Sephora's Sextech, NFT Gigs & Unicorns 🌄

Clearly, the above numbers show how much potential the sexual wellness industry holds. But though VCs see the market potential, though they know that sex is big, but the risk kind of outshines it.

The biggest benefit of the sex tech industry is that it’s a recession-proof market. 

Some of the risk associated with sex tech involve being excluded from common payments and social media platforms, or problems of advertising on social media, consumer education and medical expertise in this field. Most payment processors, including PayPal, will not work in the adult category products and most mainstream search engines and social media sites ban adult content ads. 

From exits to retail agreements, pioneer startups are taking huge steps toward destigmatizing sex tech as a whole. But the current scenario looks bleak.

Back in 2017 when five firms - Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Meta - reached a combined $3 trillion in value, it felt staggering that less than a half-dozen companies could be worth so very much. A year later, in mid-2018, the group smashed the $4 trillion mark. And then by 2021, the five companies managed to double their worth to over $8 trillion. 

Unicorns have seen a similar pace of value expansion, According to Crunchbase, last summer the aggregate value of global unicorns had reached the $3 trillion mark, up from $2 trillion the year before. That, by the way, is the result of all those funding rounds last year that seemed to push more and more startups into the $1 billion valuation club. 

But why compare the two numbers?

The startup market once contained a handful of investors and so few startups that it was easy to keep track of well-known founders. But now, the startup game has changed. Nearly 600 companies became unicorns last year according to Crunchbase. And the scale of the dollars involved has grown so large that the collection of billion-dollar startups is challenging the most valuable companies in history.

Meanwhile, the biggest tech companies are taking some lumps thanks to data tracking and antitrust regulations, with Meta in particular shedding value. So one can only wonder if global unicorns combined could some day be worth more than the mega-tech companies lumped together.

The freelance community is in the throes of the NFT bubble. It’s pivoting away from gig work towards making NFT art.

26-year old Argentinian musician Frank used to have gigs on Fiverr with more than 100 five-star reviews, but he never garnered as much attention towards his gigs as he did with an NFT with no reviews. In January 2022, when he first sold NFT services on Fiverr, he made more than $10,000. As a middleman selling artists’ work to NFT enthusiasts, he’s expecting to make $40,000 from NFT design sales in February.

Similarly, Jose Mercado, used to run side gigs including designing notebooks sold on demand on Amazon. But since he joined Fiverr in mid-2021 fulfilling order for new NFTs he has earned $268,000 from NFT collectors. 

NFT collectibles make up the majority of the value of the NFT economy. 

Two in three US-based freelancers have profited from servicing the burgeoning economy around NFTs, according to a survey by Fiverr. Huge numbers of people are buying NFTs as investments. There’s an increase in demand for new projects from artists on Fiverr and competing platforms who are able to produce low-cost, high-quality, quick-churn work.

The number of people listing NFT-related services on Fiverr rose 278% from Q3 to Q4 of 2021; at the same time, the amount those freelancers earned for their NFT services rose 374%.