Sandbox: Why Is This Man Smiling?

Most Duke students list Perkins patronage and beer pong as extracurricular activities. Howie Lerman lists starting a national company and then selling it for almost $100,000. And after college, most Duke students go to law school or try to find, well, any job. Lerman already has a job - he started his own company which has more business than it knows what to do with. Just a tip, Howie: you're making us drool.

That's not the first anonymous suggestion the December graduate has gotten. Or sent. Or created. In fact, blame Lerman for every "Just a tip, your breath stinks" and "your penis is small" that has ever been sent. With three partners in crime - two Princeton grads and former Chronicle writer Alex Sundstrom - the history major ("it gave me a lot of time to do other things") sent a couple to friends, who sent a couple to friends, who - well, it spread faster than the flu during rush.

"The fun for me ended in about two weeks and continued to go down when everyone who got a tip thought they were still coming from me," he recalls.

The concept began when the four suburban D.C. high school friends used to prank call people pretending to be a tip service hired to tell people of the "serious problems" they had. They went legit Lerman's sophomore year in college and developed a website (www.justatip.com) that would send people not-so-gentle suggestions sans cost. They even added complements, sort of. "All the complements were back-handed - I'm not sure if anyone ever caught that," he muses. "'You have a well-hidden toupee,' I mean, that's not a good thing."

And the thumb print of Lerman, his friends and Duke were all over every one of them. "Personal touches - ohmigod, they were all over the place," he laughs. "Everything on there was personal to some regard."

Before they sold the site almost two years ago, they would customize tips based on their own personal jokes and for friends.

For example, one popular tip used to be, "You root for a bad basketball team," and you could only send that particular one if the person was a UNC, Maryland or Wake Forest fan. As far as the rumor that there was a tip to be more like his long-term girlfriend in bed: "Haha, not as far as I know." Was there guilt in that laugh, Howie? "But you have to remember, I did have three good buddies working with me on the site..."

And now those buddies are grown up and three of them funneled their profits from Justatip into a software company they started this year called Intwine, which Lerman says is already overflowing with business. He's just a man who doesn't seem to need any tips.