From consulting to vibrators
The business of sex with the founder of MysteryVibe
Hello!
Happy new year (I promise this is the last time I’m saying this this year). It’s good to be back.
A huge thank you for all the support last year — I’m just really grateful that I get to share this space with you. Here are 2023’s most read pieces:
2024 is an exciting time for Brown Bodies. We’ve already got some exciting guests, writers and events lined up for this year. So let’s get to it. This first interview is a collision of my two worlds — tech startups and sex.
Soumyadip Rakshit is the founder of MysteryVibe, the company behind the first vibrator I ever owned! It was packaged as ‘luxury’ so it didn’t feel as icky or as embarrassing to young me as the ones I saw in the windows around Soho. The company describes itself as over the counter urogynaecology devices that exist to address one of people’s biggest personal challenges — keeping the ‘mystery’ in the bedroom, especially after major life events like childbirth, menopause, cancer treatment or surgery.
It took us a while to actually get this interview in! The first time Soumyadip and I chat, we have a quick intro call and I meet his cute 5 year old who is home from school and ready for play time. The second time, Southeastern trains decide that making a good first impression is not on my agenda — I’m an hour late and Soum, very kindly, waits for me outside the station. It’s a freezing cold sunny day, my favourite kind of London day. Soum’s too, apparently: neither of us want to honour our plan of sitting inside and having lunch when there are rays to catch. As he drags my suitcase on our little hike through The Green Park, St James’ Park, across Westminster Bridge and down the Southbank, we chit chat about life, family, London, how we’d be way richer if we’d followed a corporate career… At the end of our hour together, I jokingly say, ‘Well, we’ll have to find another time for our interview.’ To which he replies, ‘Oh yes! That’s why we were meeting!’
Who were you before MysteryVibe?
I grew up in Calcutta and moved to Bath — the most beautiful city in the world! — for university. I studied iris recognition for my PhD and ended up working for an iris biometrics identification company that my professor ran — you may have used our tech at airports or crossing borders. It made me want to learn more about business — I realised after I finished my postdoc that I didn’t know a lot of basic work stuff like project or people management. So I joined Deloitte — it has a great training programme — where I spent seven years in consulting and did a lot of work in the public sector.
Consulting to vibrators. How did that happen?
After a while, I knew it was time to get back to my love of biomedical research. I wanted to work with the old team from the biometrics company (which sold in 2009). We brainstormed ideas and we kept coming back to major life events that impacted people’s intimate lives like having children, period and prostate pain, cancer and surgery. These topics weren’t in the mainstream — not like today where King Charles’ enlarged prostate surgery is being reported (and rightly so) about by the press. I mean, sextech wasn’t even a term! We decided we were going to research and build solutions in that space.
I knew that meant not going back to university as what you can research is directly linked to what you can get funding for. I would have had to focus on the area that funding was available — if there wasn’t funding for exactly what we wanted to do, then we wouldn't be able to do it. So, we decided to start something small and use our own money to get us to the next step where we’d be fundable. It gave us flexibility to be researchers, to build our own lab and to do the stuff that we love without constraints. We worked alongside leading specialists in urogynaecology to understand the work they do and how some of that could be translated to hardware devices.
As you say, sextech was a nascent space. How did you convince people to work with you, invest in you and, ultimately, buy your products?
I would talk to them about their life. I would ask, ‘Do you suffer from period pains or do you know someone who does?’ If their answer was yes, I’d ask them how they managed it. They’d maybe reply with, ‘Oh, you know, I pop some painkillers or use a heat pad or just generally suffer.’ This is where I’d come in and pitch, ‘Well, what if we could create a very simple solution that would be helpful at alleviating that pain?’ That deep empathy gave us our target customer. It’s also what convinced angels to invest in us too — we’re 100% funded by angels.
It isn’t just about periods. Whether it’s parents after having kids, post menopause, prostate related issues, erection issues or vaginal dryness, understanding that everyone is impacted by urogynae issues means people can relate to what we’re trying to do.
The sexual health space struggles to attract investment, yet in 2021, the global sexual wellness market was valued at $80bn and is predicted to hit $120bn by 2030. What’s going on?
There are multiple reasons:
Hardware. Hardware, in general, is difficult to raise money for. It’s expensive and takes a long time to get to market — an investor might wait a long time to see any financial returns. There are hardware specific investors who understand the play but, add on sexual health too, and that shrinks the investor pool.
Lack of success stories. There haven’t been any major exit stories in this space, yet. Investors want lots of different data points that show potential for their bet to work out. It's a chicken and egg situation: if they don't invest, the chances of a good exit are low. Once it does happen though, investors will throw money at the industry.
Taboo. Some funds have rules about what they can and can’t invest in. These can include things like tobacco, gambling, porn, firearms…and sextech.
How did your family take your career change?
My parents definitely didn’t want me to leave consulting to start my own business, full stop!
I think the general view of a South Asian family is being risk averse and prioritising safety. For good reason. Our communities have had to survive. I think it’s also the reason we are now seeing so many South Asian CEOs at big corporates: they’re excellent at being sensible and managing risk carefully, which is what you have to do at the top.
Growing up, academia was everything. How can I learn more? I did my PhD and postdoc for the love of the subject and access to knowledge, not for the letters before or after my name. I grew up with the mantra ‘knowledge is wealth’ and I still carry that belief with me today.
Say more?
We’re going to live a long time. Our kids are probably going to live even longer. My view is there’s hurry to finish studying quickly and get a job at 21. There’s time to explore the depths of a subject rather than just gaining a superficial understanding.
We need to be thinking about what we really love and go really deep. With the rise of AI, especially when our kids enter the job market, the superficial stuff won’t be needed. If you can’t go deep, you might not have a job. I think we need to learn a lot, do stuff slowly and carefully work our way up, contrary to a lot of popular tech platitudes.
You know a lot about sexual health and women's health, how has that impacted your married life?
Oh, a lot. A lot of the work we do is creating conversation starting pieces. We’ve written thousands of pieces of content over the last 10 years where we’ve translated research into actionable and easy to understand information and lessons. We’ve even covered things like setting the scene, music, smell, touch and temperature. So I learn as we research and, of course, try things myself.
I get to work with so many amazing practitioners and doctors. I go to every urology gynaecology and pelvic floor therapy conference I can and absorb so much information that helps the company and my understanding in my personal life. I’ve learnt, for example, about the importance of prostate exams from the age of 40, vaginal dryness and the changes experienced after childbirth. It’s so important for us to understand more about ourselves and our partners in order to have more fulfilling relationships.
So what’s next for you and MysteryVibe?
We’ve been doing this work for over a decade and it’s time to repay investors in some way. Fundamentally though, we are going to keep doing research and we’re going to keep building in this space. We’ve seen so many of our peers die over the last year through the tough economic downturn but the need for sexual health providers and companies building in this space is higher than ever. So, hopefully, we’ll see more players, more investors, more talent coming into this space, more mergers and acquisitions and more exits in general.
You can find Soum on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this type of interview as I’d love to write more about the Business of Sex if you think it’s interesting! Let me know :)
See you next week to chat about setting erotic goals!