While traveling with my daughter for another medical school visit (she will graduate from Penn in May, then move on to med school next fall) I had a chance to catch up on some reading the past couple of days. Much of that involved following story links that readers like John in Chicago sent me.
I found a new article in Inc. Magazine to be especially interesting because it illustrates the unlimited opportunities that the Internet and a good website idea offers motivated entrepreneurs. The piece by Max Chafkin titled And the Money Comes Rolling In tells the amazing story of PlentyOfFish.com founder Markus Frind who takes in a reported $10 million a year from his wildly popular dating site, while often working less than one hour a day. Even more amazing, he essentially runs the entire operation by himself.
Chafkin wrote, “It’s a 21st-century fairy tale: A young man starts a website in his spare time. This person is unknown and undistinguished. He hasn’t gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter, yet he is deceptively brilliant. He has been bouncing, aimlessly, from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious.
He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. In most stories, this is where the hard work begins – the long hours, sleepless nights, and near-death business experiences. But this one is way more mellow. Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year.”
If you are looking for some inspiration at a time when the overall economy is plunging, Chafkin’s article about the Vancouver, Canada based entrepreneur should do the trick.
Speaking of entrepreneurs - Terence Chan – a long time domainer who was one of the first people I met online when I discovered domain forums in 2002 – has just put a unique portfolio of top notch .com media domains on the market. The group includes MediaDirectory.com, MediaForum.com, MediaBlog.com, MediaCalendar.com, MediaClassifieds.com, MediaReview.com, MediaJournal.com, MediaForecast.com, MediaAlerts.com and MediaResources.com. Chan has set up a cutting edge website at MediaCompanies.com to showcase the collection. It takes private domain marketing to a new level so if you are looking for ideas on how to display your names in their best light, you will want to check out what he has done there. [source]
And below is Markus Frind opinion might be useful related to that news on his blog :
1. I hardly call myself lazy or a sloth. I built the site in 2 weeks 5 years ago. Since then and even now all the user interaction happens in only a handful of pages. At the end of the day there are only so many ways in which you can reorder the search results. It’s like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, it accomplishes nothing.
2. The only way to grow a site once its running its self is to have brilliant ideas. Great ideas don’t come from sitting in front of the computer screen for 8 hours of the day wondering what to do next. You have to inspired or have a really deep understanding of what is going on. So a Brilliant idea may start a business but you need to have many many more brilliant ideas if you are going to go from one of many to an industry leader.
3. Opportunity/luck doesn’t come to you, You are the one that creates it. I debated with myself for weeks before posting the million dollar check, and I figured the best way of doing that was by creating a blog and give myself a voice. I knew my free site competitors where going to venture capitalists and asking for huge sums of money, and my competitors where claiming to be first movers etc. After posting that check their chances of raising money went to 0. The wall street journal called after reading that post. WSJ article came out, next day the Today Show Called. The next week my total US site traffic was up over 50% and kept on growing. In Fact many things i’ve written on my blog have made it into the national papers. Inc Magazine story was a result of my blog, and i’ll be going on a national talk show next week again as a direct result of my blog. I post a lot of things on my blog, many of which seem like bragging, but when reporters read that it gives them an idea for a story which is the whole point of a blog anyways.
4. Work smart not hard. If all you do is work hard making incremental improvements you are just like a hamster running in a wheel and never really getting anywhere. If you want to get somewhere you need to come up with great ideas, or something that is significantly better than the competition and execute on that. Then you go back again and do the same thing over and over. Far too many people think entrepreneurship is like an attendance award, where you can win just by showing up.
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