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This 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. Wor

This 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 ago
That 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 ago
iirc, 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 ago
  Not 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 ago
  Using 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 ago
    Specifically, 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.
- fleitz 11y ago
  It's a combination of Moore's law and churn, since the site is reasonably effective it generates huge churn. Since RAM follows Moore's law you could always keep the users in RAM if you wrote effective queries because user growth didn't outpace Moore's law. All you had to do was build a server big enough. C# definitely helped vs ruby, the real kicker was stored procs, everything was a highly tuned stored proc. The huge insights I got was latency, by keeping everything close together you could run some really abysmal synchronous code with out cratering everything. Also, he really cared about the ant hill more than the ants. He would do horrible things to the ants that would encourage them to build a bigger ant hill. (Ants are users, employees were treated very well) As a fictional example, lets say the site was skewing too heavily male by 20%, just add a line in the stored proc that gave a male user a 20% chance of their registration not being written to disk. Voila, site has the proper mix, onto the next problem. He was the most brutally effective person I've ever worked with.
  - chubot 11y ago
    Is that last anecdote true? When did you work with him?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - fleitz 11y ago
      As a fictional example... The ant thing was verbatim while we were all drinking... But seriously, go to a club... same thing...
  - smrtinsert 11y ago
    The memory vs users idea is briliant. I would love to have observed him although working under someone like that sounds like it requires a great amount of patience. The architecture post on high scalability is truly inspirational.
majani 11y ago
You've got a bigger chance of winning the lottery than replicating that.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I've been meaning to put a blog post together for a Show HN advocating for buying lottery tickets and working a sane 35-40 hour week job versus slaving away at a startup for 80-100 hours a week with even worse odds of becoming wealthy.
  - gooseus 11y ago
    I'd love to see this post as I'm securely in the "lottery is a tax on the desperate" camp. I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday. I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth? So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth? This is the study I'm interested in performing. > So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious. Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling. I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.
      - 11y ago
fleitz 11y ago
I've worked with Markus, it would be very disingenuous to think he works 15 minutes a day. He really loves running the site. It's just that the feels like work part of his job only lasts 15 minutes, signing cheques, etc. He just doesn't do the "I work 8 hours 5 days a week thing", if the site is fucked up he is there til it's fixed. If everything is on track, he might be there an hour or two.
peterjmag 11y ago
I found it pretty funny that he said Match is "dying" in that article: When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ...

hackerboos 11y ago

That 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 ago

iirc, 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 ago
Not 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 ago
Using 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 ago
  Specifically, 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.
fleitz 11y ago
It's a combination of Moore's law and churn, since the site is reasonably effective it generates huge churn. Since RAM follows Moore's law you could always keep the users in RAM if you wrote effective queries because user growth didn't outpace Moore's law. All you had to do was build a server big enough. C# definitely helped vs ruby, the real kicker was stored procs, everything was a highly tuned stored proc. The huge insights I got was latency, by keeping everything close together you could run some really abysmal synchronous code with out cratering everything. Also, he really cared about the ant hill more than the ants. He would do horrible things to the ants that would encourage them to build a bigger ant hill. (Ants are users, employees were treated very well) As a fictional example, lets say the site was skewing too heavily male by 20%, just add a line in the stored proc that gave a male user a 20% chance of their registration not being written to disk. Voila, site has the proper mix, onto the next problem. He was the most brutally effective person I've ever worked with.
- chubot 11y ago
  Is that last anecdote true? When did you work with him?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - fleitz 11y ago
    As a fictional example... The ant thing was verbatim while we were all drinking... But seriously, go to a club... same thing...
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  The memory vs users idea is briliant. I would love to have observed him although working under someone like that sounds like it requires a great amount of patience. The architecture post on high scalability is truly inspirational.

majani 11y ago

You've got a bigger chance of winning the lottery than replicating that.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
I've been meaning to put a blog post together for a Show HN advocating for buying lottery tickets and working a sane 35-40 hour week job versus slaving away at a startup for 80-100 hours a week with even worse odds of becoming wealthy.
- gooseus 11y ago
  I'd love to see this post as I'm securely in the "lottery is a tax on the desperate" camp. I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday. I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth? So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth? This is the study I'm interested in performing. > So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious. Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling. I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.
    - 11y ago

fleitz 11y ago

I've worked with Markus, it would be very disingenuous to think he works 15 minutes a day. He really loves running the site. It's just that the feels like work part of his job only lasts 15 minutes, signing cheques, etc. He just doesn't do the "I work 8 hours 5 days a week thing", if the site is fucked up he is there til it's fixed. If everything is on track, he might be there an hour or two.

peterjmag 11y ago

I found it pretty funny that he said Match is "dying" in that article: When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ...