GeekSG

PlentyofFish (POF) is not a site which you would praise for its design or how innovative the service is, but it is the success story that many could only dream about. POF has 1.2 billion page views/month, 500,000 average unique logins per day and has estimated its revenue to go beyond US$10 Million next year. When you see numbers like this, you would expect it to be run by a huge company operating out of Palo Alto, but instead, POF is operated by only the founder, Markus Frind, out of his own apartment in Vancouver, Canada. He is the Chief Developer, the CEO, the VP of Marketing and everything else.

Frind started the company with only the intention of giving himself a project to work on so that he can learn ASP.NET because he figured it would be better than reading a book. As such, he started the dating site in 2003 and focused on functionality rather than design. He attributes his success to the fact that he was able to offer a free service unlike his competitors as he was operating at very low costs.

As he was a 1 man army, he could not do a lot of business development and hence relied on AdSense in the beginning. He earned US$3 Million on AdSense alone in 2006. People may argue that he may have earned a lot more if he hired a sales person to get corporate advertisements but I’m guessing he’s contented just with the millions. He also doesn’t spend a cent on marketing and relies on plain-o word of mouth, even though he does get a lot media attention for being a 1 man company.

Every Joe can build a web application but the amazing part to all this is that when we talk about this amount of traffic, scalability becomes a huge issue and companies usually hire large teams to manage its servers and develop complex architecture for its systems. By keeping his source code simple, he was able to run the site solely on 1 web server, 1 mail server and 2 database servers.

True blue success story. Who knows what may happen if you just picked up a programming language and started typing away.

Note: It’s US$1 Billion valuation is based on the analysis by Read/Write Web which is then based on his US$10 million estimated revenue.