Driving Disruption: Mariah Freya Of Beducated On The Innovative Approaches They Are Taking To Disrupt Their Industry
An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Root with your customers. What they say is where we should be working towards. We are conducting regular customer surveys to filter out what our customers need and in what direction we should be working towards.
In an age where industries evolve at lightning speed, there exists a special breed of C-suite executives who are not just navigating the changes but driving them. These are the pioneers who think outside the box, championing novel strategies that shatter the status quo and set new industry standards. Their approach fosters innovation, spurs growth, and leads to disruptive change that redefines their sectors. In this interview series, we are talking to disruptive C-suite executives to share their experiences, insights, and the secrets behind the innovative approaches they are taking to disrupt their industries. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mariah Freya, CEO and Co-founder of Beducated.
Beducated.com, founded by the German couple Mariah Freya and Phil Steinweber, is the world’s largest online resource for pleasure-based sex education. This revolutionary sexual wellness start-up empowers adults to embrace and discover their sexuality in a safe and inclusive online learning platform. Think of it as the Netflix for your sex life, where you can embark on a journey of self-discovery and unlock the secrets to a more fulfilling and satisfying sexual experience.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about disruption, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
In my early 20’s, sex ranked very low on my priority list. I had experienced sexual assault multiple times, resulting in low libido and painful sex. This brought a lot of challenges in my relationships, which made me look for a way out. After working with many therapists and coaches and visiting workshops worldwide, I realized that there is a lot I can do and that there is no reason to settle for a mediocre sex life.
I am originally a social worker by trait, naturally seeking empowerment tools that help individuals to utilize their full potential. After seeing the positive effects sex education had on my life — gaining sexual energy and fresh inspiration, feeling more confident and grounded in myself — I realized that I have found the one thing others could benefit from, too. Sex Education for Adults.
Back then, the resources for adult sex education were very limited. They were either hard to access, only available offline, very expensive, or needed to be more inclusive. This is how my husband, Philipp Steinweber, and I had the idea to create an online learning platform. A safe place that makes it easy to study from the comfort of your home, with digestible and affordable teachings.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Our mission is to beducate the world and help users elevate their sexual happiness. Everyone deserves inclusive, pleasure-based, and comprehensive sex education wherever we are on our sexual journey, from adolescence to adulthood to older age. We started with a simple course in our old bedroom that showed in 6 modules how to give a vulva massage to yourself or your partner. Today, we have over 100+ online courses in one platform with over 40+ different experts.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
We have four values in our company that I try to align with my everyday leadership style — Sex-positive, Human, Pioneering, and Enthusiastic.
We are a very human company, with over 80% women working on our mission. Whenever someone is not feeling well, we support each other and help each other get back on track. I had one employee telling me how she loves it and that she doesn’t have to be afraid of me (which used to be the case for all her bosses).
We are a very Pioneering company. Every day, we need to think outside the box, as our industry has many policy issues with advertising platforms. This pushes us to get creative and find workarounds to reach a wider audience. The market around sexual wellness is growing, predicted to reach $120bn by 2030. Society is slowly changing its attitude towards sex, but investors are slow to recognize the potential of this industry.
I want to lead with a sex-positive mindset, not that I am constantly talking about sex, but that the topic is visible inside our company, and we have a positive, professional, and non-judgmental attitude towards all forms of consensual sex and intimacy. We, for example, organized a gender language workshop for everyone to get more informed about how we can act more inclusively with our language.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.
The hardest decision we had to make was 2022 when we almost hit rock bottom and had to let go of many great team members. It was a massive challenge for us all to get back on track and build the team’s trust that we can do it. Going through this made us navigate more carefully on what we spend monthly on marketing. The current recession and low investor opportunities made us change how we navigate our business, away from dependencies of funds towards a bootstrapping mindset. This is a sustainable road for us as founders and the team.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. In the context of a business, what exactly is “Disruption”?
Disruption is very close to our company’s value, pioneering, which means we positively impact millions of people’s lives. We constantly challenge the status quo, take risks, and want to put a dent in the universe. I think that you need to get comfortable in the uncomfortable.
How do you perceive the role of ‘disruption’ within your industry, and how have you personally embraced it? Is it a necessity, a strategy, or something else entirely in your view?
Everyone in our industry is naturally a disruptor, as you need to break through the taboo and stigma attached to sexuality constantly. By working in this industry, you must naturally embrace the disruption and pioneering mindset, as there is no big road to follow. You’ve got to make your path as nobody was before you. We explore new projects and strategies through experiences and team events. We organize that twice yearly, as we are a 100% fully remote company.
What lessons have you learned from challenging conventional wisdom, and how have those lessons shaped your leadership style?
I follow many other female leaders who don’t just lead the way other male leaders do, but in their own way, not listening to what other people say about what to say and what to wear as a female leader. This is helping me a lot to find my style.
Disruptive ideas often meet resistance. Could you describe a time when you faced significant pushback for a disruptive idea? How did you navigate the opposition, and what advice would you give to others in a similar situation?
“Sex education is a human right because it impacts not only the health of human beings but also their quality of life (Kumar & Kumar).”
Many big advertising platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok don’t allow us to promote our offer, preventing us from reaching a bigger audience. The Sexual Wellness industry is suffering from these blocks a lot and is kept small for no good reason.
To make sexual education accessible, I’d like to shatter the taboo around sex education. The only way to Democratize and spread this knowledge around the globe is if everybody would treat it as a human right. We’ve lost our Instagram account twice, even though we did follow the guidelines around nudity, but in those ‘family-friendly’ platforms, you aren’t even allowed to say vagina or sex. I’d like to see changes in the policy regulations around advertising and opportunities to spread our work.
What are your “Five Innovative Approaches We Are Using To Disrupt Our Industry”?
1. Root with your customers. What they say is where we should be working towards. We are conducting regular customer surveys to filter out what our customers need and in what direction we should be working towards.
2. Get comfortable with the uncomfortable. We could be experiencing another shadowban or account deletion any day, but not only that, any software or service could decide to stop collaborating with us simply because they changed their policy, and nudity is not allowed. So, we must always be prepared for a change and have open conversations with the software companies we collaborate with.
3. Diversity and variety. Sexuality exists on a broad spectrum of orientations and tastes; that’s why we need to be great at diversity and variety. We collaborate closely with the world’s top experts to deliver unique content.
4. Breaking a taboo requires patience and timing. We could have the best product in the world; if society is not ready to do something about it, we’d be a lost case. Change of society: 85% of US Americans believe masturbation or better self-pleasure is a form of self-care. Nevertheless, we need to constantly educate and be part of that societal change to succeed. This requires patience and a delicate hand at timing.
5. Resilient from Day 1. You can’t just do what other start-ups do; you need to think beyond the box, bootstrapping with a growth hack mindset and having a significant impact with little budget. It’s more painful, but you’ll be more resilient than other start-ups. Especially in times of recession, it is a great skill to have.
Looking back at your career, in what ways has being disruptive defined or redefined your path? What surprises have you encountered along the way?
I’ve always done my own thing in my way. I’ve only worked in a regular job for one year. My travels have been most impactful on my work, which infused my day-to-day work and how I function as a human.
Beyond professional accomplishments, how has embracing disruption affected you on a personal level?
I am in a business and love relationship with my co-founder. This requires everyday creativity to keep things fresh and exciting. Plus, we have young kids, which makes it challenging. But hey, I definitely have the tools available to do something about this, which makes me feel more empowered and confident. Personally, I feel very content with what I do and how I organically wrap my family around the business I built.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I already started one :). But if I do something new, it would be something like finding solutions for climate change.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
Driving Disruption: Mariah Freya Of Beducated On The Innovative Approaches They Are Taking To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.