In 2021, Grant McNaughton, then 24, was living the life that business grads like him dream of: working for a consulting firm on Toronto’s Bay Street (Canada’s financial hub). But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and McNaughton was forced to work from home, he soon became disillusioned with working for big corporations.

“It was a lot of grunt work,” he says. He realized that he wanted to be his own boss. Facing another unforgiving Canadian winter in lockdown, McNaughton quit his job and moved to Australia as an independent consultant. While there, a man on Grindr asked if he could record their hookup for his OnlyFans.

Intrigued, McNaughton agreed, on the condition that he could wear a mask. He didn’t get a cut of the revenue from the recording, but it sparked an analytical instinct he had cultivated through years of business classes. “It turned me on, and I was like, ‘I actually think I can make this look better and can make it a bit more fun.”

Soon after, McNaughton launched his OnlyFans persona—still masked but turning it from an identity-protecting precaution to one of kink. The Aussie creator who first filmed with him added McNaughton to a WhatsApp group chat of local gay creators, sharing advice and scheduling collaborations—a warm induction to the community which, McNaughton says, helped him grow his account. At his peak, he was earning over a thousand dollars a month off OnlyFans. But with the money came a lot of questions.

“I began to think a lot about the economics of OnlyFans. Like, who owns content? Who, besides me, is making money off this content? If you have three cameras set up, and one of them is mine, is that my content or yours? How long can content be exclusive?”

McNaughton knew OnlyFans couldn’t be his long-term career. “As someone who, for lack of a better term, is a twinky commodity, I’ll age out,” he says. Instead, in hopes of continuing to develop his entrepreneurial skills, he left Australia for California to pursue a master’s degree in business at Stanford University. As he did, he deleted his OnlyFans to avoid judgment in a new city by future friends or schoolmates.

Though his creator days were limited to that year of posting in Australia, McNaughton couldn’t shake his fascination with the commercial aspects of the platform. In 2024, he enrolled in an independent study course at Stanford. His study’s focus: OnlyFans. After messaging more than 4,000 OnlyFans performers on platforms like X, he found a healthy sample of more than 200 mostly gay male performers, though not exclusively. From their responses, he learned a few key insights about the platform.

First, he learned that the average creator earnings from the pool he surveyed was only $150 a month. “It’s a really tough industry, and when we talk about people even in the top 1 percent of porn stars on OnlyFans, they are not making enough to pay their rent. It’s like the top 10th of a percent that actually are.”

Another key learning was just how hard it was to maintain a paying following. The average “churn” rate, meaning the number of people who pay once and then leave, was 40 percent—compared to the industry average for subscription-based platforms, which was closer to 5 percent. “Creators are replacing their entire audience every two and a half months—that is mind boggling,” he says.

McNaughton also learned that creators only spend about 5 percent of their working hours in front of the camera. The rest is spent on editing, managing messages, accounting and promotion. Even with AI programs that respond to messages for you—which are becoming increasingly popular—the effort is very disproportionate to the returns for the vast majority of creators.

He then had the thought every entrepreneur does: There has to be a better way. After hiring a team of developers, he built Quickie—a platform he describes as “OnlyFans meets TikTok” where users flip through content on a home page rather than going to a specific account. The more they linger on one video, the more videos of that type the platform will show them. Users pay a single fee to access this feed, and creators are paid per view rather than directly by subscribers.

The platform is still small—only about 200 creators, compared to the millions on more prominent sites. But the growth has been exciting for McNaughton. He now employs 10 people, and has earned the trust of creators and investors alike.

@xtramagazine A Toronto man is set to be the first Canadian to be cured of HIV following a stem cell transplant. The 62-year-old patient was diagnosed with HIV in 1999 and was not expected to survive longer than six months as he was also battling a rare and aggressive cancer—Stage 4 Burkitt lymphoma—which had spread to his brain and lymph nodes. The patient’s diagnosis came at the time of the introduction of antiretroviral therapy, also known as ART, which can stop HIV from reproducing and extend the average life expectancies for patients to a near normal length. But HIV patients by and large have to be on ART for the rest of their lives. The genetic material of HIV can be buried into the immune system’s memory cells, allowing for the virus to hide and resurge once a patient comes off of the treatment. The Toronto patient had been taking ART to suppress virus levels since his initial diagnosis. But in 2021, he received a stem cell transplant for his cancer that acted as a “double cure” because it contained a rare genetic mutation resistant to HIV: CCR5-delta32. Four years after the Toronto patient’s stem cell transplant, he was able to stop taking ART in July 2025 and is now in sustained remission with undetectable levels of HIV as of April 2026. If he remains at that level for 20 months, he will join a group of 10 people across the globe considered to be cured of HIV. Learn more from @script.health Managing Editor Ziya Jones. #lgbtqnews #lgbthealth #hivawareness #queerhealth ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

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His founder experience hasn’t been without challenges, though. It took him over a year to secure a firm to process payments as more and more are choosing not to partner with adult content. Coming out as a former creator has also come with difficult conversations, including with his rural Canadian parents.

“They are hard-working people from farm families in Saskatchewan—I don’t think my parents had met a gay person until me,” says McNaughton. Though his family moved to the more progressive city of Calgary, Alberta, they remained conservative. Coming out as gay was one thing, but coming out as a former adult performer was another, he says.

To ease them into it, McNaughton emphasized the scale of platforms like OnlyFans, and articulated his desire to help people through his business. Still, his parents were concerned—especially about his future job prospects. “I was like, ‘I promise you, Mom—I can make this work.’”

As for potential investors, many rejected him outright. One replied to a request for a meeting with a brief and harsh note, “Starting this company will likely be the biggest regret of your life.” McNaughton printed the email and has it framed in his apartment as motivation.

In one particularly grievous case, an investor expected sexual access in return for funding. “I said no to his cheque, which felt really good, and it was at a time I could really have used that cheque.”

Yet McNaughton is undaunted. Despite the rejections, he knows there is potential here, not only for him and his business but for creators as well. Creators whom, through his own experiences on OnlyFans and his research, he’s grown close with and has heard stories of why producing adult content is right for them.

For example, there are those who reclaim a sense of financial or sexual autonomy through amateur porn. There are disabled creators who couldn’t otherwise find consistent, self-scheduled work. And there are those whose bodies would typically be rejected by mainstream porn studios, but find dedicated audiences on such sites.

“I want to do something that helps these performers make more money while spending less time doing it, instead of it just going in the hands of really wealthy men who are in the shadows.”