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Markus Frind started building online dating site Plenty of Fish four years ago as a project to help him get his programming chops up to speed so he could get a real job. Then something totally unexpected happened. People started to flock to the site, despite Frind having done nothing to promote it. Shortly after launching Plenty of Fish, he got a check for $900,000 for just two months of advertising revenues. Talk about hooking a big one. Frind doesn't disclose how much money the site makes today, noting only that it reaches 50 million visitors and generates a measly 1.2 billion page views a month, making it one of the largest online dating sites in the world. One other thing. Frind has no staff. He operates the site out of his Vancouver, British Columbia, apartment, maintaining a dozen servers or so in an external vault. "It's all very automated," Frind said Thursday at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit. "All I really have to worry about is when traffic jumps to a new level, and I will throw in another server or two." Frind isn't typical of the crowd at AlwaysOn, which attracts a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs and a select group of venture capitalists. But during a panel entitled "Why Take Venture Capital at All," Fark founder Drew Curtis and four other entrepreneurs echoed a similar theme, saying they had built very profitable companies with no full-time employees and no venture capital. Curtis singlehandedly built Fark nine years ago as a way to compile all the bizarre and entertaining news stories that he came across on the Web. Today, the site is widely used as fodder by radio DJs, morning news shows and late-night television and has 4 million unique users a month, including a loyal fan base that submits stories for consideration. Curtis does have four part-time workers around the country to help him read incoming news stories, but he says the site is so self-sustaining that he barely had to check in during a recent three-week vacation in Europe. Ramu Yalamanchi also built hi5 into one of the largest social networking sites in the world before eventually accepting some venture funds to help him "It's a simple game designed to spread quickly and encourage users to play," Commagere said. "Monthly page views are just shy of half a billion." While much has been written about the falling cost and complexity of starting an online business, the conventional wisdom has long been that even the most successful startups will eventually need to raise venture money to take a company to the next level. With the exception of Yalamanchi, who said he found VC funding useful as his company matured, all the entrepreneurs on the panel said they had managed to build and scale large businesses on their own. Commagere, for instance, said that rather than soliciting advice from VCs, he had done his own research on Facebook, making friends with hundreds of other members so he could observe their behavior. The experience affirmed for him how technology usage patterns change dramatically according to people's ages, with the result that that 17-year-olds see the Internet in a significantly different way than 20-year-olds. The younger they are, he said, the more time they tend to spend on social networking sites, which is why, after years of trying to build serious businesses, he found success in a seemingly silly online game that his parents didn't understand. "My mom is like, 'Sweetie, did anyone offer you a job yet?' " he said. Commagere admitted that not every entrepreneur can expect the same level of success he has enjoyed, noting that some businesses require little overhead. While his "Vampires" game makes money through online ads, he understands that it is not sophisticated enough to attract paying subscribers, and so he sees no need to seek guidance or funds from VCs.  Longtime entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki (left), who led the panel, said such stories offer a valuable lesson in an industry inundated with tales of the part VCs played in Silicon Valley starts like Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. "This is my strike for freedom and democracy," he said. "There is another way besides the VC way." - Andrea Orr See Markus Frind's blog
Comments
From: Plenty of Fish,
Plenty of Fish should stick to dating and leave the American bashing forums to other sites. POF is Canadian run and treat posters on their forum VERY differently. As a dating only site I would only rate the quality at maybe a 3
Posted on:
January 16, 2008 1:45 PM
From: Plenty of fish,
Woh, Mr. Markus is the top sample that I am impressed in my life. He has a master mind in marketing and managing his site by himself.
Posted on:
January 30, 2008 2:04 PM
From: Tom Lee,
Anyway you look at it, plentyoffish.com is a great success. A one man website/company that changed the dating industry landscape forever!
Posted on:
June 26, 2008 5:18 AM
From: Plenty of Fish Dating,
The interesting thing is that PlentyofFish keeps getting a bad rap, but the site continues to increase in popularity and is now one of THE top online dating sites in the world.
Posted on:
October 31, 2008 4:18 PM
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scale the business, while serial entrepreneur Blake Commagere said he wouldn't even know what to do with VC. Commagere (right) struck gold with an extremely simple "Zombies, Vampires and Werewolves" game that is popular among Facebook users. 
Hello,
Interesting article.
I'm building a Free Entrepreneurs Investors community. Our idea is to connect entrepreneurs/inventors/investors together.They can post their projects/capital needs. Most entrepreneurs/inventors are too isolated and just don’t know what to do. They also do not have all the financial resources to raise money. We will be honored if you can participate to our community.
I leave you the decision to publish the address of the website (thestreetmarket.com).
Thanks and good work!