Inc. Magazine has a piece on Markus Frind, creator of previously mentioned dating site Plenty of Fish. Check this:

• 1.6 billion page views per month.
• $10 million / year in revenue.
• 3 employees (customer service), with Frind himself working maybe an hour a day doing the rest.
• Eight servers.

This, in spite of being anti-design:

Plenty of Fish is a designer’s nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon

… and not listening to his users:

“I don’t listen to the users,” he says. “The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches.”

Can’t judge a book by its cover, though. It’s no accident his site runs on eight machines instead of 80:

…cleaning up other people’s messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. The topic, a perennial challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, and Frind thought it would be a fun way to learn how to sharpen his skills. He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind’s record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) “It was just a way of teaching myself something,” Frind says. “I was learning how to make the computer as fast as possible.”

Impressive, odd fellow. Some kind of savant. I don’t know what kind (certainly not the idiot kind, though).

Markus Frind is the CEO of Plentyoffish.com, a dating site. I just read on his blog that his site is #13 in the US (according to hitwise). I wouldn’t necessarily find this noteworthy, except for two things.

First, PoF keeps appearing on my radar. A couple years ago it was when Scoble noted that the site was wildly successful despite being ugly:

At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. He’s Google’s #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

(The design hasn’t improved much since, and is still a poster child, along with craigslist, for the anti-design movement.)

Then, a couple weeks ago, PoF popped up in my aggregator again, this time when Jeff Atwood noted that the site serves up all this traffic on just a handful of servers.

Second, Frind pretty much runs the show himself. From his post above:

I still haven’t hired a tech guy to watch over the servers, that will be the first thing i’ll do in 2009, getting tired of running every aspect of the site except customer service myself!

So if we take the hitwise numbers at face value (and I don’t know anything about them), they put these entities in the upper echelon: MySpace, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and… Markus Frind. Impressive.