Vancouver Tech

Do not go any further without reading this article from Inc on Markus Frind and Plenty of Fish. This is one of the web’s greatest success stories, and it all takes place here in Vancouver.

Frind grew up in Hudson’s Hope, BC, and built Plenty of Fish in 2003 in an effort to bolster his skill set by learning ASP.net in a couple weeks. Until 2007, he had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs three customer service workers and the site plentyoffish.com serves up a whopping 1.6 billion webpages per month.

Some great excerpts from Max Chafkin’s Inc article:

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 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.”

By 2006, Plenty of Fish was serving 200 million pages each month, putting it in fifth place in the United States and first in Canada among dating sites. Frind was making amazingly good money, too: $10,000 a day through AdSense. In March of that year, Frind mentioned these facts to Robert Scoble, a popular tech blogger whom he met at a conference in Vancouver. When Scoble wrote about the solo entrepreneur with the ugly website making millions of dollars a year, his readers were in disbelief. At the time, AdSense was seen as a tool for amateurs. It might cover your blogging expenses, but it wouldn’t make you rich.

By the summer of 2008, with his site moving into first place among dating sites in the U.S. and the U.K., Frind began to wonder about his next step. He rented a 3,700-square-foot suite in Vancouver’s Harbour Center, announced he was going to hire 30 employees, and bought a BlackBerry. But the plans were not exactly concrete. By October, Frind’s own office was still empty: no furniture, nothing on the walls. He still hadn’t figured out how to get e-mail on his cell phone. He had hired three people, not 30.

…estimates he creates 800,000 successful relationships per year

Frind’s blueprint for success: Pick a market in which the competition charges money, build a “dead simple” free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense

What’s the most fun you have had at work?
Going to the bank and depositing a million-dollar check

For more great info on Plenty of Fish and similar online successes:

• Watch legendary online persona Guy Kawasaki orchestrate a panel with Frind and others, including Hot or Not’s James Hong
• From Frind’s blog in 2006: “How I started A Dating Empire”
• Frind’s brief how to guide: “How I made a million in 3 months”