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Sex and Dating in Vancouver

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By Dee Hon published Dec 1, 2009

Jeff Minton

Markus Frind got up around 9 this morning—but hey, who’s keeping track? Things were quiet until the phone rang at 10: workers arranging to swing by his Coal Harbour condo to see about the deck. While Frind waited for the tile guys, he did the following: “Surfed the web,” he recalls. “Looked at different things. Sat around. Had something to eat. Watched some TV.”

Around 3, he pocketed his BlackBerry and strolled the few blocks to his office, which happens to be the headquarters of the world’s largest Internet dating site. PlentyofFish.com occupies space on the 26th floor of a downtown office tower. An  unmarked entrance leads to the main room, where the company’s freshly hired staff of 11 sit in rows behind computers. Clear glass separates a bathroom-sized corner office and another room that’s empty but for a chair.

Today’s tranquil pace is typical for Frind, the 31-year-old multimillionaire founder, CEO, and sole owner of Plenty of Fish. He works as little as he desires—he’s been quoted as saying he works about 10 hours a week—yet he has all the material goods he could care for. And all this thanks to a company that he started out of his apartment in 2003 and that he ran part-time from home, alone, until 2007.

Over that time, some things have changed. Plenty of Fish now has 16 million users, earns tens of millions of dollars a year, and is growing at the pace of 80 percent a year. Web analytics firm Alexa ranks Plenty of Fish the 35th most trafficked website in Canada and the 100th in the United States. It serves up an astonishing 2.4 billion page views a month.

Yet some things haven’t changed at all. The site itself retains the appearance of a barely tamed DIY project, full of quirks and imperfections that would make most designers quake. The faces of would-be daters appear squished or stretched because Frind only recently bothered to add software that allows users to crop or resize their pictures when uploading. And it’s baldly apparent he has never thought to hire a copy editor. In bold letters, a banner atop the site’s home page shouts:

Do You Know What You “REALLY” Want?
Take our new psychological
assessment HERE!

Spelling errors compound grammatical ones. Capitalization rules seem borrowed from the LOLcat style guide. Yet despite such cosmetic flaws, Frind has, in his own energetically efficient way, succeeded where much-hyped and heavily financed giants like Facebook and Twitter have failed: he’s built a Web 2.0 company that earns profit. The last time Frind publicly revealed his bottom line, back in January 2008, he said he expected to net $10 million for the year. In doing so, he has single-handedly rewritten the rules about how to  succeed in the Internet age, besting corporate titans with billions of dollars at their disposal and armies of managers and geeks working 80-hour weeks. To top it off, he has helped revolutionize the way people use the Internet and the way people search for love.

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Filed Under

Dating, Markus Frind, Plenty of Fish