Welcome to our first introductory post!
When I started Lesflicks I had very different plans to where we are today. Well not exactly, we're doing exactly what I expected we would be doing in 2022... but 18 months early and pre-funding and investment instead of after.
Our aim is to make it easier for you to find and watch lesbian & bisexual films!
My name is Naomi, and I'm a 38 year old lesbian from Kent, UK. I'm the brains behind Lesflicks - the CEO & Founder of an independent lesbian & bisexual streaming platform, events company & website aiming to increase the knowledge of, & access to, lesbian & bisexual films. I'm taking her existing knowledge of the women loving women community & combining this with experiences & passion around film. My extensive collection of lesbian interest films on DVD should tell you how passionate I am, if my wonderful pride-themed rainbow eyeshadow doesn't.
The pandemic has certainly provided challenges - all of our face to face events which were building both a community and important data were shut down overnight and we had to launch the streaming platform fully much earlier than planned. In 2020 I was averaging 110 hours a week, no days off and also holding down my day job that was paying the bills (sadly I wasn't furloughed). Come September Lesflicks was growing, and I could no longer balance both so when I was offered voluntary redundancy I took a leap of faith. I haven't earnt a penny since September 2020 - and as a new limited company and a director, there is zero support available to me. Launching a streaming platform is extremely expensive, and I couldn't have achieved everything we have without the support of an amazing volunteer team.
When I look at how much Lesflicks has achieved in 2 years on a tiny budget, and a lot of love and volunteer hours - I'm super proud. With my team of trusty volunteers, together we've run tonnes of online events to keep the community connected during lockdown. We've taken the streaming platform from less than 20 titles before the lockdown started to over 120 titles in March 2021. We're releasing a new title every week too! Our LBTQ database has gone from around 50 titles to over 300 and we're constantly adding more!
However Lesflicks is still a very new organisation, in the long term we plan to fund lesbian & bisexual productions through a grants fund, and actively help create the titles we know you want to see. We want to engage and talk to you as the audience as we believe if we know what you want, we can make sure that is what gets made! We want to help put you in the room with creators to create meaningful conversations. We have big dreams, but we can't do it alone. We're trying to continue our growth but without investment or funding we are running on a lot of love and fresh air and this means we're growing slower than we'd like. We know not everyone will want to subscribe to another streaming platform, but may still wish to support lesbian & bisexual film - and so we are launching a Coffee account for the community to support us; as well as an online community launching in April 2021! Subscribers to the VOD Platform and our Coffee account will be given first access so support us today and we'll reward you very soon!