How I Quit Porn as an Anti-Porn Startup Founder

My name is Ricardo. I'm the founder of X Reset.

This is a build-in-public post. I want to explain the why behind this site, and tell my story, because I lived this problem for years before I built a solution around it.

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Raised on the internet

I grew up in a small city in Brazil. I got online as a kid in the early 2000s, and I've been deep in the internet ever since.

I explored every corner of it: forums, messaging, online games, social networks. I was kind of everywhere. Most of it was useful. But somewhere in the middle was porn.

It wasn't a problem at first. It became one later.

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Early adopter, then early quitter

I taught myself to code, and started out as a freelancer building simple websites. From there my career grew. I worked in person in Silicon Valley, ran my own ecommerce store, and got deep experience with payments and open-source software at a large corporation.

I always carried a stressed-out head. And I'd take the edge off the way a lot of guys do: a few tabs, late at night. It's embarrassing to admit. But that detail matters later.

Here's what living deep inside tech did to me: I became an early adopter of everything. For about fifteen years, I was that guy.

And when you go deep enough into how things are actually made on the internet, something flips. You start to see how social networks design their notifications and buttons to manufacture urgency and hold your attention as long as possible (ever watch The Social Dilemma?). The early adopter becomes an early quitter.

First television. I still watch some, but now I see the content machine running behind every channel. Then social media. I quit that too.

There was one thing I couldn't quit, though. And it was the hardest of all. Porn.

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The one thing I couldn't quit

This one felt impossible. I felt bad about it, and I didn't even know why I kept coming back.

The truth was simple. It was never about sex. It was about new.

Something new always feels like more. There's even a name for it: the Coolidge effect. The next new clip pulls harder than the last one.

And online, new never runs out. There's always one more tab. Always one more click.

The worst part was not knowing. I never knew if the next video would be the good one. So I kept clicking.

This pull hits men even harder. The average guy doesn't open one tab and leave. A normal visit to a big porn site runs several pages deep. Nobody goes there for a single video.

Then it would end. The good feeling would crash. And I was left feeling ashamed. That shame is what kept me stuck.

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Willpower with extra steps

I went deep on this. I even ran my own DNS blocker that cut the sites off across every device.

It worked, but only while it was turned on. So it still came down to willpower. On a bad night, I would just turn it off myself.

Then something clicked.

The body has natural stop signs. Eat enough, and the hunger goes away. Those signs keep us safe with real things.

The internet is different. It shows fake copies of real things, for free. The fake copies never trip the stop sign. So nothing ever says stop.

We carry more in our pockets today than our great-grandparents saw in a whole life. A guy with a phone can reach more of this than any king with a harem ever could. We were never built for that.

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The accident that became the idea

All this time, I kept building little systems for myself to fight the habit. The DNS blocker was just one of them. And it was while tinkering with those that I stumbled onto the thing that actually worked, completely by accident.

When I had to pay for porn, the urge went away. Paying broke the spell.

But if I was paying, who would I pay? That question became the product.

Around that time I came across ideas like stickK and x402.org: people already putting real money behind a promise, and money that moves natively across the web. That's where I derived the shape of X Reset.

The idea is simple. I put a little of my own money on the line. Stay clean, it costs nothing. Slip, and a small daily charge kicks in. No willpower fight at midnight. The part of me that hates losing money does the work.

Then it went one step further. I started routing my own relapse charges into marketing, using that money to put X Reset in front of other men stuck in the same loop. Every slip I have now pays to reach the next guy. That's the turn that made it more than a personal hack: the model funds its own reach, so it can keep helping people instead of depending on me alone.

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Why it's a .org

X Reset is a .org on purpose. It isn't a blocker, and it isn't here to sell you a subscription to willpower. It's about the wellness waiting on the other side of the compulsive thought: a real path to reduce first, and then to quit.

And here's the honest, build-in-public part: this only works with people in it. Accountability hits harder when you're not the only one showing up. The more of us who use it, the better it gets for every single one of us.

So if you've felt this loop (the extra tab, the spike, the quiet shame after), hear me on this: you're not weak. You're fighting a system built to beat you. I built the thing I wish I'd had when willpower wasn't enough. Come use it, and help make it work for the next person too.