From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year - Plenty of Fish
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It may look like crap, and he may have used shady tactics to gain traction, but the guy is making $10 million a year. I'm sure most of you would put up with much more if the reward for doing so was so delicious.
One quick observation: it's not an accident that some of the ugliest websites on the internet (MySpace, Craigslist) are also the most popular.
survivorship bias strikes again: for every CL or POF there are thousands of ugly sites which are dead; and the vast majority of popular sites have pleasing designs.
This is way too simple to be true. Other sites, like Google, Flickr and the pre-F8 Facebook, made clean design a virtue.
MySpace is about user self-expression, especially for teenagers. Teenage bedrooms don't look like House Beautiful. Also, teenagers have a proven ability to extract signal from greater noise (no really, look it up; they really can read text on wacky complex backgrounds much better than oldsters). So their aesthetics are somewhat different.
Craigslist is not particularly pretty but the usability is very good. Everything is there for an obvious reason. And regarding the rather "default" look -- not only does this save on bandwidth, it actually helps usability. Designers should remember that if they even make non-underlined or non-blue links, they just lost a lot of unsophisticated users.
There's very little the user needs to understand, few barriers to posting or reading, and pages load really quickly. The Craigslist people are the masters of giving you 80% of the value for about 10% coding effort and 1% user effort.
It just indicates that our sense of beauty is broken. Or more accurately, hasn't adapted for web pages evaluation yet.
My guess is that we use, to judge web pages, a sense of beauty that we developed for static graphic arts: painting, typography, advertising etc. It fails to take key points into account: a site's dynamic nature, its complex structure, its usability. My usual experience is that many sites which look shiny on screenshots are a PITA to actually use.
It's also possible that he could take his huge customer base and monetize it more effectively by introducing new features and making the experience better. But he's so lazy/apathetic that he wont even write a script to keep the pictures the right aspect ratio.
Sure he makes 10 million dollars a year, he provides a great service, etc, but in the end he's not really contributing anything to society but a well-baked cake with dog shit frosting.
So why don't you do something about it? Start a company to right his wrong and profit from it.
Fact is that he is smart and successful and his user base speaks volumes for his contribution to society but he does everything WRONG for a YC inspired/funded startup:
1. No Co-founder
2. Bad design
3. Doesn't use Apple products but MS.
4. Isn't from/hasn't moved to Silicon Valley.
etc.
I don't think it's a good idea to compare his company to YC-funded/inspired sites, because he didn't set out to make a successful company; he made a site to learn a language, and people gravitated toward it over time. He got lucky by entering his market accidentally at the right time, with the right features.
Some people voted me down, I assume for saying that I "disrespect" him. But I really do. Any businessman who doesn't believe in advancing society with the power and responsibility that comes with business ownership deserves no respect nor success. But the fact is that whether or not someone deserves something, they sometimes get it; and he did.
But in the grand scheme of things, looking at plentyoffish.com makes me want to vomit, and that's why I highly doubt it will remain successful indefinitely. The only problem with overtaking its lead is that it's a user-to-user business, and competing with a company like that is hard for someone new like me, because at first there is zero benefit for signing up due to the lack of users. The first few thousand users might not even get anything. So you end up with an alarmingly high switching cost.
In the war between beautiful design and achieving benefit from the product, the latter almost always wins. At least in the short term.
I think you're being too hard on yourself. POF is many things, but it isn't a dating site. Seriously. How many other dating sites run their competitors' ads? How many have a 30% monthly attrition rate? When you look at it critically, POF is little more than a glorified banner ad for other dating sites.
IMO, that's the real reason why Markus doesn't have to invest in user experience. It's actually better for his bottom line if they bounce to one of the many other dating sites who advertise (prominently) on POF. It remains to be seen if a free dating site that focuses on user experience can thrive, when the only vetted revenue model involves selling your ad space to the non-free players in the same industry.
If Markus had your mentality, he would not have started POF because he would have said there are "better funded, better sites, sites with too many users" out there, and therefore I shouldn't compete with them. Obviously he did not think this. And good for him and the users of POF.
BTW - I have checked out your recent site and I like it - if you truly believe that POF is crap, then I look forward to you building a competitor - I do think that your sense of design will at least give you an edge on POF.
When it's done in a few weeks, I'll do an Ask YC post about it.
On some of the comments below regarding shady tactics, I can't speak for this as I don't know anything about the company. If this is the case, then it's not great, but from Rockerfeller to Steve Jobs this has sometimes been the way of it. I think if we can take some lessons from the good side - ie quick to market, novel approach to making money, and apply them to what we are doing ourselves then that's a good thing
of all the places for a double negative...
Everything they say he does was done years earlier (match.com and hotornot come to mind), but the technology needed for this kind of application hasn't changed in a decade.
Perhaps he's being a little disproportionately rewarded for his efforts but that's just good business. Also I'm sure he's helped make plenty of real people happy who could care less about how his site looks.
Even if you don't think "doesn't deserve" applies, still file under no taste.
If you want to be tasteless and really big, try getting an executive position in Wal-Mart or something.
I love this line from nyt: "Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience."
You have to have a really screwed up interface to make someone call it "visually painful."
http://www.graphpaper.com/2006/09-04_class-and-web-design-pa...
I vaguely recall a lot of fake profiles, with POF links.