ARCAST.TV — Aug 3 — Ron Jacobs of ARCast TV, a production of the Microsoft Architecture Strategy Team, traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia to interview Markus Frind, the founder of and one-man show behind PlentyofFish.
Ron: Tell me about PlentyofFish.com.
Markus: It’s a free online dating site written in all Microsoft technologies, like ASP.NET and Windows Server.
Ron: Is it doing well?
Markus: We hit 33.5 million page views yesterday on just the site itself and about another million in the forums, so it’s probably one of the biggest sites in the world.
Ron: How’d you pull that off with just one web server and a couple of database servers?
Markus: If you break down 33 million page views a day at peak, you’re only looking at about 5-600 page views a second, which isn’t that difficult to pull off. The most important thing is RAM. The more RAM you have, the better. And as long as you keep database access fast, then you have no issues.
Ron: Most dating sites have fees, but yours is free. How does that work?
Markus: I make money off advertising. Match probably makes $3-400 million a year from subscriptions, but because I don’t have to pay any employees, I can make a decent living for myself.
Ron: Do a few ads on the side of a page really pay?
Markus: When you have 30 million page views a day, you can make money doing anything.
Ron: How do you decide which new features to add to the site?
Markus: I usually just come up with one, put it on the site, and wait to see what the user response is. If it’s great, then I improve it a bit more. If it sucks, I take it down.
Ron: What do you do about site outages?
Markus: If the site goes down, it’s only for like a minute or so. The biggest issues for me have been DNS-related ones. But it’s a free site, so people expect downtime.
Ron: How do you analyze the market without a business analyst?
Markus: I don’t need to hire a bunch of people to tell me common sense. Sometimes I go to other sites to see what they’re doing. I mean, chances are these sites with a couple hundred employees must be doing something right.
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“I don’t need to hire a bunch of people to tell me common sense.” Great comment. There is this thing called a chasm, Markus, and it’s right in front of you. Not many companies cross it armed with only common sense.
“I don’t need to hire a bunch of people to tell me common sense.” Great comment. There is this thing called a chasm, Markus, and it’s right in front of you. Not many companies cross it armed with only common sense.