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Match Group Buys PlentyOfFish for $575M
- x5n1 11y agoi thought it would be worth more. congrats markus. not that markus needs any more money than that. i thought he would enjoy being a billionare though.
- hackerboos 11y agoRevenue in 2014 was approx $100 million. Maybe growth numbers were not doing well...
- solve 11y agoCompanies valued purely based on revenue streams alone will typically sell for 2x to 5x their yearly revenue. This is a big part of why it's SMART for most consumer startups to avoid earning revenue at all. Doing so will often cap their potential exit price, in practice. Still, this at least was at the higher end, for purely revenue-based valuations.
- msie 11y agoHeh, Silicon Valley (the show) talks about maintaining a pre-revenue state.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoHow many SV VCs would have turned him down because his team and his pitch deck weren't cool enough, and they "weren't looking for investments in that sector"? I'd love to see more examples of successful bootstrapped and/or lifestyle businesses, but - unlike PoF - most of them they don't get the same PR as the mainstream startups, which makes them harder to find/follow.
- solve 11y agoLikewise, a cap on a convertible note may be used by investors in the next round as an anchoring point to restrict the valuation in the next round. Both of these effects are what a layman would think "shouldn't be real". From experience, both are extremely real. Too bad that the TV shows present these as sort of jokes. That disappoints me. No joke, these are dead real.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoJokes are often about reality.
- kitcar 11y agoOnline dating is a mature industry with lots of M&A and therefore historical multiples -
- x5n1 11y agoFor someone like Facebook or Google that does not matter. It doesn't look like he shopped it to enough buyers. Or perhaps this was a quick and easy deal, he would have to wait on others. Also perhaps he was afraid of losing to mobile.
- giarc 11y agoShopping the site around to get more than $500 million is just ego boosting at that point. That's more than enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- blowski 11y agoSo IAC now owns Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, and PlentyofFish. Are there any competition concerns there? I only looked briefly, but couldn't see any market share figures. EDIT: and Chemistry.com, Meetic, and PeopleMedia.
- yincrash 11y agoThey also acquired HowAboutWe exactly 1 year ago today. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/digital-love-consolidated-iac-buys-howaboutwe-dating-site/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/digital-love-consol...
- adventured 11y agoeHarmony and Zoosk are the only two majors left standing independently. It wouldn't surprise me if IAC has over 50% of the US dating market at this point. There's a blatant competition issue there, but the online dating market isn't likely to attract much anti-trust scrutiny at this point, for at least three reasons: there needs to be some evidence of consumer harm (I'm not aware of much in that regard); competitors would have to be getting Washington's attention; the dating market isn't considered to be very attention worthy, minus something egregious going on.
- jolan 11y agoNot sure how major they are but there's Coffee Meets Bagel as well. They got some traction from being on Shark Tank.
- afarrell 11y agoMay I shamelessly plug my friend's startup? http://www.jessmeetken.com/ http://www.jessmeetken.com/ is based on introductions from women to other women, which eliminated the problem that women's inboxes are filled with lots of low-quality (and occasionally vulgar) messages.
- tomjen3 11y ago
- mtsmith85 11y agoMatch, Tinder, OKCupid, HowAboutWe, now PlentyOfFish. I'm curious if there are other mainstream dating apps out there? There are apps like Grindr for the LGBTQ community; JDate for the Jewish community. But what others are there for the larger populations? eHarmony, though I've always been under the belief that religion was a key component of that site. I find it interesting to see that Match now really owns the space and that TechCrunch is suggesting that the purchase was for "a fresh pool of digitally active singles" vs. technology (OKCupid) or a different experience all together (Tinder).
- chris_overseas 11y agohttps://www.happn.com/ https://www.happn.com/ has a mobile app that seems to have a large pool of users, at least in central London.
- theklub 11y agoFarmersOnly
- caseysoftware 11y agoThe only way to grow the business is to grow the market and move into niches where the customers don't go away, such as Tinder. Otherwise, the customer base of a dating site is doomed to collapse as it becomes successful: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
- nasalgoat 11y agoClover on iOS.
- sputknick 11y agoThis man is my hero. When I become a millionaire I want to be just like him. Spent a weekend hacking together a mediocre site that grosses millions a month. Working 15 minutes a day. Yeah, brilliant. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
- hackerboos 11y agoThat article is from 2009, I remember reading that he was forced to hire more people to do marketing etc. which made the job full time.
- smrtinsert 11y agoiirc, he was was able to scale easily since his c# based dev allowed for performance etc. tl;dr he knew how to build a big site.
- internic555d 11y agoNot really, he started the site as a hobby project to learn ASP.NET. He obviously didn't know how to build a big site at this time.
- noblethrasher 11y agoUsing a “compiled” language like C# probably didn't hurt, but Markus Frind is also wicked smart. Some of his work was cited in a published number theory textbook.
- gohrt 11y agoSpecifically, he wrote a computer program to look for primes. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.math/AZD_CalO7as https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.math/AZD_CalO7as I am not an expert, but it seems he wrote some highly optimized code to do it: > The search was conducted over 10 days on a AMD 1800XP and checked > about 20,667,931,547 Potential AP 22's per Second.
- 11y ago
- bkm 11y agoInteresting to see how he kept things lean and has gone against the entire 'companies need a co-founder to succeed' stigma by single-handedly growing a multimillion dollar venture. He recruited the first three employees in 2008. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
- manishsharan 11y agoIf Match group is really really serious about bagging more singles, they should acquire Reddit.
- ececconi 11y agoPeople aren't on reddit mainly to find other people to date or hookup.
- majani 11y agoIt's a joke about how reddit is supposedly full of unpopular people, but strangely enough, the joke has now become about how HN is full of people who can't recognize a joke.
- tomjen3 11y agoMore single women, probably - men will generally go where the women are.
- Dirlewanger 11y agoDon't know if one can say that about Pinterest...
- rhokstar 11y agoYes, definitely in the club scene and night life scene. Very different in the online world however.
- antidaily 11y ago
- nraynaud 11y agohalf a billion dollars in 12 years. What did I do this last decade?
- loceng 11y agoPOF's founder story is fascinating and jealousy making. It was just right time, right place, right product. He had $10MM in the bank before he realized he needed help and hired his first employee..
- anon3_ 11y agoOnline dating is elance of romance. It's a race to the bottom. "Myspace, Match, eHarmony, CL… they all suck for the elegantly simple reason that online there are too many indiscriminate horny men and too few cute girls. The dynamics are totally in the woman’s favor, ridiculously so in that it encourages massive self-assessment inflation that will carry over into real life social interactions, guaranteeing disappointment." http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/online-dating-is-futile/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/online-dating-is-f... is an interesting article on online dating. A great youtube video on why online dating doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5_JK_LcEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5_JK_LcEI
- ececconi 11y agoI think it's also a place where men can boost their self esteem. I think it's the antithesis of seduction. It's just way too efficient and not serendipitous enough. Sure, you can say swiping on someone allows you to interact with way more people than you could ever interact with in person. The thing that's lost is that random look in the middle of the street, coffee shop, or party where you exchange glances with a stranger and wonder for a second if the attraction is mutual. Then you put yourself out there without knowing what the response would be because you don't know if the person is looking for a tryst or romance. On tinder, you can assume they're already open to at least some flirting. If not, no big deal -- you never even looked the person in the eyes.
- seunosewa 11y agoSolution: market the site primarily to women. Screen the hordes of men who will surely follow thoroughly and only admit the best.
- ElComradio 11y agoThese exist, but the criteria most desired is apparently wealth. Date a millionaire dot com and such.
- probably_wrong 11y agoTo me, that article feels incredibly negative, sexist, and rooted on a men-women dynamic that assumes women are things to be conquered. Then again, I don't know what I was expecting from a website that gives "Alpha assessments" regarding "women you are attempting to bed" and whose top post is "How to get a girl to send nudes of herself".
- curiousjorge 11y ago100 million per year and only about 6x multiple? I'd expected at least a billion but I guess they aren't doing as great as they used to?
- gjkood 11y agoHere is a discussion of the PlentyOfFish architecture on High Scalability http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture.
- Luc 11y agoSix years old though. Still interesting historically.
- atwebb 11y agoSome is still pretty appropriate Monitors performance using task manager. When spikes show up he investigates. Problems were usually blocking in the database. It's always database issues. Rarely any problems in .net. Because POF doesn't use the .net library it's relatively easy to track down performance problems. When you are using many layers of frameworks finding out where problems are hiding is frustrating and hard.
- smrtinsert 11y agoThis is what engineering looks like. Makes other social networks look kind of pathetic especially with regard to team size.
- iDemonix 11y agoWow, wasn't aware of how impressive that is. Makes me blush a bit that we have 1000 - 1100 customer websites (which don't get many hits) spread across 6 CloudLinux servers and the performance is terrible... (not that I have anything to do with those servers!)
- shubhamjain 11y agoWhen I was just an ignorant kid, I was fond of building stupid little website where I could put adsense ads (they used to approve almost everyone) and have a small pocket-money income. In the best month, I made around $300. I could never figure out how to get traffic and people like Marcus and Amit Agarwal used to be my heroes. Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income; a good business / startup seems more worthwhile but sometimes, I do get tempted to enter that territory again seeing people making thousands of dollars a day with just re-hashed content and a little effort but I feel it won't be something to be proud of in the future.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago> Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income I dunno, I'm pretty excited about that sort of effort-to-income ratio. That's the equivalent of never having to pay for groceries again.
- jblow 11y ago... by crapping onto the internet and making it worse. That's called parasititc behavior.
- debaserab2 11y agoThe allure of that seems enticing, but I've found in practice that the effort to income ratio is not what it seems: it takes a lot of effort to even hit that $300/mo mark, and it's not "set it and forget it" - in most cases you have to keep working to keep viewership interested or keep ever changing Seo rankings healthy.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoI ll give you one. You can republish email content from the fashion industry and affiliatize every outgoing link via Viglink or Skimlinks. Take your time to select expensive brands, do some basic SEOing, encourage social share, force visitors to give you their email addresss when they get on a deals page before clicking through. Twice a year you will have a brand send you a take down. It will take you some time to get some traffic but you will hit $300 per month eventually. If you were willing to spend some time in curating the homepage then you could do even better.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kamilszybalski 11y agoAnyone know what the biggest exit for a bootstrapped company is?
- binarymax 11y agoMojang maybe?
- cryowaffle 11y agoWinner here
- qq66 11y agoCargill
- randomdata 11y agoCargill is still owned by the family.
- kamilszybalski 11y agoI think it may be indeed.. apparently sold for between $750-$1 billion.
- blackguardx 11y agoHP?
- swozey 11y agoI cannot believe that terrible site is worth 575. It's basically the trailer park of online dating.
- GVIrish 11y agoJust goes to show it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be useful to enough people.
- colkassad 11y agoIt has a great name too.
- tim333 11y agoIt's got an awful lot of users.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoMaybe that's why. Trailer park girls can be lots of fun.
- aeturnum 11y agoIt's a great reminder that the silicon valley echo chamber only reflects the views of silicon valley. If you want to do great work and be respected for your peers it's a great place, but never confuse the quest for prestige with the quest for financial gain.
- bruceb 11y agoHe is one of the original open disclosure type founders: Here he post his ad-sense earning for a couple years: https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/adsense-breakdown/ https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/adsense-breakd... Here is the post with the $900k(CAD) check from google (which bounced!) https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/07/small-companies-google-adsense-is-the-future/ https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/07/small-companie...
- cperciva 11y agocheck from google (which bounced!) He said the ETF (think wire transfer) bounced, not that the check bounced. I'm guessing this means that Google got the wrong account number.
- Gdiddy 11y agoWell this is awful... Their monetisation of OK Cupid killed the sites functionality. You literally have to pay to see 'more attractive matches', and search ranking is based on payment as well. What was once a place where the alternative / arts crowd could meet like minded folks is now awash with spam, poorly filled out profiles and other guff that makes it effectively useless for meeting a potential partner.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoWhat was once a place where the alternative / arts crowd could meet like minded folks is now awash with spam I see a Business Opportunity
- circa 11y agoThis is pretty sweet for POF. I remember talking to Markus on my days at OT. A good 10 years ago now at least. Good for POF!
- techaddict009 11y agoI strongly feel Adsense can be really great source of revenue! Thanks POF for making my faith more stronger and stronger! How many of you have Adsense source of income?
- ck2 11y agoI remember when he was mentioning how his relatively new site was pulling in a million a month in adsense and no-one believed him (many, many years ago).
- craigslistguy 11y agoI've said it before and I'll say it again, "it's easier to get laid on Craigslist.org"
- rhokstar 11y agoAnd to your point, Craigslist is also a haven for scammers and therefore not as trust worthy.
- gohrt 11y agoI've never heard of plentyoffish users in USA, nor bumped into advertising except PR on web-biz sites. I have heard of users of Match, Yahoo, JDate, and seen advertising for eHarmony. Is this a case where someone launched a product that conquered the non-USA users that USA companies ignore?
- netcan 11y agoI'm not sure if I'm on track, but I think Match.com's acquisitions are of the kind I'm a little sad to see, "competitor squash" kind. A lot of acquisitions are cool. EG, Google bought youtube and they run it well. You might not agree with everything, but it's hard to say youtube suffered. Google just wanted to get into video and youtube knew how to do it right. BWhen FB buy instagram or match.com buy everyone, it feels like an unfair avenue of competition. I'm not sure if "fair" or "competition" are the right words, but hopefully my point gets across. Part of the issue is (ironically) well illustrated by OKcupid's blog post.^ In it, they basically said that paid dating sites work worse, because they are paid. It's a fun pick-a-fight blog, so read it if you're interested. Implied (IMO) is that a massive dating site can be run with much lower revenue and be better for users. Doesn't matter if they were right. OKcupid had a working unique, effective model and their product was different. Then Tinder do it a totally different way and we have more diversity. The difference are cultural, not just a different feature-set. I think that's awesome. But, one business model generates way more money. The others are profitable too and can actually do their job perfectly well (OKcupid anyway) with less revenue. There's no inherent reason not to continue existing and letting a thousand (or like six) flower bloom. The problem is that removing company A as a threat is worth more (in dollars) to company B than company A costs. So company B buys OKcupid, Tinder, POF and anything else. The wheels of the market are removing choice. OKcupid still exists. It's fine, but it's doesn't have the same cultural uniqueness. They removed that blog post, for example. ^http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...
- maxtaco 11y agoFor the record, no one ever asked we take down that post. We did it just to be polite. By contrast, when we sold TheSpark.com to iTurf.com in 2000, we spent several man-months of company time making the parody AyeTurf.com, which pissed a lot of people off.
- netcan 11y agoAwesome to hear feedback from the source. I don't think there's anything terrible about taking down the post to be polite. I also don't think that OKCupid (or match.com) are to blame. I'm just kind of musing about this sort of tiny-giant paradox generally. The internet lets people make great things on small budgets, which means big thing can exist with small business models. Magnitude of revenue does not necessarily equal magnitude of impact, but if the first is a lot smaller then the second, they're a target for these neutralising acquisitions.
- dimino 11y agoI've read somewhere that it's very hard to sell VCs on dating websites, but with OKC and PoF both now being owned by big companies, is this space opening back up for someone without the stink of big corporate?
- baudehlo 11y agoWell pg has definitely written about it. http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sytelus 11y agoSome people put down Marcus as just the lucky guy and POF as an ugly undeserving website. The reality is that running even a semi-successful dating website for 12 years straight is a huge huge achievement. Dating websites have almost 30% customer churn each year which means you constantly have to figure out how to get new customers. This problem becomes much harder because entry in the market is easy enough that any one can one-up you anytime. There is not much stickyness or virality like FB. All these makes dating business very difficult to run successfully with large margins. The thing is that Marcus has conveniently downplayed the required effort in playing this game. He has projected image that he just worked few hours a week to check servers and then going back to other things in his life. I would bet reality wasn't exactly like that. To ensure new customer acquisition, you must make sure your website constantly pops up high on Google for most popular dating queries. This means lot of SEO+marketing work. My guess is that Marcus purposely made his story very attractive for newspapers to report without paying for any PR which gave him links and boosted his ranking. His competitors are known to spend massive fortune and efforts on marketing just to stay relevant. Now that deal is done, it would be good time for Marcus to actually disclose the true story :).
- Scoundreller 11y ago> Dating websites have almost 30% customer churn each year which means you constantly have to figure out how to get new customers. I think that was a part of the business model. A good chunk of the ads were for for-pay dating sites. At $30/month, which is effectively $30/month marginal revenue (since most costs are fixed), the for-pay sites will pay a fortune per customer acquisition. Good call on the alleged PR move.