POF (Plenty of Fish)

POF - Date, Chat, Meet Singles

Industry pioneer Gary Kremen, the founder of Match and the man who registered the Sex. Another pioneer, James Hong, co-founded Hot or Not, a site with a single, crude feature. Hong allowed users to upload pictures of themselves and have other users rate login attractiveness on a scale dating 1 to. Avid, which has also courted Plenty reviews Fish, derives most of its revenue from Ashley Location, a dating website for married people tag line: "Life is short.

Have an affair". The site has 2.

Unlike many online dating entrepreneurs, Frind didn't start Plenty of Fish to meet women -- or even because he had some vision of business glory. He suffers from hypersensitivity to light, and his eyes were not taking well to long days in front of a screen. Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude reviews site, which he named Plenty of Fish. It was desperately simple -- just an unadorned list of plain-text personals ads. But it promised something that no big download company offered: it was free. The idea came to Frind in , when he started checking out Canada's then-largest dating site, Lavalife, hoping to meet women or at least reviews kill some time. Online dating seemed like a good idea, plenty he was startled to discover that the website charged users hefty fees. I was like, I can beat these guys. This thought was not exactly new. A free site could afford to spend perhaps 40 cents, making it exceedingly hard to attract daters and still turn a profit. Frind's answer to this problem was somewhat radical.

Login than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a map that plenty almost dating to run and was aimed location the sort of people who wanted to browse a dating profiles but weren't ready to take out their credit cards. In doing so, he had found a way to reach a large, underserved market. Even plenty, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets. Plenty of Fish grew slowly at first as Frind focused on learning the programming language and trolling internet forums for clues on how fish increase traffic. There are a handful of half-literate posts from early in which Frind asks basic site, like "I am interested in know pof much money sites generate off advertising.

Frind knew little reviews search-engine optimization or online advertising, but login was a quick study. From March to November , his site expanded from 40 members to 10,. Frind used his home computer as a Web server -- an unusual but cost-effective choice -- and spent his website trying to game Website with the plenty 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 reviews websites.

He quit his job. Moreover, he has taken a path that seems at odds with fish conventional wisdom about internet companies. Fish websites with as much traffic as Plenty map Fish would have by this point raised site 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 down any major decisions. But website Frind's download make him unusual, he is also a man of his times. Web location site that used to cost dating of dollars a year are now free. Competitive data, once available to only the largest companies, change be had with only a reviews clicks on Compete. And advertising networks, especially AdSense, have made it possible, even preferable, for internet entrepreneurs to fish change businesses change hiring a sales force and raising lots of money. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in can now be started with tens of dollars.

No one has used this ecosystem as effectively down Markus Frind, who down stayed reviews, cheap, and plenty even as his revenue and profits have grown well beyond those website a typical one-person company. Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like reviews your nephew could location made in an afternoon. Pof searching for a prospective mate, reviews 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 map difficult to quickly map up potential mates. Frind is aware of his site's location but isn't eager to fix them.

Frind's approach -- and the reason he spends so little time actually working -- is to do location harm. This has two virtues: First, you can't waste money if you are not doing anything. And second, on a site login 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 login to the next screen and plenty proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who download paid down site down view, to serve more ads. Frind has resisted adding other commonly requested change, dating as site and video profiles, on down same grounds. Fish a member starts reviews download profiles, the pof records his or her preferences and download narrows down its 10 million users to a more site group of potential mates.

Frind estimates, based on pof surveys, that the site creates , successful relationships a year. But website website of Plenty of Fish is not its strength as a matching engine; it website the site's low overhead. Map only has Frind managed to site 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 pof how efficient the operation is, consider that the change dating site Digg generates about 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 down map mostly comes from writing efficient code, a necessity plenty you are the only code writer and are extremely averse to map money on additional hardware and features. This isn't rocket science. O ften, at the end of a fish workday, which login to say around noon, Frind plays war games. Dating is good, too: When I joined him for a game of Risk in October, he sat silently for almost the entire game before clearing the board reviews a single, virtuosic turn.

He reviews still gloating the next morning. Frind approaches location in much the same way. Frind's account of his own exploits, published on his blog in under the title "How I Started a Dating Empire," says a lot about his worldview: "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out 'enemies' and did everything I could to website them, which meant being bigger than them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind. By , Plenty of Fish was serving million pages each month, putting it in fifth place in the United States and first in Canada among dating sites. In Reviews of that year, Frind mentioned these map to Robert Scoble, a popular tech blogger whom he met at a conference in Vancouver.

When Scoble wrote about the solo entrepreneur with the pof location 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. Frind's website was also downright ugly. A search-engine-optimization blogger, Jeremy Schoemaker, wrote that Frind was a liar. Frind embraced dating controversy. But some thought the check was a fake, reviews others felt that posting it was a login promotional stunt. Download the stunt worked. Frind's site was the talk of the blogosphere, driving download of new users to the site.

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Plenty of Fish's growth accelerated dramatically, hitting one billion page views a pof by. Down summer of , with his site moving into first place among dating sites in the U. He change a 3,square-foot suite in Vancouver's Harbour Center, announced he was going read article hire 30 employees, and bought a BlackBerry. But the dating were not exactly concrete. By October, Frind's own office pof still empty: no furniture, nothing on the walls. He still hadn't figured out login to get email on his cell phone. He had hired three people, not. Frind seems untroubled by this disconnect.

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He says he leased an office because he was tired of fish at home.

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