In my earlier post about POF, I said I?d edit that post after I chatted with Markus, well after chatting with him, I knew it needed a post of its own.
First off, Markus is awesome to chat with. Nice guy, we think we have met face-to-face?NorthernVoice is most likely, and easy to chat with. He strikes me as the kind of ?normal guy? who is just very humble about what he?s done. What has he done?
He launched POF in 2003. Today it earns north of $5 million a year, 600-700k relationships started (including my current one ? I?m not just a blogger I (was) a client!) and it?s all still run out of his spare bedroom.
He is hosting POF with Vancouver-based Peer1 using just 10 servers! Get this, he just added a second webserver. He was serving billions of page views on one server! Holey smokes!
Markus also noted that between a combination of his own skill at tuning the ads on the site and the nature of the audience, he is earning more money per page than Facebook! How about that. Facebook, who are getting trounced for not having very effective ads, are getting trounced guy a lone entrepreneur who did it all with one webserver.
Given the scale of the site, and the number of users I had to ask about support. He really is the sole employee. Markus said that he has automated bots handle a lot of it and what automation doesn?t handle the user community handle things like pictures that include nudity (not allowed on the site). The forums were very active when I was there. People were helping each other with tips on profiles, online safety, and users to avoid, etc.
This is an entrepreneur?s dream, create something cool, do it from home, and make it widely successful. Yes, I did ask, Markus gets buy-out offers every week, nothing close to make him jump thought.
This is just a taste of that Canadian start ups are all about. Just wait until I clear my backlog of content!
Technorati Tags: Plenty of Fish, Markus Frind, online dating, Vancouver startup
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