"I had, in effect, a user base eager to buy porn, but no one to sell it to them"
About this Quote
The sentence is also a neat inversion of the startup fantasy. Usually founders claim they created a market people didn’t know they needed. Cohen’s subtext is the opposite: the market was embarrassingly obvious. The problem wasn’t convincing users; it was supply, legitimacy, and logistics - “no one to sell it to them” implies gatekeepers, stigma, payment processors, and the very real risk that the would-be sellers didn’t want to be visible. It’s capitalism with its mask off: not a moral debate, just a mismatch between eager consumers and constrained producers.
Contextually, it taps into the internet’s long, awkward courtship with adult content as a driver of adoption - from early bulletin boards to streaming, from credit cards to privacy tech. Cohen is pointing at a dirty engine powering a clean narrative. Tech loves to talk about “community”; this is community as compulsion, and it works because it’s blunt enough to be funny while still implicating the listener in the demand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Startup |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Cohen, Benjamin. (2026, February 18). I had, in effect, a user base eager to buy porn, but no one to sell it to them. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-had-in-effect-a-user-base-eager-to-buy-porn-but-69866/
Chicago Style
Cohen, Benjamin. "I had, in effect, a user base eager to buy porn, but no one to sell it to them." FixQuotes. February 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-had-in-effect-a-user-base-eager-to-buy-porn-but-69866/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I had, in effect, a user base eager to buy porn, but no one to sell it to them." FixQuotes, 18 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-had-in-effect-a-user-base-eager-to-buy-porn-but-69866/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2026.







