No Plan, No Capital, No Model...No Problem

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

I’ve moderated many panels in my time, and if I had to choose one that entrepeneurs should watch, this is it. If you’re one guy/gal or two guys/gals in a garage, it will push all the right buttons, and you’ll love it. However, if your plan is to raise several million dollars from venture capitalists and then hire five engineers, one vp of biz dev, one CTO, two testers, and a vp of marketing to ship a product in a year, you probably shouldn’t spend your time watching it.

The members of the five-person panel provided many good insights into starting and funding a company today.

Marcus Kazmierczak, vp of engineering, Maya’s Mom
Markus Frind, Founder, PlentyofFish.com
James Hong, Co-Founder, HotorNot.com
Dave Lu, CEO, Fanpop
Karen Northup, CEO and Founder, CoreFino

Watch it and reap!

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Here is the MP3 (46722.2K) file.

Comments

[jesus]

Well, it's immediately obvious that this is a one-man site! If this guy is raking in as much dough as he claims, you'd think he'd have the good sense to get a makeover.

But my guess is that this is just a publicity stunt to get more traffic.

The surprising thing, though, is that he hacked Google Adsense, which isn't supposed to work behind password-protected sites. Unless they changed their policy...

[tenassian]

Also: Guy, thank you and participants for this amazing seminar. We were seriously considering VC capital for our next project, but now realize the limitations outweigh the benefits for our next site.

[tenassian]

Reg, if you know something we don't... don't leave us hanging. Markus has been fairly transparent on his blog about what he's doing. How is he misleading people about his story?

[Margaret Howe]

Thank you for putting up the video! We are the guy & gal churning away in our living room & what inspiring stories for us to hear!

I'm also glad to have some validation that this can be done with 1 or 2 people on their own. Our friends & family think we have gone crazy to take this leap.

From my perspective, we'd be crazy not to.

[joe bruzzese]

Hey Guy,

Incredible selection to share with the world of budding entrepreneurs. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Thinking Forward I'm continually on the prowl for inspiring ideas that will drive my own business forward towards a more remarkable experience for my clients.

I anticipate returning often to check out what you have to share with us in the continued challenge of Changing the World.

Thanks for an incredible start to my day.

Regards,

Joe Bruzzese

[Forbrugslån]

Great inspiration! Thanks for the pick - Im aming for a similar situation in a few years from now! :)

[Daniel CerVentus]

This is what is means to be an entrepreneur my friends. I've been challenging myself to build business without external funding and it has been an interesting and profitable journey.

From using creative ways to get income and to bartering for services, its always a such great feeling when you stumble upon a solution.

You tend to be the most creative when you are stuck in a corner and you looking for ways to get out. As its said, necessity is the mother of invention.

Here's to the crazy ones.

Guy@ Great job moderating as usual and thanks for the post.

James Hong@ Turning your biggest weakness into a plus, is really inspiring and I think more entrepreneurs should have your outlook.

[Henk]

These cases give the impression that every web app can be made in 3 weeks by one person and all others that need 4 programmers and a tester are fools.

I would imagine that something really useful and innovative like http://www.plaxo.com/ would require much more than that I would never make fun of them because of that

[Bloggrrl]

Thanks for posting the video. Chances are, that's a resource I would not have otherwise found.

Strangely, one of the first partnership offers I have received is from a dating service, lol. I can see it, somehow.

[Matthew]

Trying to change the world too, check out how.
www.matthewsblog.waynesborochurchofchrist.org

[Douglas Karr]

Was that between $5 AND $6 million? Or between $5 million and $6 million?

;)
If it's the former, my site does that well, too!
Doug

[TG]

Okay, I visited PlentyofFish.com's home page. I would be very grateful if any propellerheads out there can explain how it might be possible to host such a site on one server, which at quick glance appears to be resource-intensive with photos, and according to the page, 51,000 people connected at the time I visited the site.

Unlike a social networking site, this site is basically a huge free public database. Maybe this is what keeps server demand lower because people are not creating new pages; they are for the most part creating a new "row" of data in the DB for themselves and/or doing DB queries to find other people....?

Oh, and I saw a "Adult dating" link which obviously is NSFW, and that link alone gives me an understanding where a good chunk of Mr. Frind's $$ comes from.

[mynameishere]

The "one server" is just serving pages. I believe he has a cluster of SQLServer instances running as well.

[John Treadway]

Guy -

There's no such thing as "the way" to start a company. HotOrNot and PlentyofFish could be done with one or two guys for nothing. If you're selling to businesses and you aren't VC backed or have a strong balance sheet out of the gate, you're at a disadvantage. Karen's business needs capital to scale. She needs sales, marketing and R&D investment well beyond a web 2.0 social community widget site on Facebook. She can get a bit of the way by herself, but at some point she's going to need more cash.

[nate]

It costs $100 to incorporate

Really? I'd like to know where to go that does incorporations with stock options etc for $100 that's not a fraud. Referrals for that kind of service would be nice if anyone has experience with them.

[Jon]

Good interview and panel, they all seem to realize how much of a lottery win they have achieved and are appreciative of their achievements.

Entrepreneurship is like any other career, you can get lucky and become a millionaire or work for somebody else and win the lottery... as are most things in life.

Jon

[Reg Nordman]

Always a great blog Guy. Too bad that you were also sucked in by the Markus/Plenty of fish Reality Distortion Field. Skyliner is right, the facts can not stand up. Since I live in Vancouver, I know what really goes on in Marcus world. Its too bad that he sticks with that misleading story as he still does good volumes and benefits with decent low level revenue. Once again, if it sounds to good to be true...don't forget your spidey senses.

[Jay]

skyliner - if you have the web site developed properly and you keep the amount of queries down significantly (or remove them altogether, which would be the best option) then your site needs less to host it. If he is running one query a page and your running 10, whilst he's delivering 10kb sized pages and your delivering 300kb worth of data each page ... then these things become easier for his server than yours.

Guy - thanks for posting this up. It was an excellent video to watch and you did a great job moderating the panel.

[skyliner]

Guy, the story of Marcus and PlentyofFish.com sure is inspiring. But details sound, ehm, fishy. A dating site built on ASP.NET with 12 billion pageviews a year still running on a single server with a single person in charge? Are you sure you've got all the facts right?

I'm curious because we are running a regional social network with two sites that together get roughly the same amount of pageviews as you indicate plentyoffish.com is getting (the bigger of the two sites ranked ~No. 90 on the Alexa global site list a month ago).

It currently takes ~60 servers in two countries to keep both sites alive and well. The setup scales nicely and does not require a large technical team, but still it is more like 5-6 people (server admins, DB admins and developers) rather than one. And yeah, social networking functionality taxes the servers much more severely than that of a basic dating service - but still a single server serving 12 billion pageviews per year sounds more like an ad for HP or SUN than a real world case. I'm puzzled.

[Patrick Kerr of PTRADES]

yes! this reminds me of my partners(karel baloun of FACEBOOK) new book called "Inside Facebook" check it out...a must read for etrepreneurs!!!!!!!!!!!

[Tara]

Excellent advice!

In addition to talking about gadget and luxury products and services on my blog, maybe I ought to start a dating service so my gadget and luxury lovers can meet each other!

Just kidding, of course. But then again...