Monica McCormick
Twin sisters Anna and Alicia have spent years having the same conversation: about heartbreak, desire, attraction and the patterns we repeat, usually with friends and usually for hours. Born in Poland and raised in Sweden, they spent their careers in marketing, brand building and content, so when they realized how many women wanted the same honest conversations, they built Made Hot, a space for modern intimacy, desire, relationships and self-discovery.
But spread across Instagram, Substack and Patreon, Made Hot felt fragmented. With Movement’s Done For You service, they brought it all into one app with its own rooms, voice and mood, built to be experienced rather than scrolled past.
“We didn’t want people to simply consume Made Hot, we really want them to experience it.”
Can you tell us a bit about yourselves and your background?
Alicia: We’re Anna and Alicia, we’re twin sisters, and we’re the founders of Made Hot. We’re originally from Poland, but we came to Sweden when we were five years old, and that’s where we’ve grown up since then. Now we’re 47.
Our backgrounds are in the creative and digital world: marketing and brand building, content and communication. And the thing is, we’ve always been fascinated with people, with relationships, with attraction, intimacy, human behaviour, all of those things. We spend a lot of time amongst ourselves and with our friends just talking about it. And from that came Made Hot.
“We’ve always been fascinated with people, with relationships, with attraction, intimacy, human behaviour… And from that came Made Hot.”
What is Made Hot and who is it for?
Anna: We made Made Hot into a space for modern intimacy, desire, relationships and self-discovery. We created it primarily for women, because we want them to understand themselves more deeply, not just in the relationships they have, but in their bodies, their sexuality, their emotions and the way they move through the world.
We’re interested in the bigger picture. Not just sex, not just dating, and not just healing, because we feel that everything is connected. So inside Made Hot, we bring together conversations, questions, education, personal stories, and expert perspectives and experiences that invite people to explore themselves without judgment.
And judgment is important. Without judgment, you’re more open to speak, and you feel that you can open up more about the things that have been going on in your life. We wanted it to feel intelligent and beautiful, but also human. And of course a place where you can laugh, because when you laugh, you actually learn more easily. So you learn something, you feel something, and hopefully you recognise a part of yourself that you haven’t paid attention to in a while.
“Inside Made Hot, we bring together conversations, questions, education, personal stories, and expert perspectives and experiences that invite people to explore themselves without judgment.”
Your app says “this started with us”. What’s the story behind Made Hot?
Alicia: It really did start with us: with our conversations, our experiences, but also with the questions we’ve been having for so many years and the things we’ve been trying to understand about ourselves. Heartbreak, desire, relationships, the patterns that we repeat so often, and the things we don’t always know how to ask for.
Somewhere along the way, we realised that so many women are having those exact same conversations. We noticed it within our friend group too. Every time Anna and I initiate a conversation, it turns into hours of conversation.
We didn’t want to create a space that tells women how they should look or feel or love or have sex. We wanted to create a space where they could get really curious about themselves and really explore themselves. Because when the conversations can be honest, and sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes funny, something really beautiful happens. You just open up in a different way.
So yes, it started with us, but it was never meant to be about us. It was about creating a place where other women could recognise themselves too.
“It started with us, but it was never meant to be about us. It was about creating a place where other women could recognise themselves too.”
Why create your own app instead of staying on social media, podcasts or course platforms?
Anna: We realised along the way that Made Hot was becoming something bigger than just content. Social media is amazing for discovery and for inspiration, and we love that side of it. But it’s incredibly fast, almost too fast. You post something meaningful, you put so much time into it, and you hope that someone reads it and connects with it. Then a few seconds later they’re scrolling past it into something completely different. You hope they save it, but you never know, and then they forget it.
So we wanted to create somewhere people could actually stay for a longer while. A space where the different parts of Made Hot could all live together: the conversations, the lessons, intimate audio, dating support, expert voices and, of course, community. Somewhere you can come back to, depending on what’s happening in your life.
We didn’t want people to simply consume Made Hot, we really want them to experience it. That’s the main thing we want to highlight. When you experience content, and not only consume it, something else happens. It sticks.
And having our own app gave us the opportunity to build that experience around the brand, rather than trying to fit the brand into the limitations of other platforms.
“When you experience content, and not only consume it, something else happens. It sticks.”
What were you using before Movement, and what other platforms did you consider?
Alicia: Before Movement, we were building Made Hot on different platforms. We had our website, Instagram, we started Substack, and we started Patreon, although we never really kicked Patreon off. Those were the spaces we had for our content and the community.
It’s good to have those spaces and to show the brand in different places, but it was starting to feel a little bit fragmented. We wanted people to be able to move between different kinds of content without feeling like they were leaving one part of Made Hot and entering something separate on a different platform. We wanted it to feel more immersive.
So when we started looking at solutions, we weren’t only considering features, but also what we could create that actually felt like Made Hot. We really didn’t want a generic course platform with just our logo on it. We wanted it to have a personality, to feel the way we see Made Hot: editorial, intimate, immersive, but easy to navigate.
Anna: When you’re trying to choose the right platform, especially when you’re not a developer yourself, there’s so much information to navigate. What we really appreciated was that Movement wasn’t just telling us why we should choose them. Movement was giving us information that helped us understand the differences, like the comparison with Passion.io on your website. That transparency made an impression on us.
The more we explored, the more we felt Movement offered the flexibility we needed to create something that felt like Made Hot, rather than just reshaping the website into a platform. That was an important part of why we felt confident moving forward with Movement.
“We really didn’t want a generic course platform with just our logo on it. We wanted it to have a personality, to feel the way we see Made Hot: editorial, intimate, immersive, but easy to navigate.”
Why did you choose Movement and the Done For You service? What was working with the team like?
Anna: What appealed to us about Movement was the possibility of creating something that felt like our own world, rather than just a standard membership app. We’ve always felt that Made Hot has a very particular identity, especially the visual language and the tone. The way we want to present our content, everything is intentional. So we knew we weren’t necessarily going to be the easiest clients. It took a long time, because life was life, but we did have a very clear vision.
The first version of the app didn’t feel like us at all. We wanted something darker, more editorial, more sensual. So the Done For You service was really appealing. We’re not very techie, so it was very nice to have people around us who understand the technical side, so we could focus on being creative and bringing that vision to life.
Working with Steve has been very collaborative. We’ve gone back and forth on the details and made revisions, and we’ve also learned a lot along the way. I thought it would be much harder to be in the admin panel doing bits and pieces on your own, but it’s so much fun. I loved it. I was like, I’m going to be an app developer after this.
It was really nice working with Steve. It became a challenge for him to create the app the way we wanted it to look, and he really got it. It was spot on with what I had in my head. It was hard to put into writing how I wanted it to look and feel, but it was like he was inside my head, thinking the same way I was. He really nailed it. From what we understand, our app looks very different from other apps, so it felt so cool to see it come alive. Big, big props to Steve. The app looks beautiful.
“It was hard to put into writing how I wanted it to look and feel, but it was like he was inside my head… He really nailed it.”
What features or aspects of Movement have been most useful?
Alicia: For us, it’s been bringing so many different experiences together, because Made Hot isn’t just one type of content. We have conversations with expert coaches, educational lessons, masterclasses, more intimate, sensual after-dark content, dating support and spaces for the community. It’s been really nice to organize everything into what we call rooms and collections. It still feels cohesive, but you can feel that there’s a different mood in every room.
I also love that we can communicate directly with our members through the chat and the feed, and that we can control how that works, whether we initiate chats or the members can. It’s nice to have that control over how the community works inside the app.
Anna: We’re also introducing private dating and dirty talk micro lessons. I came up with that last minute, because I started dating on Hinge! Someone can book a focus session and have a conversation with Alicia through private chat and voice notes. It’s like you’re going on a date and you’re thinking, what the f*** do I actually say? That’s one of the lessons.
It really brings out the personal connection that’s a big part of where we want Made Hot to go. We know it’s about the community, we can feel that in our bones. Although we have all this written and educational content, it’s going to come down to the community, and I love the way Movement supports that part in the app. We want Made Hot to keep evolving, and the app gives us room to do that.
“It’s been really nice to organize everything into what we call rooms and collections. It still feels cohesive, but you can feel that there’s a different mood in every room.”
How do you want members to feel inside the Made Hot app?
Anna: We’re in the early stages of introducing the app, but what we want people to feel is very clear. We want someone to open the Made Hot app and feel that they’re entering a space where they can be curious without being judged. Where they can have conversations about intimacy, desire and dating, and aren’t treated as something embarrassing or something that needs to be fixed.
We want them to feel seen, understood, maybe challenged sometimes, and hopefully more connected to themselves. What excites us about the app is that we can create a more personal experience than we ever could through a social media feed. That’s the feeling we’re building towards.
“We want them to feel seen, understood, maybe challenged sometimes, and hopefully more connected to themselves.”
What would you tell another creator thinking about building their own app with Movement?
Anna: Be really, really clear about what kind of experience you want to create, because then it’s so much easier to work with Steve and the team. And not just what content you want to put inside the app, but how you want people to feel when they’re there. For me, those are two very different things. For us, it was never just about having a Made Hot app. It was about building that space, those rooms, that feel like an extension of everything we believe in as a brand.
Alicia: And don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if they feel stupid sometimes. I was very clear that I’m not techie and didn’t understand certain things, and [Steve] was very patient. You think it’s going to be overwhelming, but it’s not. If you follow along with what Steve is teaching you and explaining, it’s really not that hard. You just think it’s hard before you start.
It’s been very valuable to have a team help us translate our ideas into something functional. We’re the creatives, not the techie, functional people, so it was nice to have that back and forth with someone who sees what we want to communicate in a different way and can bring it out in the app. Technology should support your vision, but it shouldn’t define it. Steve made that very easy. He was both intuitive and very open to what we wanted.
“Technology should support your vision, but it shouldn’t define it.”
Made Hot is proof that an app doesn’t have to look or feel like a course platform. For educators, coaches and brands working in intimacy, relationships and wellbeing, where tone and trust matter as much as the content, Anna and Alicia built a space that feels as considered as the conversations inside it. As Alicia puts it: “It started with us, but it was never meant to be about us.” Step inside Made Hot and see how they brought their rooms to life.
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