Okay, let’s talk about Marcus Frind now. He is the founder and the CEO of the famous free online dating website, PlantyofFish.com that boasts of around 1 million relationships a year. Now, that’s some big numbers!
Anyway, it is not that unimaginable with plentyoffish.com considering the worldwide wild popularity of this plain Jane dating website. But how did it come to life?
Marcus tells us that one day at work, he was introduced to internet dating by one female employee (uuuuuuu!). Perhaps he lost his chance with that employee, but surely he grabbed another chance, which made his life.
He was not really impressed with all the paid dating services. Fuck ‘em! He told the colleague that he is going to create something that is totally FREE, whoa! And he did.
Well, in the beginning, it was only an index site and was abandoned into the online desert for months. But when he understood the level of stability at his workplace is even weaker than that in the national stock exchange, he decided to learn some programming and work on developing the dating site. At that point, the site was an ugly gremlin.
But still by the end of March 2002, it had a steady growth of around 2-5 percent growth in the number of members in the site. By God’s grace, it didn’t crash upon his home machine.
Around the end of June, Google came up with Adsense and that was the only source of income for plentyoffish.com. He made around 5 bucks the first month but that provided inspiration to go on with what he was doing. Another affiliate program probably made him under 50 bucks per month. Well…
Anyway, one feature at a time, within a few minutes…it was not that hard to update the site, every day after coming back from the job. But till then, Marcus says that he didn’t really do anything special and the site went viral on its own. How could he have competed with Yahoo Personals, LavaLife and such? But it was worth noting that he was still not getting enough clicks from the organic searches. He complained about it here.
So, around October that year, after about eight months of running the free online dating site (phew! the one and only plenty o' fish) from his home, he left his job, bought a little server and moved the site to some hosting provider. And the rest is history.
The dating market was big and this person just stuck to what he was doing. He didn’t know anything about SEO, SEM, SMM…not even about venture capital. He believes that it shows how anyone can do anything if we put our mind, body and soul to where's there's planty of fish.
It is all about how much you want something.
Great job, Marcus!
_______________________________________________________ Great job, Marcus!
You can reprint this post in your website or blog and link back to my home page, Modern Men's Online Dating Guide blog - Ron C.
No comments:
Post a Comment