INNOBLOG

A couple of years ago I first heard the story of Markus Frind, the founder of dating website PlentyofFish.com who, it was said, worked about an hour a day on his site and was making $10,000 a month. That was annoying enough. Now, a recent profile of Frind in Inc. magazine says Frind works an hour a day and brings in $10 million a year.

I bring this up not to annoy you, but to point out that Frind has built his fortune mainly by following the disruptive playbook. His “blueprint,” as he described it to Inc.: “Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense.”

We would add, find a market with significant amounts of nonconsumption. PlentyofFish.com is aimed at nonconsumers of sophisticated dating sites – people who people who want to browse profiles but are not ready to purchase. The unintended side effect of this was that PlentyofFish.com also turned out to be the “perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets.”

Frind is a master of resource constraints. He uses many fewer servers than most database-driven sites with his traffic, only has three employees, and resists adding features. He has even profited by *not* making what would to others be obvious improvements to PlentyofFish.com: “On a site this big and this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes might affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, might actually hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users are compelled to click on people's profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads.”

Finally, Frind has written code that tracks what users do and serves them profiles based on the preferences their search patterns suggest, not on what they say they want. Expressing a preference in your profile for blondes but spending your time searching for brunettes would get you more profiles for brunettes. In this way Frind indirectly listens to his customers. He doesn’t believe in directly listening to them. He told Inc., "I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches."

The disruptive playbook doesn’t account for all of Markus Frind’s success – the Inc. article makes him sound like the rare person who’s managed to make his personality quirks work for him and not against him. But PlentyofFish.com is a great example of how one person can master disruption and benefit handsomely.