One man: at age 24, he wrote a website and worked only 2 hours a day, yet he still complained the workload was too heavy. He earned tens of thousands of dollars a day from Google ads. He had no partners, never raised funding, and held 100% equity by himself. At 36, he sold the company for $575 million.

On July 14, 2015, the dating website Plenty of Fish was acquired by Match Group for $575 million. Its founder, Markus Frind, was only 36 years old at the time. The site had long been operated solely by Markus himself since 2003, making money by placing Google ads.

Because the website was so profitable and had few employees, Markus had no need for partners or funding. 100% of the company's equity belonged to him alone. When he sold the company, no one else shared the $575 million—it all went to him alone!

This is simply the role model of a lone underdog entrepreneur.

In 2008, Markus told The New York Times that his website had a net profit of $10 million a year. He worked 10 hours a week, only 2 hours a day. Yet he actually told reporters: "This workload is too much!"

Markus told Business Insider that by the time he learned what venture capital was, he was already making several million dollars in net profit a year. So he really had no idea how to talk to venture capitalists or how to raise funding.

When Markus sold Plenty of Fish this year, the website already had 90 million registered users and 3.6 million active users.

Markus said that when he first started Plenty of Fish in 2003, it was because he had just learned a newly emerged computer language, ASP. To practice and prove he knew ASP when looking for a job later, he casually built Plenty of Fish. Unexpectedly, many people came to register, and it gradually became popular. When the site could earn about $4,000 a month, enough to support himself, he quit his job and lived on the site's ad revenue.

Markus felt that during the time he founded and maintained Plenty of Fish, he never encountered any real difficulty. A few months after Plenty of Fish went live, it had only a few hundred visitors a day, but traffic grew steadily and consistently. So he could clearly predict how many visitors there would be in the next four or five months. Then he had enough time to slowly improve server performance and database structure on his own. Markus told reporters that the thing he was most proud of was: "Relying on me alone, I can generate 1 billion web pages every month."

Markus worked only 2 hours a day. When INC interviewed him and asked what time of day he found most interesting, he said, "Morning, because I only work for 2-3 hours in the morning." When asked what the most interesting thing about work was, his answer was: "Going to the bank to deposit the $1 million check that Google Ads wrote to me."

Speaking of the advertising fees Google paid Markus, one has to list the details of Markus's ad revenue. Here is the chart below:

In June 2003, there were only 493 page views, and ad revenue was 7.6 Canadian dollars (roughly equivalent to US dollars). In July 2003, page views exceeded 180,000, and ad revenue was already over 1,700. It then increased steadily month by month. By February 2004, ad revenue had reached over 12,000. In June 2004, monthly revenue broke through 50,000. In April 2005, monthly revenue broke through 100,000.

In June 2006, he posted a check for 900,000 that Google Ads sent him, equivalent to earning 30,000 per day. At this time, the website still had only him alone. His competitors, in contrast, typically had at least 600 servers and at least 300 employees.

After achieving the goal of earning one million dollars a month on his own, another year passed, and it was not until 2007 that Markus got his first employee. By now, Plenty of Fish has 370 million unique IPs and 2.5 billion page views per month, yet it still has only 65 employees.

One man quietly starting a business (it can hardly even be called starting a business—he just casually built a "small" website in his spare time); one man quietly improving his website; one man quietly making money (until counting money made his hands cramp).

This is the real entrepreneurship, the real down-to-earth approach, the real business.

Markus is a role model for every self-made entrepreneur.

This article is from "Chuang思舍", focusing on management experience and business stories in entrepreneurship. WeChat official account: "Chuang思舍".