Spring Break
Minding Your Own Business
A Miami student creates, manages, and owns his own Internet company.
Laura Pollina
Issue date: 3/28/06 Section: Features
Reading hundreds of pages, staying up until 4 a.m. to finish that one paper and drinking so much coffee your leg has seemingly unstoppable twitch, are all part of an average student's life at college.
We do this knowing that one day we will go out in the real world and find ourselves in the employee pool.
But for one Miami University student, the routine of an average student has been combined with the pressures and perks of owning his own company.
Matt Dopkiss, a 21-year-old junior, is the creator, owner and mastermind of a user-friendly Web page designer Internet business, which in 2005 accumulated gross sales of about $70,000.
While many college students look under their couch cushions for cash, Dopkiss simply looks to his computer.
The company, www.dynamIt.us, was created by Dopkiss and high school pal Bobby Whitman the summer before they started college. The company takes professional, custom designs and gives the user complete content control through a system similar to Microsoft Word. DynamIt makes what used to be a complicated and strenuous process for designing Web pages an easy and affordable one.
"Before our software, people were forced to pay a programmer to make daily changes to their Web site's content. The result was that Web sites were either extremely expensive or not properly maintained," Dopkiss explained. "We set out to solve this problem."
Even before he entered college, Dopkiss had a mind for business and started his computer empire back in high school.
A Columbus native, he attended Bishop Watterson High School where he took programming classes. Along with Whitman they used their knowledge to create a humorous computer game dubbed Watterson Clue.
With a personal take on the classic board game, Dopkiss and Whitman used Watterson teachers as the suspects, places around the school as crime scenes, and various classroom objects as the murder weapons. Selling their game at lunchtime for only a few dollars, Dopkiss realized he just might be onto something.
We do this knowing that one day we will go out in the real world and find ourselves in the employee pool.
But for one Miami University student, the routine of an average student has been combined with the pressures and perks of owning his own company.
Matt Dopkiss, a 21-year-old junior, is the creator, owner and mastermind of a user-friendly Web page designer Internet business, which in 2005 accumulated gross sales of about $70,000.
While many college students look under their couch cushions for cash, Dopkiss simply looks to his computer.
The company, www.dynamIt.us, was created by Dopkiss and high school pal Bobby Whitman the summer before they started college. The company takes professional, custom designs and gives the user complete content control through a system similar to Microsoft Word. DynamIt makes what used to be a complicated and strenuous process for designing Web pages an easy and affordable one.
"Before our software, people were forced to pay a programmer to make daily changes to their Web site's content. The result was that Web sites were either extremely expensive or not properly maintained," Dopkiss explained. "We set out to solve this problem."
Even before he entered college, Dopkiss had a mind for business and started his computer empire back in high school.
A Columbus native, he attended Bishop Watterson High School where he took programming classes. Along with Whitman they used their knowledge to create a humorous computer game dubbed Watterson Clue.
With a personal take on the classic board game, Dopkiss and Whitman used Watterson teachers as the suspects, places around the school as crime scenes, and various classroom objects as the murder weapons. Selling their game at lunchtime for only a few dollars, Dopkiss realized he just might be onto something.
