How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)
inc.com
inc.com
----------------------------------- I found myself reading an entrepreneurship forum today talking about the Inc Article. I thought I would post here as well as some others might find this useful.
1. I hardly call myself lazy or a sloth. I built the site in 2 weeks 5 years ago. Since then and even now all the user interaction happens in only a handful of pages. At the end of the day there are only so many ways in which you can reorder the search results. It’s like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, it accomplishes nothing.
2. The only way to grow a site once its running its self is to have brilliant ideas. Great ideas don’t come from sitting in front of the computer screen for 8 hours of the day wondering what to do next. You have to inspired or have a really deep understanding of what is going on. So a Brilliant idea may start a business but you need to have many many more brilliant ideas if you are going to go from one of many to an industry leader.
3. Opportunity/luck doesn’t come to you, You are the one that creates it. I debated with myself for weeks before posting the million dollar check, and I figured the best way of doing that was by creating a blog and give myself a voice. I knew my free site competitors where going to venture capitalists and asking for huge sums of money, and my competitors where claiming to be first movers etc. After posting that check their chances of raising money went to 0. The wall street journal called after reading that post. WSJ article came out, next day the Today Show Called. The next week my total US site traffic was up over 50% and kept on growing. In Fact many things i’ve written on my blog have made it into the national papers. Inc Magazine story was a result of my blog, and i’ll be going on a national talk show next week again as a direct result of my blog. I post a lot of things on my blog, many of which seem like bragging, but when reporters read that it gives them an idea for a story which is the whole point of a blog anyways.
4. Work smart not hard. If all you do is work hard making incremental improvements you are just like a hamster running in a wheel and never really getting anywhere. If you want to get somewhere you need to come up with great ideas, or something that is significantly better than the competition and execute on that. Then you go back again and do the same thing over and over. Far too many people think entrepreneurship is like an attendance award, where you can win just by showing up.
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Seneca
Could be interpreted in this situation that he was in the right place, with the right idea, at the right time.
Right to the top of my bulletin board.
Kinda goes without saying around here, but still nice to hear every once in a while.
The funny thing is that this "story" is probably the single most effective marketing factor for plentyoffish. Nobody would have heard about it if it wasn't for the story...
Yes, we already heard the story long time ago, when his AdSense checks were making rounds the web.
And at that time, you would think: that's it, guy was lucky/clever, his money problems are solved, let's move on.
But meanwhile, he still kept going on and up.
When I first read about PoF, it was somewhere among the top Canadian dating sites, though not even the most popular one. Now, only a couple of years later, it became no. 1 in US.
He successfully made transition from "internet famous" to being on the cover page of well-known business magazine. He uses publicity gained at one level to propel him onto another one.
That, and also, as inerte mentioned, it was really well done story. It showed Markus from another angle.
Sorry for the "hint...", it was their original title.
Congratulations, you created a pedestrian website which makes gobs of money and requires 10 minutes per day of "work" to keep the current iteration running.
Now, do something interesting. Because, I'm sorry, but Plenty of Fish isn't.
The guy's loaded, has all this time and opportunity...and he's just idling along with his very cute girlfriend and her (extremely attractive if we are to believe the video) friends.
I know there are a lot of people on here who'd use his time and opportunities to go wipe out malaria, write an epic novel and start a seed funding program for startups that adhere to his approach.
But being the way he is got him to where he's at. Maybe if he was the type who had grand visions left and right, he'd have screwed up plenty of fish long ago.
And hey, whatever, that's great. If the guy is happy with his life, there's not much more than that. My point was, "I'm not impressed." Given how many articles have been written on the PoF "success story", it seems like a lot of people think I should be.
Seriously though, what would you do after you finish your hard slog?
Very few things actually help or change the world - and those that really want to change the world are doing it already. If you want to change the world, go do it - you don't need money to make a difference. What are you wasting your time for?
Full props to the pof guy, he is obviously doing what pushes his buttons.
What would I do? Travel a lot. Keep learning new things every day. Work on many Open Source projects. Maybe slow down long enough to go on a date for the first time in a couple years. Whatever it is, the story probably won't be worth a 5 page article in Inc. Sort of like this one.
Personally, I find impact on human lives of that scale rather interesting.
I personally find PoF to be very interesting. It shows what kind of success can be had without reaching for super intelligent, insanely great, SUPER INNOVATIVE, whatever blah blah blah products.
Determine what people want. Give it to them. Is this not an excellent case study?
I think a lot more people on HN would have the financial success they want if they'd focus less on "pushing the envelope" and more on "shipping something people will actually give a shit about."
Which, to wit, does not involve social bookmarking, or yet another online calendar.
When searching for a prospective mate, one 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 it difficult to quickly size up potential mates.
Frind is aware of his site's flaws but isn't eager to fix them. "There's no point in making trivial adjustments," he says. Frind's approach -- and the reason he spends so little time actually working -- is to do no harm. This has two virtues: First, you can't waste money if you are not doing anything. And second, on a site this 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 get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads. "The site works," he says. "Why should I change what works?"
"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."
I wonder how hard it would be to do something similar today using SEO.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/competitive-int...
I'm not saying I don't respect what Markus has done. I just don't think his stats are anything near what is reported.
the neat part is that Frind very strategically set this up for himself. maybe this will encourage more people to value smart moves over cramming work-hours (mindless or otherwise).
The forums are a mess too, bickering and thread closures I mentioned seem to happen all the time. I left when I got tired of witnessing personal attacks on members...by the moderators!