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from www.forbes.com – Ah, the porn business.

It seems like such a good idea from the outside.

People having sex, low-barrier of entry for the aspiring producer, and the internet has provided you with the means to distribute it.

If only selling sex movies was so easy. Is the porn business a business like any other? Yes and no.

Here’s what your business can learn from the porn business.

TIP #1: Innovate or die.

Read enough articles about the adult movie industry and you’ll hear one refrain over and over again: Porn led the way in technology.

The truth is, it used to.

When it could have been innovating, the porn industry languished, never figuring the mass distribution and subsequent piracy of their product across the interwebs would saturate the market and hurt the business for everybody.

Your business may be known for innovating, but are you really?

TIP #2: Calculate your risk.

On occasion, I am reminded that the lack of deep reporting on the business behind the porn movies means people misperceive what the porn industry is actually like. They envision office parks in which cubicle-dwellers just so happen to churn out porno.

In fact, the porn industry isn’t quite like that. In reality, the sausage factory is rather messy.

Its existence due to a unicorn of a loophole, employing young, transient workers whose common talent is a willingness to have sex on camera and whose career longevity is perhaps two to five years, producing a lightning rod product that involves complex health issues to manufacture, the adult movie business turns risk management into a risk orgy.

There’s a difference between making bold business decisions and doing stupid shit. Know it.

TIP #3: Know thy consumer.

Another reason porn went from boom to bust: you.

Once upon a time, you had to get in your car and drive to a brick and mortar store to get your sex movies. These days, you can have whatever tickles your peccadillo with a click.

But it wasn’t simply the distribution model that changed. The way we consume porn now has transformed the type of porn we want. What those porn producers who stuck to making X-rated feature-length movies while eight-minute digital clips were getting hit after hit after hit failed to understand is that what technology really transformed was our appetite for porn itself.

If you don’t figure out what your customers want, they’ll find someone who will.