Markus Frind, Founder of ‘Plenty of Fish’ - Either a Liar or a Fool

January 13, 2008 in Uncategorized

200801131326 I’ve been watching the story of Plenty of Fish for a while now.

I’m sure it’s a great site. Plenty of users (AKA fish). Growing fast. Great. Good for you. Keep up the good work.

What I think is interesting is how Markus Frind keeps bragging in public about the success of his little company.

Now he’s in the NY Times bragging about his $10M a year in profit:

For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.

Why is Frind disclosing this? He’s not a public company and under no need to disclose his revenues.

He obviously doesn’t need to raise VC as he has over $10M in the bank.

He’s come forward before. On Read Write Web a year ago he was bragging about his servers:

Markus is basically a one-man band running a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is two and a half times bigger than digg.com. Digg.com gets 200 Million page views per month, but Markus says plentyoffish gets 500 Million:

“The site(plentyoffish.com and Forums.plentyoffish.com) serves ~500 million pageviews a month and does so using 1 DB server and 1 Web Server which is a far cry from the industry standard of 300+ servers for a site of this size.”

Digg uses 3 web servers and 8 small database servers. Recently I asked Markus via email how much work he puts into the site on a daily basis. His reply:

“It is around 2 hours of work a day and that stays steady because as the site grows i automate more and more. Some of that work I get my girlfriend to help me with, she is far more diplomatic when answering mean emails. From what I can tell i should have no problem running it by myself even if it gets to 3 times its current size.”

OK. Great. So you’re making tons of cash and you’re capital expenditures are very low. Good to know.

Tell me something. I know you’re making a TON of money. Your application isn’t that difficult to clone. There isn’t much of a barrier to entry since I know you only have a few servers. Heck. You even just have one person doing tech support.

Why shouldn’t I just jump into the market and compete with you an take some of this easy money off the table?

Mr Frind is either a liar or a fool.

If he’s telling the truth he should just shut up and keep collecting checks.

If he’s lying we should call him out.

Either way, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Update: This little meme too off. Matthew Ingram thinks Markus it the new Craig Newmark. Scobleizer thinks this is legit.

The media loves these types of stories.

Markus himself follows up and says they have plenty of announcements soon.

Markus. There’s plenty of prior art here. Follow the path of Hotornot and Adult Friend Finder and don’t talk about your revenue until you’re virtually retired.

Update 2: Peer1 (who hosts PlentyofFish) has more info:

Google Adsense millionaire Markus Frind, founder of PlentyofFish was a database and web developer who graduated from college in 1999 with a diploma in computer science. This was also the time of the dot-com meltdown. Jumping from job-to-job, Markus began developing a home-grown site to help himself learn ASP.net. Rather than buy a book, he learned by adding new functions and features to the site. He also started experimenting with search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and incorporating them into the site. Gradually, it morphed quite unintentionally into an online dating center. The site has continued growing astronomically ever since and is now the No. 1 free online dating site in the world, averaging 8 million unique visitors per month. His bank account has grown fatter as well thanks to the Google ads he runs on the site. He has also garnered international attention, including being featured in the Wall Street Journal and on the Today Show.

I’m not sure why they’d brag about PlentyofFish. It’s not using many computing resources and you’d think that you’d use a ‘customer story’ about a company that’s having scaling problems.

Thanks to Niall for the pointer.

9 Replies

brianaker
January 13, 2008 at 5:47 pm

I had a similar thought when I saw this. For years I tried to get a couple of friends interested in doing this… oh well :)

Back to building tools!
burtonator
January 13, 2008 at 6:02 pm

Brian,

I was thinking about this today. I find myself continually steering myself away from working on cool technical problems and into boring business ideas that make more money.

Building tools is fun but sometimes I think it’s greener on the other side.

Not that I’m going to stop anytime soon. :)
andydavies
January 14, 2008 at 4:17 am

I’m not sure I’d agree with your sentiments but if I was making this much money on so little effort, I’m not sure I’d be broadcasting it to the world…

Well not unless I was looking to sell, or I wanted someone to offer me a cool job doing something else, but hey, on that much revenue you could do what you wanted..

There is this picture of cheque (or check for those in the US) that shows decent revenue: http://www.workhappy.net/2006/06/interview_with_.html

Andy
miggins
January 15, 2008 at 7:43 am

I agree with Andy, but my sense here is that it’s simply too hard to keep it a secret. If you’re rolling in dough and no one really knows the full story, it’s more fun and enjoyable to tell someone about it.

It may be foolish and invite more competition, but at $10M a year and 10 hours a week, who cares.

I agree he could have been more humble and discreet.
mpermar
January 17, 2008 at 8:19 am

Well, if you don’t tell it to the world, then you don’t appear in NYT and therefore you don’t get tons of more fish…
burtonator
January 17, 2008 at 10:22 am

mpermar,

In my experience the NY times doesn’t convert very well.

Might be different for the demographic PoF is in.
Michael Stevens
April 16, 2008 at 10:40 pm

Ezdate123 is a website I won and operate. I compete head to head with Markus and plentyoffish. He has a great site. It is optimized well and has lots of members. I would have to say markus frind is making the Google adsense money that he claims.. I am not sure why he would be so open about it but I believe it is true. Ezdate123 is a much smaller dating site but we do make money each month. Everything we make from google adsense is reinvested back into advertising. We are growing but we are up against strong competition with Markus and POF…I am not concerned with Yahoo, eharmony or match.com I feel people with eventually find the free sites and give it a try. Ezdate123 is here for the long haul. I am not a programmer so we move a little slower the POF but we are getting there slow but sure…. I respect Markus and admire him for all that he is doing… The best to you Markus… Mike/ezdate123
Yura
June 19, 2008 at 3:50 am

Actually, Markus’s architecture is one of the kind. He is a database architect and has built a pretty robust website. He won’t sell his ideas/software setup, so he can freely share and expect no one to jump on the ship.

Technically, it is somewhat stupid of larger companies not to go into .NET optimization, but well, they are huge and dumb, apparently.
JJ
July 15, 2008 at 9:19 am

So,let’s review the real facts…old Markus supposedly put together POF because he wants to unite lonely people who are being swindled by paid sites from his tiny little apartment since he loves to see couples in love just as a hobby…BS…first correction…the guy is a money hungry ego freak who just got lucky by accident and doesn’t really care about the individuals that use his service and if he doesn’t sell soon which is his obvious intentions instead of bragging he’ll self destruct like most of these idiots.Who cares how much money he’s making or what he’ll have left since this is not a good way to live and eventually it will catch up to him.He can criticize all the paid site for their behavior,yet he has no problems allowing them to advertise on his site which makes him a joke…kind of hypocritical don’t you think and why there are so many Forums bashing him.Plus he claims he’ll ban unsuitable individuals to keep his site clean;no actually he’ll ban anyone that points out all the horrendous things wrong with his system which is something that maybe should be investigated further…with this attitude you would think that after all these years on the Internet he would get rid of all the under-age girls,hookers,gays posing as women,bookies communicating with their clients,women posting pictures of their young children,scam artists and more than just a few people have heard the terrible stories of females being raped or men being robbed…possibly it happens on the paid sites also…yet no complaints are ever listened to and Freeedom of Speech is basically non-existant.And what about those Moderators…Markus clones who will ban you for years for speaking up that are such wimps that the only way they can get a date/laid is to remove you for their friends if someone hates you although you’ve done nothing and the female Mods are worse…actually a Constitutional/Human Rights Lawyer would have a field day with this site and maybe the reason they don’t bother is because they already know it’s garbage.And talk about trash…you hear of all the success stories…I would love to read about the thousands of failures that would make the Springer Show look like grade-school and something you business types should consider putting together…I’d buy a ticket.Bottom line…this is actually a lesson to all of you on how not to run a business if you actually care about people and the world…sure there’s lots of corrupt people out there everywhere…but if you want to make a better dating site make it free,make it more reputable and more fun…the money will come in for sure and at least you’ll have something to be proud of instead of hiding/bragging.And you can be sure anyone who buys POF will not make it better…it will be be for greed.