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Sex and Dating in Vancouver - continued

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By Dee Hon published Dec 1, 2009

Jeff Minton

What he doesn’t do is consult users or anyone else for ideas, saying he has “far too much” feedback from users. “Is any of it useful?” he asks. “You’ve got 10 people saying this; you got 10 people saying the opposite. The only feedback that I really look at is data.”

All the tweaking of his site has paid dividends. In the world of online matchmaking, users gravitate toward where the most potential mates are found. As the king of the hill, Plenty of Fish is only going to get bigger. What’s more, Plenty of Fish spends far less money than other sites do. Sites like Match.com and eHarmony.com each spend $100 million a year on advertising. They run thousands of costly servers even though their traffic is smaller than that of Plenty of Fish, which has only 11 machines.

Some might credit good fortune for his achievements, but not Frind. “There’s no such thing as luck,” he says. “It’s basically a combination of skill, especially being able to optimize, being able to debug things, and being able to constantly learn and adapt to change.” His market share he stole, inch by inch, from the big boys, until a few years after he started, he had become the biggest of them all.

“When I was first starting I used them as a goalpost,” he says. In a 2006 blog post entitled “How I Started a Dating Empire,” he revealed his original plan of attack: “I spent every waking minute when I wasn’t at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out ‘enemies’ and did everything I could to defeat them, which ment [sic] being bigger then [sic] them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind.”

“But now,” he says, “there’s nothing to compare against anymore because I am the biggest. So now it’s a matter of, ‘Well, I just want to optimize this more and get to the next level.’ It’s kind of like playing a video game. You want to get to the next level. But you don’t really know what the next level is. You just invent it as you go along.” (The analogy is apt. Frind likes to play strategy-intensive games like Age of Empires and Command and Conquer, and owns a sizable collection of board games like Risk and Settlers of Catan. Plenty of Fish, of course, has the unique charm of being a game only he can play.)

The next level Frind aims to conquer is the world of “scientific” dating research. Companies like Chemistry.com,
eHarmony.com, and Genepartner.com hire psychologists and scientists to design questionnaires and even DNA tests to help people find mates. Frind did hire a relationship psychologist to create “compatibility matching tools” for Plenty of Fish. Now he thinks he can do better with his own algorithms.

“The science of dating,” Frind scoffs, “is all BS.” Those much-heralded matching tools are only 15 or 20 percent better than chance. And does Frind think he can optimize and tweak his way to beat that score?

“I could double or triple it.”

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Filed Under

Dating, Markus Frind, Plenty of Fish