How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)At 1. Markus Frind leaves his apartment and heads to work. It's a short walk through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, but somehow the trek feels arduous. This is not because Frind is lazy.

Well, Frind is a bit lazy, but that's another matter. The problem is that he is still getting used to the idea of a commute that involves traveling farther than the distance between the living room and the bedroom.

Frind's online dating company, Plenty of Fish, is newly located on the 2. The gleaming space could easily house 3.

Frind strides in, it is eerily quiet - - just a room with new carpets, freshly painted walls, and eight flat- screen computer monitors. Frind drops his bag and plops himself down in front of one of them. He looks down at his desk. There's a $1. 80,0. It's from Video. Egg, a San Francisco company that is paying Frind to run a series of Budweiser commercials in Canada. Like most of his advertising deals, this one found Frind.

He hadn't even heard of Video. Egg until a week ago. But then, you tend to attract advertisers' attention when you are serving up 1. That's a lot of personal ads. Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U. S. Its traffic is four times that of dating pioneer Match, which has annual revenue of $3.

Until 2. 00. 7, Frind had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers, who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website while Frind handles everything else. Amazingly, Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. While he is doing this, he carps about Canada's high income taxes, a serious problem considering that Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $1. Then, six minutes 3. Frind closes his Web browser and announces, ? Are you serious? Frind would log on at night, spend a minute or two making sure there were no serious error messages, and then go back to sipping expensive wine.

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A year ago, they relaxed for a couple of weeks in Mexico with a yacht, a captain, and four of Kanciar's friends. This person is unknown and undistinguished. He hasn't gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four- year college for that matter, yet he is deceptively brilliant. He has been bouncing aimlessly from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious.

He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. In most stories, this is where the hard work begins - - the long hours, sleepless nights, and near- death business experiences. But this one is way more mellow. Frind takes it easy, working no more than 2. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year.

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Frind, 3. 0, doesn't seem like the sort of fellow who would run a market- leading anything. Quiet, soft- featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people and who seems to take up less space than his large frame would suggest. Those who know Frind describe him as introverted, smart, and a little awkward. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), he says, is .

He always says exactly what he thinks. Frind will spend hours hiding in the three- bedroom apartment he and Kanciar share, furtively flipping light switches, tapping on doors, and ducking into rooms to play on his girlfriend's fear of ghosts. Another memorable valentine involved the secret consumption of a massive quantity of hot peppers. Though his mouth was on fire, Frind calmly planted a kiss on Kanciar's lips and feigned ignorance as she went scrambling for water. Kanciar, a freelance Web designer who also helps out around Plenty of Fish, is a lanky blonde with an easy smile and a hearty laugh, which she often uses to try to get Frind to open up. When I ask him to talk about what he does with the 2. Frind struggles to answer and then looks helplessly at Kanciar.

She offers a few suggestions - - video games, ski trips, walks - - then tries to focus his energies. He seems perpetually lost in thought, constantly thinking about and studying the world around him. In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time.

His hometown, Hudson's Hope, is a cold, isolated place not far from the starting point of the Alaska Highway. Frind's parents, German farmers who emigrated just before his fourth birthday, bought a 1,2. The family's closest neighbors were a mile and a half away, and, apart from a younger brother, Frind had few friends. He rarely visits Hudson's Hope these days.

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When his parents want to see him, they make the 1. After graduating from a technical school in 1. Frind got a job with an online shopping mall. Then the dot- com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed startup to failed startup. For most of 2. 00. It was brutal. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression.

The topic, a perennial challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, and Frind thought it would be a fun way to learn how to sharpen his skills. He finished the hobby project in 2. Worried that he would again find himself unemployed, Frind decided to bolster his qualifications. He would devote a couple of weeks to mastering Microsoft's new tool for building websites, ASP. Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills, but the industry has always been a friendly place for oddballs and opportunists. Industry pioneer Gary Kremen, the founder of Match and the man who registered the Sex.

Ice Cube and the bank robber . Another pioneer, James Hong, co- founded Hot or Not, a site with a single, crude feature. Hong allowed users to upload pictures of themselves and have other users rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 1. Hot or Not was acquired for $2. Noel Biderman's company, Avid Life. Avid, which has also courted Plenty of Fish, derives most of its revenue from Ashley Madison, a dating website for married people (tag line: .

Have an affair. The site has 2. Unlike many online dating entrepreneurs, Frind didn't start Plenty of Fish to meet women - - or even because he had some vision of business glory. He suffers from hypersensitivity to light, and his eyes were not taking well to long days in front of a screen. Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude dating site, which he named Plenty of Fish.

It was desperately simple - - just an unadorned list of plain- text personals ads. But it promised something that no big dating company offered: it was free. The idea came to Frind in 2. Canada's then- largest dating site, Lavalife, hoping to meet women or at least to kill some time. Online dating seemed like a good idea, but he was startled to discover that the site charged users hefty fees. Donna Mcdonald Dating A Cougar there. I was like, I can beat these guys.

Since the mid- '9. Lavalife. Paid sites could afford to spend $3. A free site could afford to spend perhaps 4. Frind's answer to this problem was somewhat radical.

Rather than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a website that cost almost nothing to run and was aimed at the sort of people who wanted to browse a few profiles but weren't ready to take out their credit cards. In doing so, he had found a way to reach a large, underserved market.

Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets. Plenty of Fish grew slowly at first as Frind focused on learning the programming language and trolling internet forums for clues on how to increase traffic. There are a handful of half- literate posts from early 2. Frind asks basic questions, like . From March to November 2. Frind used his home computer as a Web server - - an unusual but cost- effective choice - - and spent his time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on the forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called Ad.

Sense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites. Frind made just $5 in his first month, but by the end of the year, he was making more than $3,3. He quit his job. Moreover, he has taken a path that seems at odds with the conventional wisdom about internet companies.

Most websites with as much traffic as Plenty of Fish would have by this point raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists, hired dozens of engineers and business- development types, and figured out a way to keep someone as unconventional as Markus Frind from making any major decisions. But if Frind's methods make him unusual, he is also a man of his times. In the past few years, a new technological ecosystem built around Google's dominance in Web search and its decision to offer powerful software tools at no charge, has changed the economics of doing business on the internet. Web analytic services that used to cost thousands of dollars a year are now free. Competitive data, once available to only the largest companies, can be had with only a few clicks on Compete.

Quantcast. com. And advertising networks, especially Ad. Sense, have made it possible, even preferable, for internet entrepreneurs to bootstrap their businesses without hiring a sales force and raising lots of money.

Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in 1. No one has used this ecosystem as effectively as Markus Frind, who has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown well beyond those of a typical one- person company. Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon.