“When we started the company, I was still very scared of my body,” Anna Lee, co-founder and CEO of the sexual wellness company, Lioness Health, told me over Zoom. “I very much was like, ‘I’m never doing interviews.’ I never wanted to say the word vagina, or anything like that. I just want to build this really cool vibrator.”
Eight years later, this former Amazon mechanical design engineer raised in a conservative Korean household is now running a profitable company convincing women to share their most intimate biometric data: their orgasms. She’s built a strong TikTok following by turning her own orgasm charts into viral content after a 30-day challenge to, if I may borrow from Seinfeld, not be master of her domain.
July 31st marks National Orgasm Day. Yes, it’s a thing, widely celebrated across six countries as an offshoot of International Female Orgasm Day, founded in Brazil in 2007. Its purpose is to promote sexual wellness education, reduce stigma around the female orgasm, and raise awareness about the orgasm gap. While 95% of heterosexual men climax during sex, only 65% of heterosexual women do. Thirty-nine percent of women always orgasm when alone versus 6% during partnered encounters. A final statistic shocking to no woman, 60% of women have faked orgasms. Twenty-five percent of men have also, though presumably with less acclaim
Lee immediately saw an entrepreneurial opportunity in launching Lioness, a smart vibrator tracking biometric data during orgasms. “I really thought I could build a better vibrator. How do we have self-driving cars and VR glasses, but our sex toys are literally a motor and battery? It makes no sense there’s so little tech innovation in sex toys.”
Building a company around female pleasure required navigating an industrial landscape where traditional marketing channels are off the table, manufacturing comes with byzantine triangulation, and mentioning the O-word triggers algorithmic censorship. Despite the big O’s physical and mental health benefits, sexual wellness is still one of the most underdeveloped segments in the health economy. The global market for sexual technology products, or sextech, is projected to exceed $48 billion by 2033.
Hearing industry standards for testing vibration intensity from the male founder of a sex toy company sparked Lee’s quiet revolution.
“He told me the industry standard was to put the vibration on your nose and this is what a clitoris feels like!” Lee was aghast. “All those times where if a toy doesn’t work for you, and you’re thinking something’s wrong with me, why am I broken, but it’s really because none of those toys were ever made with women in mind. They’re meant for men to purchase for their significant other when they’re trying to spice up their relationship.”
If the industry was defining “normal” without studying women’s bodies, leaving women to quietly internalize design failures as personal ones, the only plausible solution was to go directly to the source: women’s bodies.
Sextech And Sexual Wellness
Most sexual wellness companies peddle pleasure. Lioness specializes in data. The company operates within the rapidly expanding sextech market, where technology intersects with taboo to fill gaps legacy science conveniently ignores.
“We wanted to take sex toys and make them not sexy, but very nerdy. Make it something that feels like you’re understanding your body better, making you curious about your body. The same way people get obsessed with Fitbits, Oura rings, fitness trackers. Why can’t you be equally empowered about sexual wellness?”
At Amazon, Lee specialized in force sensors embedded in Kindles and tablets, precisely the technological expertise needed to detect pelvic floor muscle movement. If a touchscreen could register the subtle press of a fingertip, why not the contractions of an orgasm? She reverse-engineered this logic and built a sensor durable enough for intimate use while maintaining clinical accuracy.
The Lioness monitors pelvic floor muscle contractions, body temperature, and movement patterns during orgasm, translating arousal into data visualizations via a companion app. Each device is assigned a unique ID connecting to an anonymous data repository, allowing users to track patterns over time.
She had the perfect product, but her go-to-market strategy wasn’t as easy as she’d hoped. Lioness launched into a market where it couldn’t say what it was selling.
Basic DTC and GTM playbooks recommend Facebook and Instagram advertising, Google Ads, and mainstream influencer partnerships. But when Lioness launched in 2014, the term sextech didn’t exist. Sexual wellness products were categorized alongside pornographic content. Meta rejected advertisements outright; YouTube labeled educational content as adult material; payment processors flagged transactions; and even email marketing campaigns were threatened by spam filters.
“January 1st was probably the first time we were able to truly run ads for Meta,” Lee shared. “This is the first time we’re actually experiencing being able to do the traditional method of paid marketing. Before then, we were doing pretty out there things to get the word out, doing everything but paid marketing.”
Those “out there things” included scientific exhibitionism of the most intimate variety. During the pandemic, Lee launched a TikTok channel where she displayed her own orgasm charts. “I wasn’t even showing the vibrator. I was like, this is what data looks like in terms of my orgasms. If I drink coffee, this is what it looks like.” Her candor earned her 450,000 followers.
Lee then escalated her commitment to empirical transparency by self pleasuring daily for 30 consecutive days, documenting the physiological variations, and posting analysis on Reddit’s DataIsBeautiful subreddit. The posts went viral.
“There were days that was very stressful, because when you’re forced to masturbate for 30 days, it is way more difficult than wanting to masturbate for 30 days,” Lee recalled. “There’s days you’re like, ‘Oh man, I don’t even feel like it.’ But you’re just doing it because you’re keeping your streak up.”
While Lee charted her climaxes, her team churned out three to four educational articles a week, positioning Lioness as a sexual wellness thought leader while skirting the “sex toy” label entirely. Lee spoke on every panel she could find, joined every discussion, and chased every earned media opportunity available.
By the time Meta finally sanctioned Lioness advertisements in January 2025, coinciding with broader policy shifts surrounding the 2024 elections, the platform had become virtually pointless. Her organic strategy outpaced paid acquisition. Users acquired through content and word-of-mouth showed higher engagement and stronger lifetime value than any gained from those intrusive paid feed interruptions.
Lee initially approached the product with an engineer’s logic, but the emotional impact on customers caught her by surprise. Many buyers didn’t just see Lioness as a tool. They saw it instead as a form of agency, a way to reclaim knowledge long ignored, outsourced, or medicalized beyond recognition.
“There was a researcher that did a study with the Lioness users on what this data means to them, why people buy the Lioness,” Lee said. “Most, almost a huge percentage of people were like, ‘this data helps me and helps other people learn about their body.’ They felt this pursuit. They’re pioneers in sexual health, helping contribute to the science of sexual wellness, getting more research out there, helping other women understand their bodies better by also contributing their data to science.”
Lioness’s Sexual Wellness Lab
Dr. Dee Hartmann, PT, DPT, spent 27 years running a physical therapy clinic in suburban Chicago, specializing in treating chronic vulvar pain, an anatomical mystery patriarchal medicine dismisses. Since shifting her focus to research and education in 2017, she’s become a global speaker, author, and co-founder of both The Pleasure Movement and the Center for Genital Health and Education.
“I’ve spent my life in women’s pelvises,” Hartmann candidly told me over Zoom. “And I’m very fascinated by what happens from a functional perspective. Physical therapists try to treat the cause of a problem rather than medication which treats the symptoms.”
Her preliminary research with Lioness’s real-time biometric data showed orgasmic contractions generate statistically greater force than voluntary pelvic floor muscle contractions.
“We possess negligible understanding in the medical literature regarding what constitutes a female orgasm,” Hartmann continued. “Female sexual arousal was determined in laboratories with college students supine on tables with temperature and moisture gauges positioned internally. The clitoris received no consideration whatsoever.”
Lioness users, meanwhile, have established an unconventional relationship with the company, anonymously contributing their data while enjoying the well-documented benefits of orgasm (better sleep, lower stress, improved immunity). Those who opt in further can share their device ID with researchers, who can then access physiological data from Lioness’s mainframe.
For Hartmann, the possibilities are finally catching up to questions she’s asked her whole career. She dreams of studying cultural differences in physiological arousal, comparing, for instance, orgasm signatures from women in sexually repressive environments versus those in more liberal societies. And now, for the first time, she has a tool that could make those studies possible.
“My thesis is, I want to know the impact and the functionality of pelvic floor muscles and clitoral stimulation, and how it contributes to arousal and orgasm.”
She pointed to one Lioness user showing dramatic variations between a 16-minute midnight session and a five-minute morning quickie. “The studies we could do with this are just endless!” Hartmann enthused.
Over in the Czech Republic, Dr. James Pfaus has also been working with Lioness in his research. Pfaus is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Charles University Prague and Director of Research Division, Center for Sexual Health and Intervention at the Czech National Institute of Mental Health.
“The Lioness, I think, is truly detecting pelvic floor movements, which is the motor part of your orgasm,” Pfaus enlightened me during our Zoom call. Pfaus has already used the Lioness to develop new theories around women’s sexual wellness. His analysis of 52 women across multiple sessions introduced three distinct orgasmic signatures:
- The Wave: Rhythmic surges in women with moderate pelvic floor tension.
- The Avalanche: High tension followed by a rapid release, like an “orgasmic earthquake.”
- The Volcano: Intense peaks from women with low baseline tension; these are dramatic, unmistakable, and visually explosive on Lioness’s graphs.
These signatures now inform broader theories about sexual response, reshaping how female pleasure is understood both in labs and bedrooms.
“It’s very hard to get funding to study orgasms,” Pfaus lamented. “Nobody wants to put money into understanding orgasm or orgasm problems because it’s like, well, we have other things to study. There’s cancer.”
In the interim, Lioness is helping researchers like Hartmann and Pfaus bypass academic bureaucracy to continue their research until funding gatekeepers start realizing the $48 billion potential of this work.
Takeaways for CMOs Navigating the Taboo Sexual Wellness Industry
When traditional digital marketing channels shut the door to Lee’s ambitions, she created a window and strategically used her $1.2 million fundraise to launch Lioness. Unable to buy attention with advertising, she earned it instead through thought leadership backed by scientific credibility. Bootstrapping led to disciplined spending and creative problem-solving – such as her sharing very personal data very publicly, winning over Gen Z in the process, and their passion for audacity in sexual wellness education.
For CMOs navigating restricted markets or taboo categories, here’s how to copy her blueprint:
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Lead With Credibility
Medical advisors, academic partners, and published data lend legitimacy in spaces where ads alone can’t build trust.
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Educate Before You Sell
When promotion is blocked, education is the best acquisition funnel. Using informative content marketing, position your brand as the smartest voice in the room.
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Make Restrictions Differentiators
Unable to advertise on traditional DTC channels, Lee had to be creative. And in doing so, avoided the fate of companies who didn’t know how to reinvent the standard playbook.
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Create Collaborators
Data-sharing turned customers into research partners. This dynamic deepened user engagement for women happy to join Lee’s quiet revolution.
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Anticipate Geographic Roadblocks
Whether it’s manufacturing, shipping, or regulatory red tape, taboo categories are landmines. Build flexible supply chains and adopt a long-game mentality for market entry.
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Embrace Radical Transparency
Lee’s public data sharing was a massive ROI-delivering authenticity play that only required she shed her modesty. Take note: vulnerability often wins trust faster than polish.
“As someone that was so scared of her own body growing up, the one way I found comfort in understanding my body was through science,” Lee confessed. “There’s a big mission drive for people purchasing the Lioness beyond just being like, ‘Hey, this is a really cool vibrator.’ They also feel that really big passion of what we have is to change the mission around sexual health and research.”
Lee’s arc from anatomy-phobic engineer to orgasm-data sexual wellness influencer is how taboo markets reward orthogonal thinking. In building a vibrator cum research device, she reengineered the narrative around female pleasure and redefined for women the passionate pursuit of luxury as the ability to own both their power and their pleasure.