Looking for 3 Senior Software Developers.

For those of you that don’t know…

Plentyoffish was started by me and has now grown to the worlds largest dating site with over 1.1 billion monthly pageviews and 45 million visitors.    As of today Plentyoffish.com is the largest Canadian consumer facing internet company and is still a 1 person company  earning millions annually.  Unfortually I am at the scale now were nothing can be bought off the shelf and everything must be built from the ground up.  As a result we will be building up a large team of 20 to 30 employees over the next few months.

As of today i’m looking for 3 Senior Software Developers to join my team.

- Strong skills in ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Web Services.
- Strong skills in building scalable software.
- At least 5 years experience working with Microsoft technologies such as Asp.net,  ASP or SQL Server.
- Must be able to assist in the setup, implementation and improvement of development cycle best practices, such as version control, code release management, version management and automation of the build and deployment process.
- Must be able to provide project managers(me)  with accurate time and work estimates based on the technical scope of the project.
- Strong communication skills both written and oral. The candidate must be able to articulate complex design and architecture ideas to members of the development and QA team and to non-technical team members.
- Having built systems that take orders and credit card transactions previously is a strong plus.

Along with working for a fast paced fast growing company you will get a 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display for your work station.   You will be working on a brand new project that will handle billions of transactions per month and be used by millions of people.

Send your Resume with compensation requirements to  mfrind  Plentyoffish.com   (put in the at sign)

Americansingles Reports 43% drop in subscribers.

Americansingles reports 43% drop in subscribers.
Match.com reported a big drop in US subscribers last week as well.
True.com’s marketshare dropped 75% in the last 3 months,  rumors starting again of impending layoffs/bankruptcy.

Anyone else noticing a trend here?

Canada’s CPC for dating has dropped from  80 cents a few years ago to about 10 cents today,  US is following the same pattern now as the paid dating sites collapse.

300k/monthly budget what would you do?

Given $300,000/month to spend on salaries what positions would you hire and what strategy would you pursue?  Keep in mind costs for employees in canada are a fraction of silicon valley.

Plentyoffish Generates 1.1 billion pageviews a month on 45 million visitors.    Closest competitor I can find is okcupid with  18 employees with around 60-90M pageviews a month.    I am starting to see why other dating sites with around 500M pageviews/month have at least 100 employees.

These are OKCUPID’s EMPLOYEES
1.  Creative Director
2.  CEO
3.  Director
4.  Editorial Director
5.  CTO
6.  Senior Web Designer
7.  Software Engineer
8.  Software engineer
9.  Software engineer
10. Software Engineer
11. Software Engineer
12. Sys Admin
13. Director of Sales
14. Web Designer
15.  Software engineer
16.  Software engineer
17. Software Engineer
18. Software Engineer

Microsoft Visits Plentyoffish. Watch the video.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=331501#331501

Time to sell?

Looks like a lot of news coming out today.   Sparkpeople sold for $75 million the company has 2 million uniques a month on 67 million pageviews and the site isn’t even break even.   I talked to chris while back and was sending them a hundred+ signups a day for a while.       I also talked to eric when I was first starting out and he sold his company for $65 ? Million today.

I’ve come a long way in the last 3 years,  today I’ve single handily built the largest dating site in the world with no employees.   The site generates more relationships than match.com  yet only makes a tiny tiny fraction of Match.com’s 300 Million a year.   So today I sit at a turning point,   the site has over 1.1 billion pageviews and 45 million visitors a month ,  the maintaince and all that annoying stuff is growing fast and there is no way to effectively monetize the site without employees.    

I can either sell and walk away with a few hundred million  or start an office and grow the site.    So in the coming weeks/months i’m going to turn my hobby  into a business.    Like anyone else  founding a startup,  i’m going to go get myself a business lisence so I can get office space.   Then go office space hunting, set up the office,  put up job descriptions etc etc.

The main goal is to start replacing adsense/dating ads and hire sales people.    I spent the last few weeks working long days optimizing my ad revenue and as a result adding over a million a year net  per week of work.    Yet compared to match.com all these efforts are really just rounding errors.   At the end of the day its not possible for me optimize revenues  myself  or to outsource sales as no one vender could sell more than 3% of my inventory.  I am at a size now were there are no off the shelf solutions and everything has to be built from the ground up.

This is going to be an insane next few months,  Right out of the gate my hobby turned business Plentyoffish is a top 30 site in the US based on Competes Attention metric,    top  10 in canada and  top 30 in the UK.

Match.com earnings show major decline in subscribers.

Match.com Released their earnings a few days ago. Is this their way of saying subscribers in the US decreased at least 12% year over year? One assumes the US accounts for far more than 50% of their subscribers.

“Revenue growth was driven by a 1% increase in worldwide subscribers, including 13% growth in international subscribers, most notably in the UK, combined with higher average prices in North America. Operating Income Before Amortization grew faster than revenue due to a lower cost of acquisition as a percentage of revenue in North America and flat operating costs, partially offset by higher international cost of acquisition. Operating income in the second quarter of 2007 included amortization of non-cash marketing of $7.2 million.”

http://phx.corporate-ir