Everyday, thousands of new bloggers fire up new blogs with aspirations of millions of dollars and little work at home.
They’ve read the latest from our good friend Everton Blair, the 17 year old .COM millionaire, or the out of work ASP programmer with a simple idea and a lot of time.
What did Ben Affleck say in Boiler Room?
“You become an employee of this firm, you will make your first million within three years. I’m gonna repeat that – you will make a million dollars.”
Well, Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish.com has done exactly that and then some. The difference is, he didn’t do it illegally, he did it alone, with just one programming language, three servers, and whole lot of help from the creators of ASP.net, Microsoft. Here is a short video, from American TV, on the largest ‘one manned’ website in the world.
What is surprising to me, is that Microsoft isn’t touting this guy more. He is surprising not only the ASP community, but the entire programming community in general. He is raking in, rumor has it, $5,000,000+ in yearly revenue, he works on the site less then 2hrs/day and he gets, according to him, updwards of 1 Billion page views/month.
While much larger pay sites, such as Match.com or Eharmony.com are setting up hundreds of servers, paying hundreds of staff and forcing people to pay at minimum $30.00/month, PlentyOfFish.com has done all of this for FREE, with no staff and a lot of help from Google Adsense. Truly a prime example of success in this Web 2.0 world.
What are your thoughts of Markus’s success? Anybody who isn’t jealous of his success?


