The mission.
PAY THE DØLLS is a queer marketplace for artists, brands, creatives, divas, and more to buy, sell, list, and promote their work. Real infrastructure for the queer community: keeping the money in our community, supporting other artists, and building it out.
The moat is zero.
In the age of AI, the moat around software is basically zero. Knowledge is free. Anything can be built. Systems of real scale can be stood up now, by people like us. Which means, for the first time, a community that was never handed infrastructure can build its own.
And we need it. We are constantly in a fight for resources. Money. Healthcare. Everything. Protecting the dolls matters, and paying them is how you actually do it. The only way that lasts is a system where financial wealth and well-being compound over time. Not a moment. Not a fundraiser. A system.
Where the money goes.
Think about where our money actually goes. We run a GoFundMe and hand the platform fees to strangers. We buy tickets to our own parties and RA takes a cut, Dice takes a cut, Ticketmaster takes a cut. How much do we spend on going out, on tickets, on merch? And every single time, the fees leave. They go to people who have nothing to do with us.
We are making everyone else rich but ourselves. Why? For what?
That's what PAY THE DØLLS is.
Our own model. Our own systems, where the fees stay in the community, and that money gets invested back into trans artists and creators. A queer marketplace. One shop where everybody goes, so nobody has to figure it out alone, everybody builds together, and you can find a bunch of really cool queer artists doing really cool things.
the culture creates the value. the culture should get paid.
Build the container first.
In Buddhism, you build the container first, so that things can flow in and out of it. That's what this is. PAY THE DØLLS is the vessel. A container our community operates, uses, and leverages, so that money, work, art, and support can flow through it and back to us. You don't get the flow without building the container. So we're building the container.
Five phases. One build.
The mission doesn't stop at the marketplace. This is the gameplan: what we're building now, what's next, and what's further out.
The real why.
Not every doll is in the same situation. So we're building a platform where, whatever a doll is going through, she knows there's funding, there's support, there's a way in. And honestly, wouldn't it be something if there was a company that just hired dolls? Gave them jobs, healthcare, insurance?
That's the company we're building toward. This isn't support. It's power.
Your $5 builds the next phase.
PTD CLUB dues go into Vers Capital, our internal savings account. It hires dolls to build the platform, funds artist grants, and backs orgs that support the trans community. One day we hope it's a real capital fund. Right now it's a savings account, and we're good with that, because it's the truth. Members fund the build; the build serves the community.
that's not a dream. that's a build. next question?