VANCOUVER MAGAZINE - Nov 20 - Markus Frind, the founder, CEO, and sole owner of Plentyoffish.com, works as little as he desires. He’s been quoted as saying he works about 10 hours a week. Plentyoffish.com now has 16M users, earns tens of millions of dollars a year, and is growing 80% a year. Alexa ranks Plentyoffish.com the 35th most trafficked site in Canada and the 100th in the US. It serves up 2.4 billion page views/month.
Plentyoffish.com spends far less money than other sites do. Match.com and eHarmony.com each spend $100M a year on advertising. They run thousands of costly servers even though their traffic is smaller than that of Plentyoffish.com, which has only 11 machines.
The next level Frind aims to conquer is the world of “scientific” dating research. Companies like Chemistry.com, eHarmony.com and Genepartner.com hire psychologists and scientists to design questionnaires and even DNA tests to help people find mates. Frind did hire a relationship psychologist to create “compatibility matching tools” for Plentyoffish.com. Now he thinks he can do better with his own algorithms. “The science of dating,” Frind scoffs, “is all BS.” Those much-heralded matching tools are only 15 or 20% better than chance. And does Frind think he can optimize and tweak his way to beat that score? “I could double or triple it.”
