Ben Chestnut was destined to be a successful entrepreneur. He just didn't know it. His first attempt was during the dot-com heyday in 2000, which fortuitously ended with a bust. So he and some colleagues took the safe route and started a Web-design business called Rocket Science.

Except, fate had other plans.

Chestnut developed some code for GourmetStation.com, one of his Rocket Science Web-design clients, for an e-mail marketing campaign. "GourmetStation was using a large e-mail marketing service which was bloated with features they never used, and they were paying thousands of dollars per month," Chestnut says.

So Rocket Science designed a simpler e-mail marketing system, and for a few months updated it for GourmetStation. But after awhile, "It got annoying," he says. "So we made it so they could log in themselves and do it themselves."

What a brilliant idea. An e-mail marketing service that is so simple a monkey could do it. So they gave their "scrap code," as Chestnut calls it, a fitting name: MailChimp. That was in 2001. But Rocket Science was a successful Web-design firm, not an e-mail marketing company. And Chestnut and his partners had already tried the venture-backed start-up route and had decided never to attempt it again. So MailChimp sort of sat in the corner while Rocket Science trudged on.

"During the dot-com bubble being laid off made you want to just bootstrap and never ever need an investor. It just wasn't in our DNA," Chestnut says.

Slowly, the market and potential for MailChimp became apparent, and eventually eclipsed the potential for Web-designing. In 2006, Rocket Science said farewell to its design customers and turned its attention full-time to developing and marketing MailChimp, the accidental successful start-up.

Today, MailChimp is a powerful and simple e-mail marketing service. More than 140,000 users design newsletters, e-mail them to hundreds or thousands of clients, manage those client lists and track the performance of their marketing campaign. MailChimp allows third party plug-ins - something other e-mail marketing services typically do not allow - to enhance the user's MailChimp account - both for the newsletters and understanding how well it's working. For example, Google Analytics can show MailChimp customers the ROI of their campaign.

And in some cases it must be high because MailChimp now offers a service they say is "Now even free-er."

Small, medium or large companies have dozens of services, fee structures and plans to choose from when designing their email marketing campaign, paying from three cents per e-mail down to fractions of a penny per e-mail. At the lowest end, MailChimp offered a $10 per month plan for folks who had a list of up to 500 people long, and sent six or fewer e-mails per month. Chestnut says they discovered the customers in this category were not contributing significantly to the bottom line, so they decided to make that category free.

Another differentiating factor is the emphasis on doing-it-yourself. "For a lot of people it's extremely easy, if you're a Web savvy do it yourselfer. If you're that type of person you can fly though it. If you ask, 'what's a browser?' there's nothing wrong with that, but MailChimp is probably not the right tool," Chestnut says.

MailChimp has a comparison page on its Web site to help people determine if MailChimp is the right service for them, based on their needs and level of ability. If the person needs a hand held while developing their marketing campaign or designing a newsletter, or if they want full-service technical help, MailChimp offers links to its competitors.

An illustration of high confidence? "If I were them I would feel creeped out," Chestnut says. But he has seen one other competitor link to MailChimp on their site, which was nice.

Though simple and easy to use, MailChimp does not offer technical phone support, only e-mail and live chat (via email). In the beginning, they hired five people for technical support on the phone, but found that those five people could be on the phone for two hours with just one customer a piece, seriously affecting the number of people they were able to help. So they switched to e-mail help only and found those five support people could now each help 10 people at a time, via live chat. "Because of live chat and because we measure everything so closely we can justify the budget and hire more support staff. We have almost tripled our support staff because of live chat," Chestnut says.

And since they've never had an investor such decisions have helped the bottom line; and MailChimp has been profitable since day one.

They plan to stay that way.

"We're going to keep experimenting, that's for sure," Chestnut says. MailChimp Labs is a research division of the company to "keep everyone on their toes and keep experimenting with stuff," he says. "If someone has an idea, a hypothesis, we try it, we do experiments, and usually it gets launched as a feature in MailChimp, though we haven't ruled out launching new products.

MailChimp is lean with a staff of less than 30 compared to its closest competitor, Constant Contact, which is a public company and employs about 500 people.

"We feel like we're in a different spot. We don't care about [our competition] at all. We're going down our own path and are really trying to innovate. There is a lot of potential in our labs, and we want to be the Google-plex of the Southeast. Why not?"