I read an interesting article about the founder of the dating website PlentyOfFish.com, Markus Frind. His Website gets about 1.6 Billion pages views per month, and has a yearly revenue of around $10,000,000 dollars. He has two employees. He works about an hour a day. Sometimes less.
Usually when a web company is turning this kind of profit, they have an entire fleet of staff to keep the ship afloat. Markus has taken a less customary, but kind of genius approach: keep it as stupidly simple as possible, rarely change anything, and make it all free to use. He wrote the code for the site himself, does any site maintenance himself, if it's needed at all, and has two employees who remove spam from the site, and any profile pictures with nudity.
- Markus Frind of Vancouver, BC
Markus Frind's business plan goes like this: pick a market in which the competition charges money for their services, build a dead simple free website, and pay for it using Google Adsense.
I have always had a lot of interest in building an internet based business, whether it be for selling a product or providing a service, and I always had the mindset that the marker of success was when you had a multitude of employees working with you and the matching payroll to boot. Now I am questioning that whole logic, and think that the more that I can do myself, the simpler I can keep the whole process, and the more profitable the business could be in the long run.
Now, the way the Frind has managed to run his business may be a one in a million spot of luck, or he may be on to something. Either way it at least gives me some inspiration that when it comes down to it, if I really wanted to, there isn't much that I couldn't do on my own. And hey, maybe being a team player isn't all it's cut out to be.
Link to the article at INC Magazine Here
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