Plenty of fish in the sea? You bet there are, and Markus Frind’s PlentyofFish.com now claims to have about 600,000 of them logging in daily to check for messages and find love. Since this 100% free dating site was created in 2003, it has grown quickly to become what Frind claims is one of the largest dating sites in the world. In total, they have upwards of 7 million registered users, and 9.3 million user postings in some 200+ forums, and more than $10 million in paid advertising. And the site is still run by Frind out of his Vancouver, Canada home.

Frind created the site because, in his words, “I was tired of seeing corporate dating sites preying on singles. Finding love is not about handing over a monthly fee to a dating site that only cares about making sure you stay another month to pay them again.”

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why did you first choose the Microsoft Platform?

Markus Frind: I was basically jumping jobs every six months. And I only knew ASP—I learned it in college. It was simple and easy to use, so I just kept with it. But I knew it was going out of style and I needed to learn a new programming language. The dating site was the hardest thing I could think of making, so I just built it as an exercise to teach myself ASP.NET.

With ASP.NET, I was able to scale to millions of page views per hour and support 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent users at once, where classic ASP only did about 10,000. That had a dramatic effect and just allowed me to scale it big time. It sort of blew up from there and tons of people are now using it. We’re now serving up 1.3 billion page views a month, with about 600,000 users logging in every day to check messages and things like that. Every other site this size needs 100 servers or so, whereas I’m able to do it on three Web servers, or even one. In fact, until August 2007, I was running it on one—but today I have redundancies and backups in place if one goes down.

MSUZ: We understand that you don't charge users for this service, it is a 100 percent free dating site, so what's your business model?

Frind: I started adding a bit of advertising on it, and it took off from there. Different ad networks started appearing and I started using them—services like Yahoo!’s Blue Lithium and Right Media and Google’s Ad Sense, some direct affiliate deals. In fact, I really have no idea who is advertising on my site, I’m just joining these different networks and letting them all sort it out.

MSUZ: Are you still running this from your home with no employees?

Frind: I hired someone in September 2007 to help out with customer service. I basically do everything else. Although I do have volunteers who seem to actually enjoy helping out for free. We get close to 50,000 new photos every day, and volunteers help us evaluate and check these before we add them to the site.

MSUZ: So the one Microsoft technology that was most critical to your success was ASP.NET?

Frind: Yes—by far, ASP.NET was most critical, but there are other Microsoft technologies I use such as SQL Server. But ASP.NET allowed me to scale at a fraction of the cost of the servers required for things like Apache. It was costing me a few thousand bucks with the Microsoft solution and I knew that the others would cost me $100,000 or more because of all the servers I’d need to buy, and all the people required to maintain it all. And on top of that, I would need all this space in a data center—you have to pay for the power, the hardware, the space, the people, etc., it ends up being an astronomical cost.

MSUZ: Are you looking at other Microsoft technologies?

Frind: We’ve basically got a Web site, so there aren’t too many other things I need, but I may look at Silverlight at some point. Most of the other things I might look at will be back-end things that users would not see.

MSUZ: So what's your future plan for this company?

Frind: I have to hire people, maybe get an office. The industry is changing so dramatically. Microsoft is buying all these advertising networks, and Google is buying a bunch of them, so pretty soon, they are going to have a self-service platform that will allow companies like mine to make money without having a huge sales force and all the infrastructure needed to maintain it—in fact, this is basically what I am already doing successfully. I think my company represents the new way of doing things. Sites like Match.com and eHarmony are spending millions a month on advertising—and they are not growing as quickly as PlentyofFish.com. We are doubling year over year all based on word of mouth. Both Match.com and eHarmony have hundreds of employees—our site is bigger and we have two employees.

Markus Frind's Background

Markus Frind is the creator of PlentyOfFish.com, which currently ranks as the top dating site in Canada (comScore) and the top dating site in the UK (hitwise) and the second largest in the U.S.A. (hitwise). Markus originally created the site in 2003 as a project to teach himself ASP.NET. Most of the day-to-day tasks required to run PlentyofFish have been automated and the site has been engineered to grow by word of mouth, rather than through traditional online advertising spends. Frind has a computer degree from the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

For more information, visit PlentyofFish.com online.