One-person companies are earning upward of $1 million in revenue annually. How do they do it? With high-speed Internet connectivity, mobile apps, automation, and a little help from their customers.
Markus Frind has been getting a lot of attention lately. He’s been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and numerous other mainstream consumer and business publications. Much has been made of the fact that Frind only works part-time — by his estimate, only 10 hours a week — to keep his free online dating site, Plenty of Fish, up and running.
The site was founded in 2003, and, according to Frind, is netting more than $10 million annually from advertising and affiliate marketing revenue. In a typical display of showmanship, Frind last year posted a photo of a nearly-$1 million check from Google AdSense for just a two-month period (Google confirmed the check was real.)
Automation is key to Frind’s success. He wrote the site using .Net, which gives users the tools to post their profiles online themselves, without handholding. He also created an algorithm that allows him to automatically separate legitimate forum posts from spam.
But Frind also depends heavily on his user base. Volunteers pour over the more than 50,000 photographs of new members that are submitted every day, and weed out the ones that seem suspicious or which involve nudity. Additionally, Frind noticed several years ago that in his user forums people had started rating and voting on the photos of other members.
At the same time, he was constantly being contacted by users who were reporting offensive or inappropriate threads or posts that they felt should be deleted. Frind realized he could spend all his time moderating such activities. Instead, he created an automated system to allow users to vote on everything from whether a string should be deleted to ranking other users to deciding if a member photo is of too poor a quality, or too obscene, to be posted. “I allow people to vote on whether something should be deleted. If seven out of 10 respondents want it gone, it’s gone,” Frind says.
“Like with any job, it’s not an issue of how much you work, but how smart you work,” he said.
“This is pretty much a business that runs itself,” he said. The fact that technology costs are dropping so fast has made his business scalable and flexible enough to accommodate the kind of growth necessary to remain competitive with competitors like Match.com. “This wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago,” he said.
Photo by National TV Canada.
Solo Entrepreneur: Markus Frind
May 9, 2008 by Rich | 5 Comments
In One-Person, Self-employed, Small Biz
Grace Freebush on May 9th, 2008 at 10:55 am
“Like with any job, it’s not an issue of how much you work, but how smart you work,” he said.
He’s really someone to look up to. Being smart with information technology means gold nowadays. My sister is currently finishing her degree in software technology. She used to tell me that it is really hard but once you begin to master every complex process then you will be surprised that it will begin to work for you while you just sit and relax.
David on May 9th, 2008 at 10:58 am
It pays huge to be a computer geek. Expect many more Bill gates to come!
business on May 9th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I think he should’ve kept that information to himself. Hungrier, smarter, sharper, genius marketers, and crazy programmers with more resources are gonna attempt to devise an elaborate plan to take a piece of his pie.
Rusell on May 11th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I don’t why he wanted to go public. People, corporate giants, hackers, may just go after him, considering that he’s the only person running his own business.
vinu shankar on May 15th, 2008 at 10:18 am
I think more than his tech knowledge, his ‘auto-pilot’ business model is amazing!