How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html

by bd • 18 years ago

87 36 18 years ago

inc.com

bd2• 18 years ago

See also accompanying video from the photo shoot:

http://www.inc.com/inctv/2009/01/oh-shoot-markus-frind.html

agrinshtein• 18 years ago

That's quite an amazing feat that he accomplished. The message rings true. Find something people need, and provide it.

Tichy4• 18 years ago

Now where have I heard that story before? Only mabye about a million times? Hopefully with this submission the last three people on the planet who didn't know it yet have been "filled in", so that we can turn to other things.

The funny thing is that this "story" is probably the single most effective marketing factor for plentyoffish. Nobody would have heard about it if it wasn't for the story...

simonk• 18 years ago

Yes its all this story, because the millions of dollars he made before any of the stories came from nowhere.

Tichy4• 18 years ago

Not saying that pof is stupid or doing anything wrong. Obviously he did a great job at being successful. Just tiring of the story.

whatusername• 18 years ago

really? I would guess that his target market aren't the ones reading stories on HN.sure - the SEO helps.... but i'm not sure too many people follow the links.

Tichy4• 18 years ago

The story didn't appear on HN, but I suppose it appeared on every other online magazine available on the web.

inerte• 18 years ago

A million times, yes, but this in particular is the best I've read. Wish I could go and retroactively delete the past ones :)

Tichy4• 18 years ago

Fair enough. I guess it was just the "hint: he only works one hour a day" that ticked me off...

bd2• 18 years ago

It is interesting because of the context.

Yes, we already heard the story long time ago, when his AdSense checks were making rounds the web.

And at that time, you would think: that's it, guy was lucky/clever, his money problems are solved, let's move on.

But meanwhile, he still kept going on and up.

When I first read about PoF, it was somewhere among the top Canadian dating sites, though not even the most popular one. Now, only a couple of years later, it became no. 1 in US.

He successfully made transition from "internet famous" to being on the cover page of well-known business magazine. He uses publicity gained at one level to propel him onto another one.

That, and also, as inerte mentioned, it was really well done story. It showed Markus from another angle.

Sorry for the "hint...", it was their original title.

physcab• 18 years ago

Ok Ok. So many people bashing this guy. What I want to know is...how he does it himself. Of all the stories I've read, none have given me THE answer. Do any of you have a clue? "Writing efficient code" as the article states isn't exactly a helper.

johnrob• 18 years ago

It sounds like one of the more overlooked parts of that story is his use of SEO (From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000). 10K is enough to cross the chicken-egg chasm, which is probably a make or break for this kind of site.

I wonder how hard it would be to do something similar today using SEO.

greatreorx• 18 years ago

I don't see how anyone can read this blog post by Markus from 2006 about faking site traffic rankings and not think his current traffic stats are severely manipulated.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/competitive-int...

I'm not saying I don't respect what Markus has done. I just don't think his stats are anything near what is reported.

BvS• 18 years ago

Isn't that post about how he tried to prohibit people with the alexa toolbar etc. to enter his site? This would actually decrease the number of pageviews these services would show for pof. I wouldn't consider this an argument not to believe his own numbers by now.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

Maybe, but the money appears to be very real.

tdavis3• 18 years ago

For an apparently really smart guy with all the time and money in the world, he doesn't seem to do much of... anything.

Congratulations, you created a pedestrian website which makes gobs of money and requires 10 minutes per day of "work" to keep the current iteration running.

Now, do something interesting. Because, I'm sorry, but Plenty of Fish isn't.

brandnewlow2• 18 years ago

That's kind of the charm of it though, right?

The guy's loaded, has all this time and opportunity...and he's just idling along with his very cute girlfriend and her (extremely attractive if we are to believe the video) friends.

I know there are a lot of people on here who'd use his time and opportunities to go wipe out malaria, write an epic novel and start a seed funding program for startups that adhere to his approach.

But being the way he is got him to where he's at. Maybe if he was the type who had grand visions left and right, he'd have screwed up plenty of fish long ago.

pietro• 18 years ago

Who cares? That's your agenda, not his. To each his own.

tdavis3• 18 years ago

I'm not judging his life; he's free to do whatever he wants. It has absolutely no affect on me whatsoever. I'm arguing the newsworthiness of the article chronicling his success with Plenty of Fish. To me, the story reads as "lazy guy who knows nothing about dating sites gets lucky and creates a dating site that makes gobs of money; proceeds to do nothing notable with life."

And hey, whatever, that's great. If the guy is happy with his life, there's not much more than that. My point was, "I'm not impressed." Given how many articles have been written on the PoF "success story", it seems like a lot of people think I should be.

trapper2• 18 years ago

Not everyone can do something as interesting as selling tickets :)

Seriously though, what would you do after you finish your hard slog?

brandnewlow2• 18 years ago

That's not fair. I completely see his point. As I was reading this, I also realized that this guy's kind of an empty void. And that bugged me at first. But those same qualities probably helped him out a good bit.

tdavis3• 18 years ago

The story of my life would go something like, "For the first 24 years, Tom did nothing of particular note. Then he moved to Boston and co-founded a web start-up. We're still not sure if this is noteworthy either." Care to imagine why there haven't been dozens of articles written on me? ;)

What would I do? Travel a lot. Keep learning new things every day. Work on many Open Source projects. Maybe slow down long enough to go on a date for the first time in a couple years. Whatever it is, the story probably won't be worth a 5 page article in Inc. Sort of like this one.

h34t• 18 years ago

"Frind estimates, based on exit surveys, that the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year."

Personally, I find impact on human lives of that scale rather interesting.

ahoyhere• 18 years ago

If you don't see what's interesting about a single guy, on his own, terrorizing an entire industry, I guess no amount of explaining will change your mind.

I personally find PoF to be very interesting. It shows what kind of success can be had without reaching for super intelligent, insanely great, SUPER INNOVATIVE, whatever blah blah blah products.

Determine what people want. Give it to them. Is this not an excellent case study?

I think a lot more people on HN would have the financial success they want if they'd focus less on "pushing the envelope" and more on "shipping something people will actually give a shit about."

Which, to wit, does not involve social bookmarking, or yet another online calendar.

diN0bot• 18 years ago

i assume there are tons of millionaires out there who do as little (if not less!) work than Frind. espeically considering inheritance and resting on the laurels of subordinates or slaves (re: recent alavery article that appeared on hn a few weeks back).

the neat part is that Frind very strategically set this up for himself. maybe this will encourage more people to value smart moves over cramming work-hours (mindless or otherwise).

compay• 18 years ago

I'm calling bullsh^H^H on the one hour a day of work... Markus is the king of obfuscating his business practices with strategic misinformation.

sam_in_nyc• 18 years ago

Interesting:

When searching for a prospective mate, one is inundated with pictures that are not cropped or properly resized. Instead, headshots are either comically squished or creepily elongated, a carnivalesque effect that makes it difficult to quickly size up potential mates.

Frind is aware of his site's flaws but isn't eager to fix them. "There's no point in making trivial adjustments," he says. Frind's approach -- and the reason he spends so little time actually working -- is to do no harm. This has two virtues: First, you can't waste money if you are not doing anything. And second, on a site this big and this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes might affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, might actually hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users are compelled to click on people's profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads. "The site works," he says. "Why should I change what works?"

akd• 18 years ago

"The business works," said Mr. Peterson, owner of the East Lansing Horse and Carriage company in 1891. "Why should I change what works?"

snewe• 18 years ago

Best quote:

"I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches."

medianama• 18 years ago

This is Frind's response to this on his blog --

----------------------------------- I found myself reading an entrepreneurship forum today talking about the Inc Article. I thought I would post here as well as some others might find this useful.

1. I hardly call myself lazy or a sloth. I built the site in 2 weeks 5 years ago. Since then and even now all the user interaction happens in only a handful of pages. At the end of the day there are only so many ways in which you can reorder the search results. It’s like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, it accomplishes nothing.

2. The only way to grow a site once its running its self is to have brilliant ideas. Great ideas don’t come from sitting in front of the computer screen for 8 hours of the day wondering what to do next. You have to inspired or have a really deep understanding of what is going on. So a Brilliant idea may start a business but you need to have many many more brilliant ideas if you are going to go from one of many to an industry leader.

3. Opportunity/luck doesn’t come to you, You are the one that creates it. I debated with myself for weeks before posting the million dollar check, and I figured the best way of doing that was by creating a blog and give myself a voice. I knew my free site competitors where going to venture capitalists and asking for huge sums of money, and my competitors where claiming to be first movers etc. After posting that check their chances of raising money went to 0. The wall street journal called after reading that post. WSJ article came out, next day the Today Show Called. The next week my total US site traffic was up over 50% and kept on growing. In Fact many things i’ve written on my blog have made it into the national papers. Inc Magazine story was a result of my blog, and i’ll be going on a national talk show next week again as a direct result of my blog. I post a lot of things on my blog, many of which seem like bragging, but when reporters read that it gives them an idea for a story which is the whole point of a blog anyways.

4. Work smart not hard. If all you do is work hard making incremental improvements you are just like a hamster running in a wheel and never really getting anywhere. If you want to get somewhere you need to come up with great ideas, or something that is significantly better than the competition and execute on that. Then you go back again and do the same thing over and over. Far too many people think entrepreneurship is like an attendance award, where you can win just by showing up.

vaksel• 18 years ago

so what great ideas did POF have that noone else was doing? Seems to me that the guy is completely discounting luck, when in reality his site would be nowhere without it. Luck plays a huge part...and almost every single successful person accounts their success to some degree of luck

unperson• 18 years ago

I would try not to look at 'luck' as some random, mystical force that just happens to favor some people. Instead:

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Seneca

Could be interpreted in this situation that he was in the right place, with the right idea, at the right time.

edw519• 18 years ago

If you want to get somewhere you need to come up with great ideas, or something that is significantly better than the competition and execute on that.

Right to the top of my bulletin board.

Kinda goes without saying around here, but still nice to hear every once in a while.

dhughes• 18 years ago

plentyoffish is one of the worst websites I've tried, dating or not, the style of it is like something from 1999. Random technical problems that if you ask about go unanswered or you're told to shut up, if not the thread is deleted.

The forums are a mess too, bickering and thread closures I mentioned seem to happen all the time. I left when I got tired of witnessing personal attacks on members...by the moderators!

trjordan• 18 years ago

An interesting note about the dating market is that there is almost no consistent repeat business. People don't get fed up with the site and leave - they either get a match, or they don't. If anything, people might return after a few months because they found a moderately successful relationship. To my mind, that's precisely the reason something like this can work. If Facebook had a lousy interface, people would eventually lose interest because they wouldn't stay continually interested. But for PoF, that's just not a factor. They come for the results, and if it works, the interface is irrelevant. They'll be back regardless, and if they aren't, there's always more people looking for a date.

How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)

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