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Sex and Dating in Vancouver - continued

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By Dee Hon published Dec 1, 2009

Jeff Minton

“PR doesn’t really help me grow or do anything anymore,” he explains matter-of-factly. “It’s on such a scale now that, you know, if you get a million people visiting the site a day, an extra 20 or 100 from reading an article is not going to matter. I just don’t feel like getting out of bed to do an interview.”

 Frind’s earnings have bought him his 2,800-square-foot condo. He drives a little BMW 3-series of a vintage he doesn’t recall. He takes the occasional vacation to places like Hawaii and Cuba with his fiancée, Annie Kanciar, whom he met as a coworker before starting his site. But more conspicuous consumption doesn’t attract him, even though many in his position would be collecting Ferraris or yachts. “There’s no real need to buy huge expensive things,” he says, quickly dismissing the mere thought. “What’s the point? Travel gets boring after a while,” he adds. The people closest to him seem similarly level-headed. Kanciar still works as a freelance graphic designer. Parents Erika and Eduard have electricity now but haven’t moved from Hudson’s Hope.

What about cashing out? “I don’t really feel like it. I own 100 percent of the company. There’s no other entrepreneur, really, that owns everything. I can write my own destiny.” And what would he do with more time on his hands, anyway? Take more walks around Stanley Park? Watch more TV? Eat more? No, despite his rather casual approach to what most people would consider work, Plenty of Fish has become a toy Frind enjoys playing with. “When I get bored I come in here for a few days,” he says in Plenty Of Fish’s headquarters. He will come in and fiddle with the site, tweaking and optimizing bits of code, trying to coax more users to join or to add a few points to members’ dating success rates.

“You look outside every now and then and you see what kind of impact it has on the world,” Frind says of the millions of lovers he’s connected over the years. “But on the computer screen it’s just a bunch of numbers. And you’re trying to make this column go higher than that column.”

Frind has never been single during his time running the site, so he takes an analytical approach to helping couples match up. “It’s not about being single or not that makes you better able to design things,” he says. “It’s really how users flow through the site and how does each user affect how every other user does something. It’s more of a math problem.”

 Plenty of Fish has beaten its competitors in part because it’s free, but also because compared to it, they are bloated and inefficient. Match.com has 340 employees and is burdened with all the committees and org charts and other roadblocks that corporate life entails. Frind can make changes to improve his site as quickly as he can type. Plenty of Fish is loaded with little features that make finding a partner easier. You can limit the age of people checking you out. You can see who’s been keeping an eye on you. He has designed algorithms that track users’ actions so he can predict what kind of people they would be interested in seeing. “Let’s say you go on the site and you message 20 nonsmokers,” he explains. “What’s the point of me showing you smokers?” He has algorithms based on members’ height, as well as other variables he prefers to keep private. Quietly, behind the scenes, his calculations optimize how people find love. And with millions of hopefuls on the site worldwide, Frind can instantly see how successful any new features or adjustments are. Sometimes he floats an idea, then takes it down within minutes.

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Filed Under

Dating, Markus Frind, Plenty of Fish