Plenty of Fish is one of the worst offenders of what the OP is calling business porn. They've been pushing the "overnight success with zero effort" story for a long time.
I just read the article on
'Scalability' or some such.
There the founder went into
a lot of detail on system
administration for his relational
database.
At no time did I conclude that his
project was either "overnight success"
or "zero effort".
But I can understand the point of
just one guy: A founder really should
understand his business. So, that takes
him into all the relevant topics in
computing and outside. That's a lot of
topics.
My main points about Plenty of Fish
were just as I explained, and I never
claimed either "overnight success"
or "zero effort".
My point is that the OP is looking for examples of real businesses telling real stories. In the story I linked, PoF is selling the same old "I fell out of bed into a pile of money" tale.
A few choice quotes from the first few paragraphs:
He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.
Mr. Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET.
No mention of long hours promoting, begging users to sign up, tracking down weird bugs, or all the actual work that goes into building a business. Just a quick rundown of how easy it is to whip up a shitty website and become a millionaire overnight.
Fine. I just don't think that
additional background on PoF has
much to do with my use of PoF
as an example.
Now that you mention the claim of
a 10 hour work week, I believe I
did read that, but I didn't
remember it or pay much attention
to it because it sounded to me
like just media fluff to 'tell a
good story'.
Media fluff aside, there's no
doubt that PoF is a good
example of what was for a long
time just one guy, two old
Dell servers, and some nice
revenue. So, such a thing,
not the 10 hour claim, is
possible. That's all I
wanted from the PoF example.
At no time did I conclude that his project was either "overnight success" or "zero effort".
But I can understand the point of just one guy: A founder really should understand his business. So, that takes him into all the relevant topics in computing and outside. That's a lot of topics.
My main points about Plenty of Fish were just as I explained, and I never claimed either "overnight success" or "zero effort".