5 ms·
At some point scale will require you to hire, at least a few people, if you're really successful. But two examples that I can think of are Markus Frind (Plenty
by jimminy 9y ago
At some point scale will require you to hire, at least a few people, if you're really successful. But two examples that I can think of are Markus Frind (Plenty of Fish) and Markus Persson (Minecraft).
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Markus Frind is probably the biggest. He spent 5 years (2003-2008) working on Plenty of Fish, and at that point it was bringing in about $5M/yr and had 3 employees.
When the site sold in 2015 for $575 million it was 70 employees, but he still owned 100% of the company.
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Markus Persson would be another possible option, for the first $10-20M that Minecraft brought in he was the only person (aside from a contracted musician). And then for a while after that, it was him and his friend who was hired to manage the business side so he could focus on the programming work.
- royjacobs 9y agoHmm, so if I apply some deep learning training techniques it seems like the takeaway from this is: Change your first name to Markus.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dkns 9y agoCorrect. Because as we know correlation = causation.
- NietTim 9y agoHighly relevant chart, and subsequent proof, for this: http://i.imgur.com/3B0pt3M.png http://i.imgur.com/3B0pt3M.png
- IanCal 9y agoYou may also like this huge collection of spurious correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- eriknstr 9y agoI like the top comment for that on imgur. >This could be telling the story of IE users being murdered out of existence.
- sireat 9y agoHow did Plenty of Fish grow at first? I have deep respect for Markus Frind being able to scale so well. Still I feel there is some missing ingredient in the early growth of PoF. What really happened before the big monthly 500k Adsense checks started coming in? Cue eBay(it was not Pez dispensers, it was to large extent newsgroups spam), cue AirbnB, cue Facebook in Harvard years, cue every "growth hacking" story. There is always some missing piece in the success story(ala Balzac). Minecraft on the other hand seems the purest single person success story.
- rhizome 9y agoOut of curiosity, what's the Balzac reference?
- drspacemonkey 9y agoOne of the ingredients to its success was a lot of free advertising from Microsoft. They loved talking about the dating site that ran ASP.NET