How 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 e

How 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.