Math specialist runs successful Internet business

Before Tim Barber started his Internet business, he was solving math problems for the Department of Defense.
DOD needed his services for tackling mathematics related to technology in a field called “computational complexity theory.” And Barber was qualified, packing a Ph.D. in math from Princeton.
Most entrepreneurs don’t hold doctoral degrees, but Barber said it’s helped him with his Internet firm, ClickBank, a dba of Keynetics Inc., Boise.
Barber likes efficiency – and the planning and organization it takes to achieve it.
“I’m really into organized things,” he said.
Dan Henderson, Keynetics executive vice president, sees the influence of Barber’s academic background.
“Everything’s mathematical to Tim,” he said.
And everything must add up to profitability, Barber said, something he’s managed at ClickBank from its early days.
“It’s kind of an unusual Internet company because it’s still around,” he said with a laugh.
ClickBank gives Internet merchants a way to transact payments via credit cards for digital products.
“We handle all aspects of the sale for our clients,” he said.
The company has kept its customers by promoting “affiliate marketing,” which gives clients a cut of profits if links on their sites deliver sales. For example, if a customer is on a site selling e-books and clicks a link to another e-publisher and buys something, the first site’s owner gets some of the revenue.
Barber also has established his company by signing up customers who don’t sell pornography.
Money transactions on ClickBank have grown by 30 percent in recent months to about $1.5 million monthly, Henderson said. The fee structure is simple: $1 per transaction, plus 7.5 percent of the product’s value.
ClickBank’s more than 2,500 clients cover subjects ranging from makeovers to motor oil. Visitors who go to these sites and then click on links to other clients are counted as hits for ClickBank, giving it the No. 238 ranking for sites most visited.
Barber got the Internet bug while he was at Princeton in the mid-’90s. While he was setting up a website, he found a need for the services ClickBank now offers.
He and his wife, Eileen, started ClickBank in San Diego 1999. It logged only one unprofitable quarter, its first, he said. He moved to Boise in June 1999, and today the company employs 10.
The love of efficiency helped Barber set up the site with only two or three Linux servers “as opposed to a building full of NT servers,” he said.
Keynetics also developed a fraud-control product marketed under a company called CC Scan. That company was sold in December to a banking consortium, he said.
Barber doesn’t’ like to keep companies until they become too large – that wouldn’t be efficient – so he aims to sell ClickBank. For him, more than 15 employees is too many.
Keynetics, he said, will continue to start up new firms based on cutting-edge technologies. He said he has a dozen patents approved or on file.
“I just want to develop the technology, get it running,” he said.