Plenty of Fish grew slowly at first as Frind focused on learning the programming language and trolling Internet forums for clues on how to increase his traffic. There are a handful of half-literate posts from early 2003 in which Frind asks basic questions, like "I am interested in know how much money sites generate off advertising." Reading these comments in retrospect paints a picture of determination and naiveté.
Frind knew little about search-engine optimization or online advertising, but he was a quick study. From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000. Frind used his home computer as a Web server -- an unusual but cost-effective choice -- and spent his time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on the forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called AdSense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites. Frind made just $5 in his first month, but by the end of the year, he was making more than $3,300 a month, largely by selling ads to paid dating sites that were interested in getting his unpaid members to trade up. He quit his job.
"Have you ever met anyone like me?" This is both a boast and a genuine question: Frind has few friends in business, no mentors, and no investors. Moreover, he has taken a path that seems at odds with the conventional wisdom about Internet companies. Most websites with as much traffic as Plenty of Fish would have by this point raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists, hired dozens of engineers and business-development types, and figured out a way to keep someone as unconventional as Markus Frind from making any major decisions.
But if Frind's methods make him unusual, he is also a man of his times. In the past few years, a new technological ecosystem, built around Google's dominance in Web search and its decision to offer powerful software tools at no charge, has changed the economics of doing business on the Internet. Web analytic services that used to cost thousands of dollars a year are now free. Competitive data, once available to only the largest companies, can be had with only a few clicks on Compete.com and Quantcast.com. And advertising networks, especially AdSense, have made it possible, even preferable, for Internet entrepreneurs to bootstrap their businesses without hiring a sales force and without raising much money. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in 1998 can now be started with tens of dollars.
No one has used this ecosystem as effectively as Markus Frind, who has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown well beyond those of a typical one-person company. Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon. There's the color scheme that seems cribbed from a high school yearbook and the curious fondness for bold text and CAPITAL LETTERS. 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?"
Frind has resisted adding other commonly requested features, such as chatrooms and video profiles, on the same grounds. "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." Instead, Frind has focused his energy on making the site better
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at matching people. When a member starts browsing through profiles, the site records his or her preferences and then narrows down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. "Users never see the whole database," Frind says. "It gets smaller and more focused on what you're actually looking for." In other words, if you tell Plenty of Fish you want to date blond nonsmokers but spend all your time gawking at nicotine-addled brunettes, the program will adjust. "People think they know who the perfect person is, but that's not always who they really want," he says. Frind estimates, based on exit surveys, that the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year.
But the brilliance of Plenty of Fish is not its strength as a matching engine; it is the site's low overhead. Not only has Frind managed to run his company with almost no staff, but he has also been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware. To get a sense of how efficient the operation is, consider that the social news site Digg generates about 250 million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's monthly traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use hundreds of servers. Frind has just eight. He is not eager to explain how he manages this, but he says that it mostly comes from writing efficient code, a necessity when you are the only code writer and are extremely averse to spending money on additional hardware and features. "At other sites, when one thing goes slightly wrong, the reaction is to buy more servers or hire a Ph.D.," he says. "It's almost unbelievable -- it's like people are trying to justify their jobs by spending money. This isn't rocket science."
