Connecting students and small businesses
By Jennifer Carcamo
Dec. 7, 2008 9:43 p.m.
Arjun Mehta, a first-year bioengineering student, is one of the founders of HotDoodle, a new online service allows Web-savvy people to develop Web sites for small businesses.
Mehta began working with the chief executive and chief of technology of software developer Metabyte Inc. when he was in eighth grade. He is now one of Metabyte’s leading officials.
Mehta’s father, Manu Mehta, founded the company 15 years ago and is now the CEO and president of Metabyte.
As a result, Arjun Mehta said, he grew up with the company.
Manu Mehta said he noticed his son’s fascination with computers early on, especially during middle school, when his son purchased a “C++ for Dummies” book so he could learn computer programming.
After years of tinkering with computers and programs while at his father’s workplace and at home, Arjun Mehta said, his interest in technology and the company increased exponentially.
“Ever since I was a little kid, I guess I just liked working with computers and seeing how things worked.”
This eventually led Mehta to obtain an internship with the company right before starting his freshman year of high school.
Mehta joined the company in 2005, where he brainstormed new ways of handling content management, sparking the creation of HotDoodle.
Mehta quickly became involved with HotDoodle’s founding team and slowly eased his way into discussions, his father said.
“He sort of dialed right in at 15 years old and … became a part of our discussions and brainstorming sessions, where he would contribute to our ideas. He played along like an adult.”
Mehta’s work with the company paid off, and the new service became available to the public on Nov. 12, after nearly four years of development.
The purpose of HotDoodle is to get Web-savvy college students to develop Web sites easily, quickly and efficiently for small businesses, Mehta said.
Small businesses can register through HotDoodle’s program and request a Web site. PenPals, who are the Web designers for HotDoodle, then go online and choose which Web site requests they would like to work on.
“HotDoodle is really easy to work with. I can sit down and change things very quickly, and the folks at HotDoodle are always at the other end of the phone in case you can’t figure something out,” said Elaine Betts, owner of Go Far Consulting, a managing consulting firm that now uses HotDoodle.
Mehta added that the PenPal feature is targeted at college students who have acquired basic computer skills by simply using online programs, such as networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Mehta’s roommate, Travis Johnson, a first-year microbiology student, said that Mehta’s passion and enthusiasm for HotDoodle has encouraged other students like himself to consider getting involved with the service.
But the process of officially developing HotDoodle dragged on through Mehta’s entire high school career and became a concrete idea only during his senior year.
That year, he became more absorbed in the development of HotDoodle and began taking his work more seriously.
“Throughout the school year, last year especially, I wanted to hang out with friends and stuff, but I knew I had to do HotDoodle work,” Mehta said.
Mehta spent hours on end working out bugs and glitches within the system and also made video tutorials to make the process easier for new users.
Over the summer, Mehta said, he would often work 10- to 12-hour days several days in a row because he had some video tutorial to finish or glitch to fix.
“Any time something wasn’t worded nicely, any time a button should have been somewhere else, I would write it down on a huge Microsoft Word document of a bunch of feedback and we would look over it,” Mehta said. “This would go on for a period of days and days.”
Although he worked long hours without pay, Mehta said he had a lot of fun and does not regret his experience.
“I’m very proud that I can say that. … It is fun to be able to say I put in a lot of effort as opposed to wasting away my time,” he said.
Now that HotDoodle has officially launched, Mehta has more work but has limited his time on HotDoodle to one to two hours per day so he can manage his schoolwork.
“I think that because there was so much going on in high school throughout the four years that I learned that I need to know how much I should put on my plate at any given time,” Mehta said.
Though HotDoodle is still in its early stages, Manu Mehta said he hopes the service will one day reach an international scale to help small businesses progress.
Arjun Mehta said he is excited for the service’s future and is happy he was able to be a part of it.
“Besides being able to work with my dad, my really favorite part is that I finally get to work with a team that implements my ideas,” he said.
“I’m not just watching and observing, I’m actually contributing to the company to make it work. … I get to be a part of it.”
