sufac.com

I’ve been reading about Markus Frind, the founder of plentyoffish.com, and I’m impressed. He built up a lean dating website and now does nearly nothing. He has millions of members and gets billions of page views, in fact he’s near top 10 sites in the world for traffic. Best of all, he now takes $5million home of the $10 million in revenue and works less than an hour a day.

Now lets be serious, when he set up the site he was working a job and building the site at night a few hours at a time. So there was more work at the start. But now he literally works very few hours. Sometimes 10-15 minutes a day to make sure nothing serious is going wrong. Peak work is 20 hours a week. So you must be thinking he has a ton of employees. Nope. Just three. And they pretty much just make sure there’s no spam or nude photo’s.

All of this comes down to business model design. He didn’t focus on high powered high feature sites that charge fees. In fact he did the exact opposite. Took a service that usually charged a fee, the dating website, and created an easy site for free. Then he put on adsense (google advertising – available to anyone) and bang he’s making money.

There’s very few sites that make it this big, but I have to say the business model is very appealing. Start a simple site while working, earn ad revenue instantly and see if it grows to the point where you can work on it full time. Or in Markus’ case, a few minutes a day.

So take a book from Markus Frind’s library and build a rock solid business model. More time and hard work doesn’t always mean the best payoff.

-Craig Sharkton