Solo Plenty of Fish Founder in Bootstrapped Financing Feature

Markus Frind, the solo founder of Plenty of Fish, has been profiled by entrepreneur.com and commended for his bootstrapped financing.

Frind sold the dating platform in 2015 for $575 million.

When he started the company in 2003, he was working as a developer and had little income to spare. He was, however, a skilled programmer.

His ability with ASP.NET saved him from incurring steep development costs, and he was quickly able to start taking registrations.

By 2007, Plenty of Fish was outperforming Match.com significantly, hosting over four times the amount of traffic.

In spite of this, Frind was running the business with just four people on his team.

By 2008, the site was making upwards of $10 million per annum and was being featured in The New York Times.

Frind noted that he barely had to advertise POF, with under 2% of his traffic coming from Google. Word of mouth spread the product, again reducing costs.

Operating the site was straightforward, and Frind says that he barely had to spend one hour per day at work. He often started work at 10am.

By the time he had heard about Venture Capital funding, he was too wealthy to have any use for it, the article notes.

Entrepreneur.com also profiles FastSpring, an all-in-one merchandising, ecommerce and fulfilment solution that helps businesses sell online digital products, and serial entrepreneur Connor Gillivan, who has started companies including drop-shipping service Portlight and hiring platform Freeeup.

Read more here.