I really am mesmerized when companies open up their kimonos and reveal some inside info. Last week, Google shared some information on the prediction markets inside Google.
I have Markus Frind’s blog in my feed reader because he feels very comfortable talking about the raw numbers of his business. I believe that he feels that he’s so different from his competitors, and that newcomers will find it impossible to duplicate his success, that he’s comfortable talking about anything and everything to a refreshing degree of transparency. I started reading his blog when I read that he needed a second web server because he was hitting the 64k concurrent IP address limit (!).
His business, Plenty of Fish, was profiled in the New York Times and I noticed this:
A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive.
How many businesses will put forth that they purge 1/3 of their member profiles each month? That’s refreshing to read. More often, I’ll read published total user numbers and suspect the business is ruffling its chest feathers and presenting numbers that fold in inactive users. This kind of obfuscation may be advantageous to your everyday business, but Plenty of Fish is definitely not your everyday business.
I have a few articles like this bookmarked, including the great SmugMug post about Amazon S3. SmugMug talks about numbers to a surprising degree, and is worth a read (and a re-read).
I having been reading his blog from the beginning. People like Marcus and Shoemoney attract a lot of readers because they do let it all hang out.
People love stats … know I do. There’s something inherently appealing about that kind of openness, and the learnings that accompany it.
Got ya in my reader now Brian!
I’m not so sure about Shoemoney (I tend to subscribe to the “assume everything he says is BS and wait until someone else I trust says it too” theory with him), but I tend to accept Frind’s explanation of things. PoF itself does have a certain quirky imperfect charm about it and it flies in the face of the conventional logic du jour. I’ve always been a fan of the site from a purely business perspective because it has always done exactly what it claimed to do.
Sure it’s “flawed” and sure it could be “improved”, but what incentive does a guy who has $10,000,000 a year coming in have to touch it? I suspect the figure’s a bit exaggerated, but the site itself still has a ton of members and more than enough to support a guy in an apartment.