Each month, industry news media organization XBIZ spotlights the career accomplishments and outstanding contributions of Women in Adult. WIA profiles offer an intimate look at the professional lives of the industry's most influential female executives.
Leah Callon-Butler is a spirited and sharp-witted crypto expert, with an entrepreneurial background in renewables, start-ups and gender equality initiatives that reached as high as the U.N.
Intimate.io goes a step further to introduce an industry-wide reputation system that allows ITM token holders to collect feedback from people and entities that they interact with, and verify personal information such as ID and sexual health records, in order to earn the trust of others and additional rewards.
Book smart and personable, not to mention inventive and ambitious, this Woman of the Month now leads adult-friendly Intimate.io as its co-founder and chief impact officer.
Callon-Butler is especially fascinated by the rise of reputation technologies and payment systems in the burgeoning peer-to-peer market.
The capacity for crypto to foster safer transactions, greater inclusivity and more sex-positive dialogue inspires her to push Intimate.io to the forefront of technology, helping to steer the industry conversation within adult and outside of it as well.
To learn more about the Women in Adult honoree for November, XBIZ got intimate with Callon-Butler for this exclusive interview.
XBIZ: Tell us about your professional background prior to co-founding Intimate.io.
Callon-Butler: I’ve spent my entire career building early-stage startups, taking projects from ideation to monetization.
I delivered a community bulk-buy project that installed $6.5mil worth of solar technologies in regional Australia; I transformed a “scratch and sniff” startup into an international sensory advertising agency (making a series of Sydney bus shelters smell like fresh cut grass for the English Premier League was a definite highlight); I was part of an initiative that saw 30-plus Australian CEOs publicly commit themselves to getting more women into senior leadership roles; and I founded an outsourcing company that connected boot-strapped startups with top-notch sales talent on commission-only terms.
Somewhere along the way, I also managed to pick up a Bachelor of Communications and an MBA. My studies at the University of Technology Sydney opened some life-changing doors, like consulting to the United Nations on equality and empowerment for women.
XBIZ: What led you to get into the crypto business?
Callon-Butler: It was my continued interest in the renewable energy sector that first sparked my fascination with blockchain, when I heard about the technology being used to trade solar power between neighbors.
My imagination went crazy with the application potential for distributed ledger tech and I became obsessed with identifying the ultimate use-case. It wasn’t until I met my future co-founder, Reuben Coppa, that I was introduced to adult — one of the oldest industries in the world, yet it was still largely unregulated, its workers were marginalized and very often, neither supplier nor customer enjoyed adequate rights or protection.
Institutional bias had made it near impossible for entrepreneurs to rely on traditional mechanisms of payment and identification, while many mainstream banks and payment gateways wouldn’t deal with service providers in this space at all … all pain-points that crypto was poised perfectly to solve.
XBIZ: Why have you opted to use Ethereum?
Callon-Butler: ITM is actually blockchain agnostic, meaning it is an ERC-20 token now, but it can be moved to another platform in future, if necessary. Today, Ethereum is adequate to support the functionality that we are on our way to proving, which includes off-chain cryptography and scaling solutions. Ethereum also has superior market penetration. But at this early stage, we are primarily focused on developing our own architecture before selecting the best platform to “plug into.”
XBIZ: Describe your role as “Chief Impact Officer” for Intimate.io and what a typical workday looks like.
Callon-Butler: People often ask about my title. For Intimate.io, achieving impact is ensuring that people have the knowledge, tools and confidence they need to adopt our payments and reputation technologies to improve their own lives, run more profitable businesses — and ultimately — make the world a safer, more inclusive and sex-positive place.
So my role is all about getting our story out there and educating both sides of crypto and adult. Over the past year, I’ve spoken at 30-plus conferences across the world on topics such as “the future of trust” and “moral arbitration in repugnant markets.”
Learning about the adult industry is often an eye-opener for people in blockchain, as they have no idea how difficult it is for us to do basic things like establish banking relationships and process payments. I also deliver “Intro to Crypto” workshops for sex workers and adult business owners, bypassing the b.s. to demonstrate how they can start accepting crypto payments and improve con-version rates to capture a growing new customer segment.
We’ve recently wrapped up a hectic Euro tour, so now I’m back at our Philippines office, enjoying a bit of routine. As we speak, I’m working on the strategy to roll out our first products; collaborating with launch partners to design our upcoming co-marketing campaigns; and planning the events schedule for the U.S. shows in January.
XBIZ: What distinguishes Intimate.io from other cryptocurrencies?
Callon-Butler: Many people in adult are already aware of the general benefits of cryptocurrencies, which include cryptographically secure transactions, low transaction fees, zero chargebacks and enhanced privacy.
Intimate.io goes a step further to introduce an industry-wide reputation system that allows ITM token holders to collect feedback from people and entities that they interact with, and verify personal information such as ID and sexual health records, in order to earn the trust of others and additional rewards.
Other points that differentiate Intimate.io:
• Suitable for every segment of the adult industry including adult content, pleasure products, business services, dating, escorting, education, health services, gaming, events, travel, media and more;
• We have developed genuine, collaborative and synergistic (not “pay for play”) partnerships with the industry;
• Governed by an ethical charter that sets our commitment to achieving positive change and social impact.
XBIZ: Discuss the latest cutting-edge trends in crypto, based on your research and participation in industry trade shows.
Callon-Butler: Crypto volatility is always at the top of my mind, so stablecoins are all the rage right now. Security tokens are popular too, as they offer a way to put assets on the blockchain, but are treated more like traditional investments, than say, decentralized coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I would say, however, that not enough people are focusing on improving UX and UI in crypto, to make it easier and less intimidating for people to start using crypto in their everyday lives. This presents a real opportunity for Intimate.io, as this is what our team is most passionate about: Making crypto more user-friendly for the people who will benefit most (that is, people who have been unfairly profiled and marginalized by existing financial systems).
XBIZ: How does blockchain tech fit into the burgeoning peer-to-peer economy, and what are the main challenges facing the crypto business?
Callon-Butler: We’ve already seen the potential for peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces to reinvent the way we transact, interact and trust the people around us, but to-date, these social spaces are still controlled by centralized bodies such as eBay, Uber, Airbnb and so on. This means you cannot transport your hard-earned personal reputation between different platforms, so your 4.7 stars on Uber means nothing on Airbnb.
However, with blockchain, this is decentralized, allowing you to regain control over your own data. This is important because “reputation” is fast becoming one of our most valuable assets, as it is used to earn the trust of others, and “trust” is the currency of the P2P economy.
I think the biggest hurdles to crypto adoption are still uncertainty, skepticism and misinformation. Intense media hype and price speculation have painted an ugly picture that crypto is just a bubble bound to burst. I was speaking with a lady just this week who said it just felt like Monopoly money to her. I said “just think of it as money that isn’t controlled by banks or governments, so the people who have been exploited or excluded by incumbent financial, judicial and political systems, can start to take some control back for themselves.”
She thanked me and said she’d never heard someone describe it like that. We should be pushing for more conversations like this, to bring people on the journey and help them dream about the possibilities (not just fearing the unknown).
XBIZ: Tell us about your approach to managing the Intimate.io crew to foster teamwork and success.
Callon-Butler: Right now, we are laser-focused on getting our product to market as quickly as possible. With 15 years experience in enterprise software development, our team follows the same methods to build a crypto project as any other project. We have an internal product roadmap that each team is working towards and we break that down into two-week sprints, so the whole team can constantly see progress. We bring design, user experience and QA (testing) into the development sprint to create fully tested working code that is built with the end-user in mind.
In hiring staff, we look for people who share and understand our long-term vision to remove shame and stigma from adult. We treat the industry with utmost respect and sex-positivity is paramount to our company culture. One of our developers recently told us that he joined Intimate.io because he wanted to build blockchain tech, but he had reservations because he thought the adult industry was “dirty.”
But now, having worked with us for over a year, he is proud of our brand and isn’t ashamed to tell his friends and family about his work. He now sees adult as a legitimate and promising industry, represented by hard-working people who deserve recognition and empowerment like anyone else. That, for me, is what it’s all about.
XBIZ: What industry partnerships have proven invaluable in furthering your ambitions?
Callon-Butler: We have a global ecosystem of 40-plus major partners, from whom we have learned so much about the breadth and extent of issues facing adult. We also have some deeply experienced and well-connected advisors.
Early on, Mark Schechter took us under his wing and shared his knowledge, advice and networks to help us get up-to-speed in the North American market. Likewise, when we first came to London some years ago, we received mentorship from sex worker-turned-political candidate, Charlotte Rose, as well as Mark Hassell and Dan Sturgeon, from AdultWork and Paul Raymond Publications respectively, two of the biggest brands in that region.
I am also a member of the Women of Sex Tech, and I am so grateful for their camaraderie, which comes from the shared experience of being female entrepreneurs who have rallied against all the same roadblocks to fund, launch and grow thriving, sustainable businesses in our quest to reimagine the future of sex.
XBIZ: Give us a glimpse of the future for Intimate.io.
Callon-Butler: Our goals for the short-term are pretty straightforward: Provide fair and equal access to payments services for business operators in the adult industry. We do this by making it easy to implement our products on existing platforms, so our partners can provide an additional payment option to their customers. Over the longer term, we will continue to develop the Intimate.io reputation system. This is the real game-changer as it has the power to totally redefine the future of trust for every industry.
For more information on Intimate.io, contact Leah@Intimate.io, follow her on Twitter @leah_cb or @intimatetoken, visit the company on Facebook.com/IntimateToken and connect on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/Company/IntimateToken or LinkedIn.com/in/LeahCallonButler.
