VANCOUVER VIEW -- May '09 -- Markus Frind is the CEO and founder of Plentyoffish.com, which is one of the largest and most successfull free dating sites on the Internet, popular primarily in Canada, the UK, Australia and the United States.
Vancouver View: There are a ton of dating Web sites on the net. How did you become confident that yours would prove successful?
Markus Frind: I created Plentyoffish to teach myself asp.net; there was no plan to create a major business - I just kind of stumbled on it. In other words this was never meant to be a business and there were no expectations to run it as a business. When I started Plentyoffish, there wasn't even any way to make money from the site.
VV: How did you spread the word about Plentyoffish?
MF: I told friends in Vancover and Toronto and then it spread like wildfire. Because the only other major dating site at that time was Lavalife, it was easy to get the word out. I didn't really need to spread the word about Plentyoffish when it first started because it wasn't meant to be business and I had no way of making money off it and the entire site was being run out of my apartment off my home computer.
VV: Membership to the Web site is free. What are your sources of revenue?
MF: I make money from various forms of advertising. With billions of monthly page views, it's pretty easy to make money.
VV: Do you have any suggestions for entrepreneurs who are experiencing challenging times?
MF: Try everything and anything! Nothing is very successful at the first try. Once you get something that works, you just keep refining it till it's perfect!
Recent Comments