I never knew about the bachelor or his website in this story, but it makes for compelling reading. Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year.
The site: PlentyOfFish.com.
As Inc.com point out in an article on Markus:
Amazingly, Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. "I usually accomplish everything in the first hour," he says, before pausing for a moment to think this over. "Actually, in the first 10 or 15 minutes."
To demonstrate, Frind turns to his computer and begins fiddling with a free software program that he uses to manage his advertising inventory. While he is doing this, he carps about Canada’s high income-tax rate, a serious problem considering that Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, "All done."
All done? Are you serious? "The site pretty much runs itself," he explains. "Most of the time, I just sit on my ass and watch it." There’s so little to do that he and his girlfriend, Annie Kanciar, spent the better part of last summer sunning themselves on the French Riviera. 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. "Me and five girls," he says. "Rough life."
As Frind gets up to leave, I ask him what he has planned for the rest of the day. "I don’t know," he says. "Maybe I’ll take a nap."
But wait, there’s more!
Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills, but the industry has always been a friendly place for oddballs and opportunists. Industry pioneer Gary Kremen, the founder of Match and the man who registered the Sex.com domain name, cites rapper Ice Cube and the bank robber "Slick" Willie Sutton as important influences on his business philosophy.
Another pioneer, James Hong, co-founded Hot or Not, a site with a single, crude feature. Hong allowed users to upload pictures of themselves and have other users rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. Hot or Not was acquired for $20 million in cash last year by Noel Biderman’s company, Avid Life.
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 2.8 million members and revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.
The funny thing (well, to me at least) is that about nine years ago I seriously considered setting up a dating website myself, with exactly the same target audience as Ashley Madison. I planned to create some false profiles, fill them up with photos of girls who were on ‘Russian bride’ sites like LoveMe.com and ‘fix’ the database so that no matter where you said you were from you would have ‘matches’ from your local area, kind of like the newer dating sites that advertise on Facebook do these days.
However, I decided not to go ahead with the project because I had a problem with the ethics of it (and those who have known me for more than ten years would agree that ‘ethics’ wasn’t always my ‘strong suit’).
Good on Markus for not selling to Avid Life, good on him for creating a great nest egg for himself and whoever he chooses in the future, and good on Inc.com for interviewing him.
Now, back to the current ‘$0.10 per word’ writing project for me… [sigh]
Tip of the Akubra to Warren Whitlock for tweeting about this article.
