2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
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Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#2I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success.
Why? Anybody know?
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#3I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success. Why? Anybody know?
Maybe it's the memorable name?
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#4I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success. Why? Anybody know?
Because it's free as in beer, and it's not intimidating or filled with Flash like some of the others (the "good enough" design derided by web design snobs).
But it's still a dating site, and even the best, most functional dating sites aren't very good. A friend of mine signed up at plentyoffish, he lives in an urban area and is reasonably attractive.
What he found was a lot of women who like to chat and email, but don't want (or can't) go out on actual dates.
Dating is a lot like teaching. Those who can, do. Those who can't habituate dating sites.
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#5I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success. Why? Anybody know?
Don't underestimate the power of one person with a passion and determination.
I think plentyoffish got some good press early on and that got it the momentum. Plentyoffish is the only free dating site I've heard of, so there's a big reason to go there instead of other free dating sites.
The site design is actually pretty good IMHO, and sort of suggests that you're going to quickly get what you want to see and not a ton of flashy useless stuff.
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#6I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success. Why? Anybody know?
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Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#7I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success. Why? Anybody know?
Early SEO (when it meant a lot more than it does now) + the network effect. An incredible success, and as strong an outlier as ever exists.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-a...
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#8He's done unbelievably well, apparently in 2006 he was making $10k a day from adsense, you can only wonder what that is now.
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#9To people who wonder how a company like this might happen, here's my take.
A developer constantly talks about his company (that also happens to cater to software developers/hackers) under the pretenses of how well a small software company is growing, which attracts software developers/hackers to read about it from blogs and hear speeches mentioning it at startup conferences, causing them to join the site to see how the site actually works, play around, and report how well they liked the site on their own blogs. This increases the userbase, which of course increases growth, which leads to more blog posts and speeches about how fast the company is growing (same content, but different and much more impressive numbers every month, so the story only continues to get more and more interesting.) Eventually, word grows about it and regular folks start caring after hearing about the user numbers. Mainstream media becomes interested, causing more growth, and so on.
The approach for creating something for fellow hackers, growing the user base, and telling fellow hackers information about how well it's doing for marketing purposes is the approach taken by 37Signals, FogCreek (JoelOnSoftware), and some less known but up and coming startups. Creating something for fellow hackers has been described by Paul in his essays. One young company that I can think of right now that is good at this cycle is GitHub.
The key is to be the one who starts something, not the one who keeps reading and reading about others'.
Re: 2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
#10This is an atrocity.