Today, POF has more than 60 employees. And users can now pay to access premium content, such as being able to know whether someone has opened or deleted one of your messages. And while the growth of the business appears to have been achieved very smoothly, Mr Frind says the transition of users to mobile phones over the past two years has been one of the biggest challenges the company has faced, requiring it to focus more on its phone app platform. Although Mr Frind says he is currently spending slightly less time than usual in the office so he can spruce up a ranch he has bought with his wife whom he met offline , he has no intention of selling up to any of the many investors who have expressed an interest.
Image source, Plenty of Fish. Markus Frind tries to work for just five hours per day. Free to join. Mr Frind says that in a period of two years the business model completely changed as users switched to mobile. Plenty of Fish says its data shows:. The elevators at Plenty of Fish's offices in Vancouver explain the firm's goal in a nutshell. Watching grass grow. POF gathers data on who leaves the site in relationships and who then returns following a break-up. Related Topics. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts.
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Maya Kosoff. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. This is not because Frind is lazy. Well, Frind is a bit lazy, but that's another matter. The problem is that he is still getting used to the idea of a commute that involves traveling farther than the distance between the living room and the bedroom.
Frind's online dating company, Plenty of Fish, is newly located on the 26th floor of a downtown skyscraper with a revolving restaurant on the roof. The gleaming space could easily house 30 employees, but as Frind strides in, it is eerily quiet -- just a room with new carpets, freshly painted walls, and eight flat-screen computer monitors.
Frind drops his bag and plops himself down in front of one of them. He looks down at his desk. Like most of his advertising deals, this one found Frind. He hadn't even heard of VideoEgg until a week ago. But then, you tend to attract advertisers' attention when you are serving up 1.
That's a lot of personal ads. Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U. Until , Frind had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers, who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website while Frind handles everything else.
Amazingly, Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. To demonstrate, Frind turns to his computer and begins fiddling with a free software program that he uses to manage his advertising inventory. Then, six minutes 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, "All done. All done? Are you serious? Frind would log on at night, spend a minute or two making sure there were no serious error messages, and then go back to sipping expensive wine.
A year ago, they relaxed for a couple of weeks in Mexico with a yacht, a captain, and four of Kanciar's friends. As Frind gets up to leave, I ask him what he has planned for the rest of the day.
I t's a 21st-century fairy tale: A young man starts a website in his spare time. This person is unknown and undistinguished. He hasn't gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter, yet he is deceptively brilliant. He has been bouncing aimlessly from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. In most stories, this is where the hard work begins -- the long hours, sleepless nights, and near-death business experiences.
But this one is way more mellow. Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than Frind, 30, doesn't seem like the sort of fellow who would run a market-leading anything. Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people and who seems to take up less space than his large frame would suggest. Those who know Frind describe him as introverted, smart, and a little awkward. When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean.
He always says exactly what he thinks. With friends and family, Frind expresses affection through playful pranks. Frind will spend hours hiding in the three-bedroom apartment he and Kanciar share, furtively flipping light switches, tapping on doors, and ducking into rooms to play on his girlfriend's fear of ghosts. Another memorable valentine involved the secret consumption of a massive quantity of hot peppers. Though his mouth was on fire, Frind calmly planted a kiss on Kanciar's lips and feigned ignorance as she went scrambling for water.
Kanciar, a freelance Web designer who also helps out around Plenty of Fish, is a lanky blonde with an easy smile and a hearty laugh, which she often uses to try to get Frind to open up. When I ask him to talk about what he does with the 23 hours a day in which he doesn't work, Frind struggles to answer and then looks helplessly at Kanciar. She offers a few suggestions -- video games, ski trips, walks -- then tries to focus his energies. That's not easy for Frind, who seems most comfortable with the world at arm's length.
He seems perpetually lost in thought, constantly thinking about and studying the world around him. In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time. F rind spent his formative years on a grain farm in the northern hinterlands of British Columbia -- "the bush," in local parlance. His hometown, Hudson's Hope, is a cold, isolated place not far from the starting point of the Alaska Highway.
Frind's parents, German farmers who emigrated just before his fourth birthday, bought a 1,acre plot 10 miles from town and initially lived in a trailer without electricity, phones, or running water. The family's closest neighbors were a mile and a half away, and, apart from a younger brother, Frind had few friends.
He rarely visits Hudson's Hope these days. When his parents want to see him, they make the hour drive southward. After graduating from a technical school in with a two-year degree in computer programming, Frind got a job with an online shopping mall. Then the dot-com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed startup to failed startup. For most of , he was unemployed. It was brutal. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs.
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