PlentyofFish.com is a 100 percent free online dating site created by big fish Markus Frind that has made some waves in the blogosphere this week. A recent Markus Frind interview transcript was posted by Andrew Johnson and it drive home the point that a successful web site can be run with limited resources - bootstrapping if you will. Markus Frind runs one of the largest dating sites on the web with the help from his wife.
According to the interview PlentyofFish.com has been raking in $10,000 a day in Google ad revenue via the Adsense program. Wow, that is $300,000 a month on contextual ads! It wasn't always that successful though, Markus it built up slowly from $40 a day in 2003. Markus's strategy was to stay under the radar so that no one cloned his service as he organically grew the dating service by blocking Alexa and comScore from tracking the site. Dave Evans may have called it early in his PlentyofFish.com post from back in January 2005.
The story of PlentyofFish.com loosely reminded me of the way that Craig Newmark and Craigslist rose to prominence - organically and with limited resources. It is stories like these that give entrepreneurs and product developers alike something to keep striving for.
Do you know of a similar story you would like to share?
