Markus Frind

MARKUS FRIND

Net Worth :$10 million USD
Place of Living : Vancouver

Markus Frind, 32, is the CEO and Founder of PlentyofFish Media Inc., graduated in 1999 from British Columbia Institute of Technology with a diploma in Computer Systems Technology. Over the next few years, he worked for several dot.com companies as the number of them in Vancouver began to wane. Markus ended up working at a company as a website and database administrator where he found and fixed errors. Markus is basically a one-man band running a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is two and a half times bigger than digg.com. Digg.com gets 200 Million page views per month, but Markus says plentyoffish gets 500 Million. He also started experimenting with search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and incorporating them into the site. Gradually, it morphed quite unintentionally into an online dating center.

In 2003, Frind had to learn ASP.NET and to better learn the language, he built a dating website. The free dating website quickly grew in Canada and then spread, via word of mouth, to the U.K., Australia, and the United States. To keep the site free, Plentyoffish began using AdSense to generate revenue. The first cheque arrived in July 2003 and was for $1,100 USD. In 2004, PlentyofFish became a full-time business for Frind. He ran the site independently until 2007, when he began hiring other employees at his new Vancouver headquarters.

“There’s plenty of prior art here. Follow the path of Hotornot and Adult Friend Finder and don’t talk about your revenue until you’re virtually retired.”