Work Less, Make More?

I was on a plane reading the most recent Inc. Magazine and came across an article about Markus Frind and his website Plenty of Fish.  He isn’t particularly smart, good looking, driven, or any of the common recipes for success.  He is a normal guy that took a market that everyone was charging for the service and created a website to offer the same service for free, and at the lowest possible cost to himself.

Apparently it was a hit idea, because he walked into his office one Monday morning and had a check for $180,000 from VideoEgg who wanted to advertise to his users.  He is getting calls daily from companies wanting to advertise to his users. Why you may wonder? Well, its because of his 1.6 billion page views each month. There are only 10 sites in the US with more than that.  When asked why he hasn’t updated the site or made it better quality, he said that would change the overall idea of the site.  If he made everyone's picture look good and perfectly square then no one would click on the profiles to see the people and one extra page view to advertise on, so he thinks change would be bad. 

Why am I writing about this fairy tale success story that is probably unrealistic.  Well its because without knowing about this story we at Student Nerds have actually been employing this strategy without knowing exactly why.  We took our site which was costing us around $250 dollars a month, and now we have cut that cost to virtually nothing.   This is important because while we keep tinkering with the site until we have it the way we would like, we aren’t incurring any more costs.  We are also building a site that is hands off; a site that eventually should be able to manage itself.  We will have a site that offers a service unlike anything else on the market and will hopefully change the way we find computer/electronic help in our homes and business’.