At different times, I have thought of all sorts of business ideas, and one of them was for pornographic shower curtains. Search the internet and I think you'll find there are few, if any, competitors in this space.
I think your market is people looking for gag gifts, frat boys, gay men, and swinger types.
To create this business, you should develop a website and translate it to a few European languages (particularly German), keep it very small and focused on various types of sexy shower curtains, and you could market it a few ways.
Do like Playboy and the other skin mags and send freebies to frat houses. Attend a sex convention or two. And advertise on various porn sites.
For production, you can get these made in China for a few dollars each, and I think you can probably charge 19.99-29.99, depending on the version. I've done research on producing things in China, and I'm thinking you can get them for under $5 each if you buy a thousand of them, and significantly less as you scale.
At the beginning, for shipping, I think you'll want to just have a big stack and do it yourself, but you'll eventually hire someone as you scale up.
I agree that it will be tough to make a good porn site, competing in a saturated market against well-funded players, but I think you could get into the shower curtain business, use the internet for distribution, and carve out a very nice niche for yourself.
If you are worried about it being to risque, keep the curtains erotic and soft core.
Porn is often the first (commercial) industry to take advantage of many new technologies (DVD, the internets, etc), but even then there's probably tons of room to innovate.
For example, I recently saw a porn recommendation engine posted on Reddit that used collaborative filtering and all that fun stuff. AFAIK there aren't many sites out there that do recommendation, even though it seems pretty obvious.
I suppose StumbleUpon would work as a recommendation engine.
http://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/comments/7qz7t/reddit_please_he...
http://www.nakedtube.com/recommend
A little more about it:
NakedTube.com Revolutionizes Adult Video Discovery with Powerful Search and Recommendation Engines http://www.klixxx.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&v...
... lots more innovation to come :)
Ironically, your HN submission on this very topic was killed: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=redman
Maybe requiring a login to use the engine is too large a barrier of entry? We've been planning to offer an "anonymous" engine for non logged in users but don't have it slated until after our UI redesign.
It seems to me that is generally the case on the web. There was some discussion about login requirements as barriers here on HN recently.
You should allow use of the site without a login. Just have them log in if they want to save their preferences. Don't make email required. Why would I want to give my email address to a porn site?
I just recently took the plunge and made a porn site. I'm not ashamed of it, but I feel like it could get socially inconvenient if other people expect me to be ashamed of it. Overall I would prefer not to work in porn than work in porn, but just for social convenience.
FWIW, it's the porn recommendation engine mentioned in a sibling post. It is very NSFW, contains weird porn, etc, but the URL is http://fapseek.com
Meanwhile, while it may not fit the quick-buck model implied here, I suspect there are many untapped opportunities in classy or mainstream pornography or erotica.
Having just read the long and rewarding Playboy interview of Steve Jobs from the mid-80s (currently on the HN homepage), I'm reminded that the world is waiting for a new generations of what might be called respectable pornography.
There's a misnomer if ever I saw one. The only way those 2 words go side by side is the day a porno wins "Best Picture" at the Academy Awards.
I don't disrespect people who work in the porn industry. However, naivety aside, unless you are lucky enough not to have to deal with Protestant America, your'e better off not going down that road.
And the quality of the plastic surgery.
And the quality of the set.
And the hirsuteness of the male "models" (ugh).
but maybe you can use your need for privacy to invent something new for the web. everyday services are getting better and better at finding out more about the consumers visiting their sites.
a lot of people may not be ashamed of their porn, but they may just want to keep it private.
Here's some business advice:
What exactly is your secret sauce that's going to make your site better than (or even halfway as good as ) all of the thousands of competing sites? There's no free way to make money.
Here's some moral advice:
Don't spend your time doing things you're ashamed of.