You Don’t Need To Look Pretty
Craigslist certainly doesn’t. The watchwords? Visually painful…
By Randall Stross at The New York Times
From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year
“MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.”
His business on autopilot. Not unusual today eh? Neither is a 10-hour workweek (yet I don’t have any experience with that!)
“Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a ‘trivial’ issue that did not bother users.”
Check it out -
“According to data from comScore Media Metrix for November 2007, Plenty of Fish had 1.4 million unique visitors in the United States. In December, Mr. Frind said, the site served up 1.2 billion page views, and page views have soared 20 percent since Dec. 26.”
Heck, at that rate he’ll catch up to Workboxers soon… (j/k)
