Sam Lawrence, CEO Of Blackbox Republic

SNW INTERVIEW -- Aug 1 -- Sam Lawrence wants to talk about sex-positivity. In mid-July, the former Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software de-cloaked Blackbox Republic, an online community for members of the sex-positive movement. The site already has gathered $1 million in seed funding. We talked with Sam about the appeal of Blackbox Republic, its “social niche-working” application and what being sex positive means to him. – Jenn Rubin

How does Blackbox Republic work?
Blackbox Republic is a membership- based online and real-life community for sex-positive people to share their personal lives. It’s $25 a month and $5 of those community dues go to charity. One way to think about it is if you’re sex-positive, you can either spend money on expensive coffee every month or upgrade your social life and meet other sex-positive people like you.

Right after we announced we got over 3,000 people signed up to be notified and join when it starts. We also received over 500 applications to be founding members. Founding Members help advise our company. We’ll be live sometime in October.

What does it mean to be sex positive?
The co-founder [April Donato] and myself are part of that community. Sex positive means that your sexuality is not an issue. You don’t have an issue with other people’s sexuality. You’re open to what other people are interested in and what their boundaries are, and you’re open with your own.

You can see examples of sex positivity in huge mega-events, like Love Parade, which is in 15 different countries and up to 1.6 million people attend. Other mega-events are Burning Man, Electric Picnic and Afrka . Then, there’s celebrities like Adam Lambert, who was just the runner-up for “American Idol,” and was supported by the millennial generation. Millennials don’t get hung up with whether he was straight or gay.

Why will Blackbox Republic appeal to members of the sex-positive community?
The don’t have a place right now and we are making something just for them. Blackbox Republic is not an open, free social network. Facebook is really kind of the global address book for the world. It’s a perpetual, public, family reunion.That’s not a community. It’s certainly not a place to share your personal life. So, that doesn’t work for this community.

The other option for them are dating, marriage or sex sites which are very focused on paying for the end result. That meat-market approach doesn’t work for people in the sex-positive culture. They’re prefer having a social experience vs focusing on the end result.

What will users be able to do inside Blackbox Republic?
Firstly, it’s a private community. There is a centralized vouch system. Those vouches connect to a reputation system, which makes sure not only people are who they say they are but also makes sure all of your behavior over the long term is accountable.

Number two, you can gift people real and virtual gifts while in the moment in the same way you use iTunes. Gifting is a great social tool to keep people included and connected. And now gifts can show up at member’s doors in a safe way.

The third thing is getting people out from behind their computer and meeting in real life. This is a real-life community that wants to expand their social circles.

The last thing is around event and social planning. Everything from “I’m having a party in my backyard” to a big festival like the ones I named earlier can all be planned and managed inside of this closed, velvet-roped community

Say I’m logging on to BlackboxRepublic.com for the first time. What would happen?  
On sign up, some of your preferences are stored. So, you’ll immediately find other people with similar interests. The second thing that would happen is you’d see only the un-vouched population of content and people. As you participate, people will decide if they’re going to vouch you. That’s when you’ll see the full population.

Tell me about Blackbox Republic’s founding members program.  
April and I have been doing a tour to meet community leaders in person. Hopefully, we’ll hit 50 cities by the end of this year. We’ve been sitting down with people, having conversations with them about what kinds of things they would look for and building trusted relationships with them.

We’ve got over 500 people as “founding members” who want to help get it off the ground. We want to run this much like a co-op, where our advisory board—the board of the company—is made up of a core set of these founding members.

You created a new exchange platform for Blackbox Republic. What sets your platform apart from those used at other social networking sites?  
We built this from scratch, so we could address this particular audience. It’s software that allows you to focus on a particular niche, develop meaningful relationships and then tie things together—privacy, events, mobile, gifting—in a way no other community software platform can do. The gifting aspect of our application is particularly unique.

We refer to it as a “social niche-working” application. You can take that to dog shows to sports to anything you want. It’s software that will end up being readily addressable to other initiatives and other products.

Any plans to license this platform and sell it to other companies?  
It’s certainly something that we’ve had our eye on. We feel if we can score here, then we’ll look at other verticals too and licensing off to other niches.

Blackbox Republic already has $1 million in seed funding. Who are some of your backers?  
They’re silent people who are in the sex-positive community. As far as revenue, we have two primary streams-- membership dues, as well as us taking a slice of the gifting that happens.

How did your past experience, including your work as Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software, help during this start-up process?  
A lot of my experience at Jive Software is applicable here, too. We reached out to work-life audiences, made sure we knew what they needed and built around that. The same thing is true here at Blackbox Republic. Instead of it being about work life, it’s about people’s personal life.

To what extent do you practice a sex-positive lifestyle?
From the perspective of sex not being an issue, I think that love is generated by people being open enough about who they are as people to put all of themselves out on the table. As far as putting all of myself on the table, it’s something that I do every single day.

Do you feel like Blackbox Republic is the culmination of everything you’ve done up to this point in your personal life and your career?  
This is a passion from the heart.

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