a 3D scene generator - essentially allowing people to direct and create their own 3D adult content, using avatars owned by other people, who receive the majority of the revenue spent using them. Some would be avatars representing real creators (who we'd partner with via rev share in exchange for them promoting our platform), some would be original avatars owned by users.

While we were building this, we were coming up against hurdles - namely the cost to build custom life-like avatars of real creators (~$25k), the difficulty of generating lifelike, usable 3D avatars at scale and the difficulty of streaming this heavy content to end-users via browsers.

We had an offer on the table for pre-seed funding of $1m, which we nearly accepted, but in the back of our minds we knew the challenges would require a lot more resource than $1m and we were hesitant to commit to a path we felt like had too small a chance of succeeding.

Fortunately, OpenAI came along and changed the game.

We could now see a world where the same principles of removing humans from the content creation and enabling decentralized ownership remained; but it would be done much cheaper, at much greater scale, in much more accessible mediums for end-users. We also saw the value bringing intelligence and multi-modal interaction to the experience would be and how our characters would have lives that extended far beyond just our platform - becoming their own true digital humans.

We decided to turn down the $1m of funding and go bootstrap mode - locking in, cutting all expenses in our lives and funnelling all of our life's savings (i.e. not much) and income from our other start up into this.

We built quickly, shipped quickly and learned quickly. We hacked together an early concept and began building traction organically. We felt like we had proven the concept and had a very clear vision of where we needed to take this.

That's when we decided to shut down our other start up and decided to go all in and found Oh, under the new vision and structure.

Therefore Oh itself is the perfect balance of old and new - older enough in its conceptual origins that we understand the spaces we operate in deeply and have had time to think far into the future and plot out our path; but young enough that we all still feel wide-eyed and excited to build every day. From when we started Oh in April 2024 to now, the progress has been pretty insane and that's a product of us laying the groundwork before anyone was talking about AI girlfriends, digital twins, or AI agents; then hitting it hard with absolute conviction in what we need to focus on and execute to get to our end goal.

That's the backstory of Oh.