Who owns plenty of fish

He chose the name Plenty of Fish - a nod to the phrase "there's plenty of fish in the sea" - out of desperation: seemingly every other dating-related domain name had already been snapped up. A graduate from British Columbia Institute of Technology with a diploma in computer systems, Mr Frind says he wrote the code for the website in less than two weeks in February , and almost immediately saw users flock to the site.

By July of that year - after he placed Google's Ad Sense adverts on the page - he was making thousands of dollars a month. That was enough to convince him he might no longer need to update his resume. Mr Frind says he made the site free mostly because it was easier to operate, as a one-man business, if he did not have to worry about processing payments.

That way he could focus on adding features like chat, better photo pages, and of course, making sure users met their matches. Ensuring users, especially women, had a positive experience was the only way to guarantee success and, in his words, "virality".

But unlike other Silicon Valley types, just when the site took off - gaining millions of users in Canada, the US and Australia in just a few years - Mr Frind decided to work less, not more. He didn't hire any employees for the first five years, and would often take off for weeks at a time to travel the globe.

In one year, just after the site was founded, he travelled to 28 countries. Even today he tries not to work for more than five hours a day. 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. Right now, users are compelled to click on people's profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots.

That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads. Frind has resisted adding other commonly requested features, such as chatrooms and video profiles, on the same grounds.

When a member starts browsing through profiles, the site records his or her preferences and then narrows down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. Frind estimates, based on exit surveys, that the site creates , successful relationships a year. But the brilliance of Plenty of Fish is not its strength as a matching engine; it is the site's low overhead. Not only has Frind managed to run his company with almost no staff, but he has also been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware.

To get a sense of how efficient the operation is, consider that the social news site Digg generates about million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's monthly traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use hundreds of servers.

Frind has just eight. He is not eager to explain how he manages this, but he says that it mostly comes from writing efficient code, a necessity when you are the only code writer and are extremely averse to spending money on additional hardware and features. This isn't rocket science. O ften, at the end of a long workday, which is to say around noon, Frind plays war games. He is good, too: When I joined him for a game of Risk in October, he sat silently for almost the entire game before clearing the board in a single, virtuosic turn.

He was still gloating the next morning. Frind approaches business in much the same way. Frind's account of his own exploits, published on his blog in under the title "How I Started a Dating Empire," says a lot about his worldview: "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning.

I picked out 'enemies' and did everything I could to defeat them, which meant being bigger than them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind. By , Plenty of Fish was serving million pages each month, putting it in fifth place in the United States and first in Canada among dating sites. In March of that year, Frind mentioned these facts to Robert Scoble, a popular tech blogger whom he met at a conference in Vancouver. When Scoble wrote about the solo entrepreneur with the ugly website making millions of dollars a year, his readers were in disbelief.

At the time, AdSense was seen as a tool for amateurs. It might cover your blogging expenses, but it wouldn't make you rich. Frind's website was also downright ugly. A search-engine-optimization blogger, Jeremy Schoemaker, wrote that Frind was a liar. Frind embraced the controversy. But some thought the check was a fake, while others felt that posting it was a crude promotional stunt. But the stunt worked. Frind's site was the talk of the blogosphere, driving gobs of new users to the site.

Plenty of Fish's growth accelerated dramatically, hitting one billion page views a month by By summer of , with his site moving into first place among dating sites in the U. He rented a 3,square-foot suite in Vancouver's Harbour Center, announced he was going to hire 30 employees, and bought a BlackBerry.

But the plans were not exactly concrete. By October, Frind's own office was still empty: no furniture, nothing on the walls. He still hadn't figured out how to get email on his cell phone. He had hired three people, not Frind seems untroubled by this disconnect. He says he leased an office because he was tired of working at home. He assumes he will one day need more employees, but he hasn't figured out what he would do with them. And he is in no hurry.

He hasn't even bothered to offer a French language site for the six million French speakers living in Quebec. With all the free time on his hands, why doesn't Frind just start a second company? He says he thinks about that sometimes and has even toyed with creating a free job- listings site but finds the idea stultifying.

It's hard to know what to make of a guy who works an hour a day, who doesn't travel much, and who doesn't have any hobbies beyond war games and somehow fretting about boredom. How is he not bored already? But if Frind is guilty of a kind of sloth, there is also a wisdom to his passivity. Being ever careful takes serious self-discipline, and an aversion to doing harm can be more valuable than an overeagerness for self-improvement. If nothing else, it's impossible to argue with his success.

Frind created his own game and wrote his own rules. As growing legions of lovesick people around the globe search for their perfect mates and advertisers fall over one another to write him ever larger checks, he just kicks back and smiles. And the money rolls in. Max Chafkin is a senior writer for the magazine. He wrote the November cover story on Kevin Rose, founder of the social news site Digg.

Top Stories. Top Videos. So how does it feel to finally have the deal close, knowing you're walking away with millions of dollars for your project? It's just very surreal. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App.

Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.