CTO – Markus Frind
CFO – Markus Frind
VP Business Development – Markus Frind
VP Marketing – Markus Frind
Development Team – Markus Frind
Board Members – Markus Frind
Customer Service – Markus Frind and Girlfriend
Markus Frind – CEO/Founder, PlentyofFish.com
The following are extracts from prior interviews (with permission).
What did you do prior to starting PlentyofFish?
I was a database developer and a web developer, nothing glamorous, and I ended up working as an efficiency engineer making sites run more efficiently. I graduated in 1999 from British Columbia Technical Institute with a diploma in Computer Science. It was at the end of the .com era, so I was jumping from job to job every six months. The companies I was at went from 20 employees to 2 or 3 then they shut down and I was just thrown from project to project.
I ended up working as a website and database optimizer. I was able to go in and see where errors were and fix them, which no one else could do. Everyone else could program, but didn’t particularly know how to fix things. I was not particularly great at building stuff but I could fix things and make them work really, really well.
Why is Plentyoffish a Web 2.0 site?
Because, like other Web 2.0 sites, Plentyoffish is driven by the community. There are one million people who have moderating powers in the Plentyoffish forums and there's a few thousand people attending parties all over the country every week. It's all organized and done by users. So unlike the paid sites, Plentyoffish is run by the users.
Why did you decide to offer PlentyofFish as a free service?
I originally created the site because I had to learn ASP.NET and I didn’t want to buy a book, so I created the site and just kept adding things to it. I had to continue to learn new things and it became a dating center; it wasn’t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. It just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing.
How fast is PlentyofFish growing?
The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise. I started PlentyofFish in March, 2003 and my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.
Does PlentyofFish really represent a threat to the dating industry?
Well I think it really depends on the market. In cities where there's a lot of wealth and a lot of money, I don't think PlentyofFish will have that deep of a market penetration, but in other areas, for instance in Canada, PlentyofFish is by far the largest dating site. People are using three dating sites on average. So right now they're probably using PlentyofFish and two paid dating sites. We won't know until there are two or three other huge free dating sites if the paid dating industry is in trouble.
Why do you like ASP.NET?
Well I use ASP.NET now because it’s trivial and easy and gets the job done. There is just so much to learn out there and every six months it completely changes. So I stuck with what I knew, used it a lot, and I’ve gotten really, really good at it. What I’ve done is about 10 to 20 times more efficient than what anybody else has ever done with the ASP.NET.
How many unique users do you get at PlentyofFish each month?
Google analytics says I get 3.2 million uniques a month. That was the data I matriculated.
How many servers do you use to host the site?
I have one web server, one mail server, two database servers now and a couple of little web servers to run the Userplane instant messenger. So, under 10, but I’ve started to scale up. I’m the size of Friendster and AmericanSingles.com and they each have 200 servers.
Why are they so much more inefficient?
I have no idea but it seems to be common throughout the industry. I’ve never worked at a company that big so I really don’t know what they’re doing or why they would be less efficient.
Why does online dating work?
It works because people want to meet people, and have companionship, and sex. The Internet is the most efficient and quick way of meeting new people. You can call it online dating and you can call it chatting and you can call it social networking, it’s all the same thing.
How do you match your users?
I match them by observing what they do on the site and then match them to people they’re most interested in based on their surfing history and messaging history.
Other dating sites are attempting to go ‘niche,’ whereas Plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the user database on the spot, so no individual user has access to the whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don’t want to see ‘smokers’; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don’t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won’t have the brand to be able to compete.
I have an active user base that no one else has. So when people message other people, there are actually real people there. Other major dating sites have 80,000 to 100,000 active paid subscribers but claim ten million members. So the chance of you getting a reply back is 1 in 80+
What kind of abuse do you deal with on PlentyofFish and how do you deal with them?
Rude users, fake profiles, people signing up from countries that have a prevalence of scamming. Every one of those I try to delete and keep off the site.
How is PlentyofFish better at guarding users against scamming activity then other sites?
Because I have better algorithms to do it and I’m not afraid of deleting people if they look like they are scammers. Paid dating sites are afraid of losing paying customers. Scammers always upload pictures of really hot women and it actually gives the paid sites higher conversions because people will log in and think it’s a real person.
How has PlentyofFish grown so large so quickly?
It’s free and it works. In Canada, it’s just insane growth and everywhere else it’s slower growth but still very high. Just people talking to other people and telling them how great the site is. It’s as viral as a social network.
On my exit poll, 40% of the people who leave tell me they’re leaving because they’ve found someone on the site. I think it works because people have a lot of options and the filtering system and the people presented in the searches, they’re actually what people are looking for.
What other countries will you be moving PlentyofFish into?
I’m already in the UK, so I’m just shoring up my presence in the USA and UK markets before making a big move elsewhere. Probably Germany,
Are you concerned about other major players or new entrants starting up free dating sites?
Not really. A lot of VC’s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don’t think there’s much they can do. Google and Yahoo would only affect me if they went free, in fact I think they would in some ways help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past.
Why are you a one man band? Why not hire more people to help you?
What would they do? I thought about it but I just can’t think of what they would do. I think if I go into Germany maybe I would hire a German speaker. I don’t think expansion or hiring that kind of people will help me. It will actually hurt me because right now my knowledge and skill level is growing because the more I do, the more I learn and the more efficient I become. As soon as you start adding people, you have to communicate your knowledge to them and if they don’t know what everyone else is doing, they can slow down performance.
What are the top five features you’re most proud of hat are different from other dating sites?
The forums, the parties, and the events around the world.
What's next for PlentyofFish in 2006 and 2007?
Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. In 2007 there will be a show down with Match.com.
Myspace has 15 million unique log in's a day. The entire dating industry in this space has maybe a million to a million and a half. And from the polls I've taken on my site, something like 30% of the people use Myspace…the same people who are using the paid dating sites. User psychology is very weird. People on Myspace say they're not just there to date but actually that's what most of them are there looking for. I’ll incorporate social networking features and try to stop Myspace and Facebook from taking over the dating industry.
