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 Love affairs: Markus Frind was fresh out of BCIT when he launched Plenty of Fish in 2003; now it’s one of the world’s most popular Internet dating venues
by Glen Korstrom Markus Frind is one of the world’s most successful Internet dating entrepreneurs, so when he announced last year that he was getting married, many people wanted to know if his Plenty of Fish website helped him find Mrs. Right. After all, friends describe Frind as a shy guy who avoids business and technology sector networking events. Until 2008, he operated his business out of his apartment. Walls in Frind’s roomy 3,800-square-foot office in the Harbour Centre Tower are lined with posters showing faces of people who used Frind’s Plenty of Fish website to find love and marriage. However Frind met his bride, Annie, eight years ago when the two worked at RLG Netperformance, a technology consulting company. They married in Mexico in April. The next month, according to Internet research organization comScore Inc., Plenty of Fish attracted 6.1 million unique visitors. Only Jiayuan.com (6.6 million) and Meetic (6.4 million) had more unique visitors in May than did Plenty of Fish. Frind hired two experienced programmers in the past month and is looking to add more to his 18-person staff. He decided to move his venture out of his 900-square-foot Coal Harbour apartment in August 2008 primarily because he was tired of police coming to his door. Unscrupulous members of his free website sometimes sought revenge on an ex-lover by arranging false dates and giving the former partner’s street address to new contacts met through Plenty of Fish. Police get involved when the pranks repeatedly target the same person. Frind said he provided authorities with offenders’ IP addresses. But he added that skilled hackers can easily disguise that string of numbers, which identifies a computer connection on a network. Combating Internet hackers consumes most of Frind’s workday. He spends the remaining time trying to devise the ideal algorithms to determine what site members make the best matches. Because Frind’s website is free, he also invests a lot of time in trying to come up with new ways to generate revenue. Most of his tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue comes from advertising. But he estimates that his users are spending about $40 million annually on other dating websites. So Frind launched a new premium member program in March 2009 that costs $80 per year and promises to increase a user’s chance of finding someone by 230%. Another of his new initiatives is enabling members to buy virtual gifts for other Plenty of Fish users. Sitting back in one of his boardroom’s chairs, Frind muses aloud about wanting to understand how his site’s members use these gifts. Do they buy their new girlfriend a virtual gift before both leave the site? Or do suitors buy virtual roses for a love interest as a way of showing initial affection? “You’re not going to get anywhere if you’re not analytical,” Frind said. “This is a highly competitive business.” His analytical prowess has long been one of his core strengths, said Peter Rawsthorne, who taught Frind computer science when Frind completed a diploma at the British Columbia Institute of Technology [BCIT]. “His understanding of the technologies is really strong, to the point of being able to optimize the technologies even greater than the vendor can.” Indeed, Frind’s drive to understand why customers visit a free dating site and, more recently, spend money has helped build the enterprise he started from scratch. Frind, who was born in the tiny village of Hudson’s Hope in northern B.C., bought the Plentyoffish.com domain in 2000 for a nominal price, but he didn’t develop the site until February 2003. At the time, Frind had recently graduated from BCIT and was jumping from job to job while the technology sector remained mired in malaise. Valentine’s Day was approaching, and Frind feared that he would be laid off. Almost immediately after developing Plenty of Fish, Frind started to make money. Initially the cash came from what he calls affiliate partnerships. People would click a link on his website to go to a pay site such as Amazon.com. Frind made money if they bought something at the pay site . By spring 2003, he generated about $100 per month this way. He kept tweaking his website and added Google’s AdSense script in June 2003. The next month, he generated $1,000. When that grew to $5,000 in October, he quit his job and focused his efforts fulltime on improving his business. In early 2004, he made $16,000 per month. Plans are now in the works for him to release an iPhone app within weeks. He doubts that this alone will help him substantially increase his current revenue of more than $1 million per month. Doing that will likely require him to either create a sister site that primarily has paid memberships or convince Plenty of Fish users to upgrade their memberships. He said targeting niche demographics such as gay daters and religious people who want to find someone who share their faith is not an option for growth. Frind likes appealing to the mainstream. Niche daters use his website, but Frind believes that altering his site’s design and its carefully constructed algorithms to please them would not be cost effective. Instead, he uses innovative marketing to keep Plenty of Fish in the public spotlight. Pointing to a framed gift from Lady Gaga, Frind reveals that he partnered with the pop star and helped fund her video for the song Telephone. Police officers in the video about a female prison are cruising the Plenty of Fish website while on duty. “You never know what works until you try it,” he said. “Most companies are too afraid to try new things. We like to try new things.” •
Mission: To expand the world’s third-most-visited dating website Assets: An analytical mind sharpened in part while obtaining a BCIT computer science diploma Yield: Tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue, 16 staff and ambitions to expand Plenty of Fish’s brand and reach
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Photograph: Dominic Schaefer
This article from Business in Vancouver July 20-26, 2010; issue 1082 |
