Heard of Markus's friend? The guy who created a dating website that grew to about 20 million visits per month? Here's a breakdown of his short story to success.
In 2003, Markus was working at a Vancouver-based tech firm. He feared getting fired from his job, so he decided to bolster his qualifications. He decided to master ASP. net, Microsoft's new website building tool, by building a difficult website in just a few weeks. And he stumbled upon a great idea. He was frustrated with the online dating sites available at the time like Match. com and wanted to create a better platform that was simple and user-friendly and he was on.
In the next few weeks, Frind built a basic dating site and named it Plenty of Fish in just a few hours a night. It was incredibly simple - just a plain-text list of personals - but it was unique in one key aspect: It was completely free, No big dating company was free. Previously while many free dating startups had struggled to compete with paid competitors like Lavalife, Frind's solution was radical. Instead of competing with Match .com, he created a low-cost site for users not ready to pay. his served an underserved market and gave paid sites a place to advertise with their huge budgets.
From March to November 2003, POF expanded from 40 members to 10,000He used his home computer as a web server, and tried to game Google with forum tricks. When Google introduced AdSense, he made just $5 in his first month. But by year-end, he was making over $3,300 a month by selling ads to paid dating sites interested in his unpaid members and he quit his job in early 2004. By 2006, Plenty of Fish was a top-five dating site in the US and the top site in Canada, serving 200 million pages each month. Frind was raking in $10,000 a day through AdSense. People were highly skeptical of this.
To prove that he was indeed making that much money, Frind posted a picture of a Google check to POF worth~ $800k - 2-month revenue. This implied his site was making $4.8M/year Some people called the picture fake, and some said it was a promotional stunt. Whatever it was, it worked. The buzz drove new users to the site and POF's growth skyrocketed, hitting 1B page views per month by 2007.
Frind set up his company so that he has to spend a maximum of 20 hours even on the busiest days.
"I get everything done in the first hour of the day," he said. Then he reconsidered and said, "Actually, in the first 10 or 15 minutes."
In 2003, this guy created a dating site as a side project. In 2015, he sold it for $575M. He kept all the money because he never raised a single cent. The sickest bootstrap story you've ever heard of.
blogpay
Total Comments: 0