Who invented plenty of fish

Hong allowed users to upload pictures of themselves and have other users rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to Avid, which has also courted Plenty of Fish, derives most of its revenue from Ashley Madison, 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 dating 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 dating 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 to kill some time.

Online dating seemed like a good idea, but he was startled to discover that the site charged users hefty fees. I was like, I can beat these guys. This thought was not exactly new. Since the mid-'90s, there had been dozens of free dating startups, but all had struggled to attract users because they were competing with the outsize marketing budgets of paid competitors like Lavalife.

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.

Rather than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a website that cost almost nothing to run and was aimed at the sort of people who wanted to browse a few 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 better, 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 to increase traffic. There are a handful of half-literate posts from early in which Frind asks basic questions, like "I am interested in know how much money sites generate off advertising. Frind knew little about search-engine optimization or online advertising, but he 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 time trying to game Google with the tricks 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 their websites. He quit his job. Moreover, he has taken a path that seems at odds with the conventional wisdom about internet companies. Most websites with as much traffic as Plenty of Fish would have by this point raised millions 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 making any major decisions.

But if Frind's methods make him unusual, he is also a man of his times. In the past few years, a new technological ecosystem built around Google's dominance in Web search and its decision to offer powerful software tools at no charge, has changed the economics of doing business on the internet.

Web analytic services that used to cost thousands of dollars a year are now free. Competitive data, once available to only the largest companies, can be had with only a few clicks on Compete. And advertising networks, especially AdSense, have made it possible, even preferable, for internet entrepreneurs to bootstrap their businesses without 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 as Markus Frind, who has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown well beyond those of a typical one-person company. Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon.

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.

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. Some information may no longer be current. Frind sold PlentyOfFish. Lucas Oleniuk. Frind, who sold his online dating site PlentyOfFish.

With famed winemaker Eric von Krosigk — co-founder of Summerhill Estate Winery and winner of wine medals — overseeing the operation, the business is set to bottle its first product in May. It will start selling in June at its production facility, located on the acre West Kelowna lakeside estate once owned by former premiers W. Bennett and son Bill Bennett that Mr. Frind is moving into a crowded market: B.

A key ingredient in his plan will be turning acres of hilly grazing land into suitable terrain for his vineyards. But Mr. Full Menu Search Menu. Close Local your local region National. Search Submit search Quick Search. Comments Close comments menu. Video link. Close X. Click to scroll back to top of the page Back to top. By Patricia Kozicka Global News. Posted July 15, pm. American writer and critic Susan Sontag once said: "Nothing is mysterious, no human relation.

Except love. Markus Frind, the founder and boss of Plenty of Fish POF , the world's largest dating website and app, would beg to differ. According to him: "Although people would like to think that everyone is unique and individual, when it comes to dating and relationships they follow a very common set of patterns.

POF's ability to match up suitable partners has helped attract more than 70 million registered users around the world, led to millions of successful relationships, and - according to Mr Frind - played a part in the creation of at least a million babies.

With data, of course. At POF's sleek headquarters, atop a Vancouver skyscraper, dozens of TV screens display charts and graphs that monitor, in real-time, the millions of messages that users are sending each minute on the site. Those messages form the backbone of POF's massive data enterprise, which tracks who users message, who they leave the site with - and of course, if and when they come back.

With all this data in hand, POF can quickly suggest like-minded people, or "matches", to new users who fill in detailed questionnaires about themselves upon joining. Further data on users, and their compatibility with others, is gathered by encouraging them to take part in a free personality test.