Karl Ebert can credit the Roth IRA for his success. It was 1998, and Ebert thought he might convert some money from a traditional IRA to a Roth. But he couldn't find a calculator to show him if it made financial sense.
So the computer science minor with an MBA in finance built a calculator.
"It worked great. And my goal was to market it and sell it," he said. But he wasn't sure he could pull it off. "Having no contacts and no means of actually marketing that one little calculator, I quickly realized it was something to put on my website that was pretty cool."
About that website: The University of Minnesota grad, who bought a house a mile from campus in the area known as Dinkytown, purchased the url www.dinkytown.net in 1997. He'd hoped to turn it into a community site for the area that made money from local business advertisements. But he couldn't convince stores and restaurants to sign on. "No one was using the Internet in 1998," he said.
He decided to slap up his Roth IRA calculator and a few others he'd programmed, and threw up information about how people could buy them and stick them on their websites. Then one day, "My wife called me ... and asked me who this person was, 'because they just sent you a check.'" He doesn't remember who first licensed his calculators, but they sent him $250. And a business was born.
Each time he created a calculator, he's put it on dinkytown.net, where people could use them for free. "Search engines found them very well," he said.
Clients small and large -- the ones who would pay to put it on their own websites -- did too, without Ebert having to hire a sales guy or advertise.
A calculator for every need