Gonna ramble a bit in this post, just some thoughts i wanted to get out.
This group was started one year ago on a different forum, with me thinking, this Amaha Narumi girl makes some really hot videos but the only way to view them is a terrible reduced quality rencoded video from groups like youiv or if im lucky maybe a its uploaded to a JAV piracy site, I found the spice-tv website where i could get not only the highest quality from the source, but also an extended version of said movies, only probl;em was the price, so i formed a little post on her scanlover thread and asked blindly if a few people were willing to bulk purchase a couple of DVDs with me, we got around 8 people who split the price evenly, In the end geting everything at a greatly reduced price, the success inspired more funds and one after another we quickly cleared Amaha's catalog at the time,
On a high from this very successful method of acquiring content i started my own thread where we funded set after set of spiceTV videos, I eventually cross posted with this forum on this thread, after some time i dropped the model of splitting the price and set fixed amounts to join, this increased the amount of participants, The following year i branched out and looked to buy from different sources, it was Tsukasa Kanzaki's fantia photobooks an infamously difficult site to buy from, i opened up new bank accounts and took new cards just so I could shop there, all the trouble was worth it, tsukasa was the most popular fund so far, being the first time a purchase was overfunded,I took it as an opportunity to expand the operation.
The following month i took on importing for the first time, i proxied up, filled up carts on DMM.com and Oimoya with physical items and have them sent to a storage unit in japan, with five ongoing funds including items from multiple labels, U18 content from skip, rising popular idols like Aoi Fujino, Yui Natsuki, fan favorites like Anju Kozuki and Ai takanashi, I paid the storage company to ship all the items back to me and bought an overpriced bluray reader for my laptop. I started ripping for the first time and although it took some time, I eventually learned the in and outs of bluray decrypting and backup. The combination of the choice of girls and perhaps the prospect of original quality rips brought more people to the group.
It's May, i decide to get daring, I'm now going to import U15 blurays, the amount of funders leaps, the introduction of junior idols expands the group greatly, I experiment with buying IM4K, notoriously difficult to acquire due to its price and restrictive distributor who geoblocks and bans foreigners, the first one was a bit of a failure as i simply funded a girl i was interested in, I ask who do peopler want to see? Sarina, Hinako and Mao, the first time i funded with those three, massively overfunded, the next time i decided to add more sets, 5 IM4Ks this time, overfunded, 8 IM4Ks, Overfunded, 10? smashed, eventually we got to 13 IM4Ks a month, the group is now 100+ people. I'm buying $800 worth of hardrives to keep up with the massive amount of data.
The group now funds all sorts of content, i just add whatever people ask whether i even care for it or not, Paypal realizes that alot of money is moving through this suspicious account and flags it, payment processor is gone, i felt a slight relief, maybe things will scale down? nope, the majority of people easily move to new payment methods, people are trying bitcoin for the first time, the September fund list goes out to 163 people...
It don't mean to alarm anyone with this but I've been kind of stressed out lately, it started out fun but its getting really big and hard to manage alone, for the past few months I haven't enjoyed a single bit of content I've funded, different from the early days, I will rip the stream, scan it, backup the disc, download the files from the sites, after that I'll throw it into cold storage where it is then mass distributed to everyone. I don't wish to be compensated or anything but i do wish i could get some time back, I'm thinking about different options, can i make it into more of a team effort? maybe slow down and reduce the amount of items per month? promising to rip thousands of files from a bunch of sites with no batch downloading tools was really silly wasn't it? Hopefully i can restore my balance before it gets bad, regardless of what happens, thanks to everyone for your patience, cooperation and trust so far.