A Techie Took On Match And Other Dating Sites With A Venture Built On Basic Business Principles — And It Netted Him Over $500 Million

What a difference two dozen years can make! For Markus Frind, it has meant amassing a huge fortune that runs up to over $500 million dollars.

Trailblazers such as Frind leave us with inspiring tales that are worth recounting, imbibing and emulating.

Who’s Frind: Frind is a Canadian entrepreneur and computer science graduate whose maiden venture is the online dating website Plenty of Fish (POF). POF was set up in March 2003 and, until 2008, was run by Frind himself. As the site’s user base swelled to 15 million and revenue increased to $10 million by 2008, Frind hired his first employee.

By 2014, POF was making revenue of $100 million per year. When Frind sold the company in 2015, it made an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $90 million.

“All of this was done without ever taking a single investor dollar or having any other shareholders/partners,” his LinkedIn profile notes. 

Riding on the success of POF, Frind negotiated a deal to sell the company to Match Group, Inc. MTCH in July 2015 for $575 million. At the time, Match was a subsidiary of IAC, Inc. IAC, a holding company that owns multiple brands across 100 countries. Today, Match is a separately traded public company, with subsidiaries that include OkCupid, Match and Tinder.

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The Inspiration & The Success: Frind was struck with the idea of setting up a dating website while working for a Vancouver-based tech firm,  Luke Sophinos, a fellow tech entrepreneur, said in a threaded tweet that highlighted the POF founder on Saturday.

Frind, who decided to go with the time-and-tested business idea of improving upon an existing product or service, was reportedly unhappy and frustrated with existing dating sites. He, therefore, aimed to create a better platform that was user-friendly. Frind initially set up POF as a basic dating website that was “incredibly simple”  and had a list of proposals in plain text. At a time when none of the big dating companies offered their services for free, Frind decided to go with a free model and gave paid sites a place to advertise. 

Frind's initial investment in his project ran into challenges, as he used a home computer as a web server and tried to leverage Google’s AdSense. As things picked up at POF, however, the entrepreneur quit his job in early 2004 to focus on his brainchild. By 2006, POF was among the top five dating sites in the U.S. and ranked as the top in Canada. In 2007, the site hit 1 billion page views every month, Sophinos said. 

Photo: Phillip Jeffrey via flickr

In summarizing POF's rise, Sophinos noted that the five things that differentiated the dating site from its competitors were its free business model, receptiveness to user feedback, SEO optimization and automation. 

Time Pressure? Frind’s Tale Tells a Different Story: In setting up POF, Frind forced himself to spend a maximum of 20 hours even on the busiest days, Sophinos said, adding that Frind got things done in the first hour of the day. Although not everyone may have this luxury, Frind's story proves that, by strategizing and executing well, one can overcome time pressure. 

What’s Frind Up To These Days: Frind’s LinkedIn profile shows that he continued to be the CEO of POF until nearly a year after its sale to Match. Since November 2015, he has been serving as the president of “Find Properties,” an investment company that manages a billion-dollar portfolio of real estate, public market equities and private equity.

Frind is also the director of Cymax Group, which sells furniture online and helps companies with logistics through frieghtclub.com. In addition, he runs a winery.

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