doogie smart houser

Houston teen wins business plan competition for his home tech company

Aaryan Patel, an incoming senior at The Village School, has been running his business since he was a freshman. Photo via tidemedia.tech

By the time 17-year-old Aaryan Patel, who will be a senior this fall at The Village School, won first place at The University of Houston Bauer College of Business' annual Think Tank competition this year, he'd already had his business on solid footing for a couple of years. Patel founded Tide Media in 2016, and he's been growing his company ever since.

The business offers consulting and installation for smart home devices, working with customers one-on-one to determine their needs and interests and doing everything from purchasing equipment for buyers all the way to full installation and integration of the technology within a home's existing devices.

"I started in the ninth grade," says Patel. That's when his dad started buying multiple smart home devices to control their lights and thermostat. "I saw how convenient it was, and how it makes for a more connected experience. It feels really futuristic."

Patel's father works in IT, so he understood how to troubleshoot when devices didn't work as planned. That got Patel to thinking how someone with less tech know-how would cope with the same situation.

"Not everyone has the competency [to troubleshoot]," he explains. "Maybe they don't have the time to learn, or they just don't know enough about technology. A lot of people come from fields where there isn't a focus on computers."

Patel, like his father, has an interest in computer technology — in fact, he's doing an internship this summer at Stanford University looking at the business applications of wearable technology for medical students — and he realized there was an opportunity to be had. But he saw it much more as a community service than a business at first. He asked his uncle in Katy to post his services to the Next Door app, and the business took off. Within two months, he'd worked with 14 clients on upgrading their homes with technology.

"I knew I didn't want to do any ads," says Patel. "So, all of my business has been word of mouth."

By July of 2017, he says he posted between $10,000 and $14,000 in profits. He credits the success of the business to his approach to clients. He wants each experience to be not only personal, but personalized. When he meets with a client, he has a questionnaire that gauges what they want to get from their technology. Some might want to properly install a Nest thermostat. Others may want to network Amazon Echo or iHome products to do everything from turning on lights to playing music.

"Or, maybe they want to open the garage door from their cellphones as they are coming in the driveway after work," he says.

Patel says he has worked with clients to tell them what they need and the clients purchase the equipment and products themselves. But he also provides more concierge service, where he will take a client's list of items, purchase them and then install them.

He says he tends to work more in the summers and on school breaks than he does during the school year, since he's studying the challenging International Baccalaureate curriculum at school. He's also trained some of his friends on doing installations, as well as mentoring them about how to talk to clients, how to respond to questions and otherwise provide high level service — things he says he learned over the course of launching his business.

"The biggest thing I've learned is that is you want to do anything, you have to have passion and drive," he says. "And my biggest challenge has been managing my clients along with my school work."

In college, he plans to study the Internet of Things, likely via a computer engineering program. Since his win at Think Tank, he's invested back into his business and plans to expand as much as he can; he's thinking of offering his services citywide, branching out from his Sugar Land and Katy coverage areas.

But even as he's continuing his studies and building a business, he keeps his own priority for Tide Media top of mind: he wants it to be a service for the community to help others be more connected.

"A lot of this is still new technology," he says. "And I want to help people see how technology can help society."

Trending News

Building Houston

 
 

Baylor College of Medicine's Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower is set to open in 2026. Rendering courtesy of BCM

Baylor College of Medicine has collected $100 million toward its $150 million fundraising goal for the college’s planned Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower.

The $100 million in gifts include:

  • A total of $30 million from The Cullen Foundation, The Cullen Trust for Health Care, and The Cullen Trust for Higher Education.
  • $12 million from the DeBakey Medical Foundation
  • $10 million from the Huffington Foundation
  • More than $45 million from members of Baylor’s Board of Trustees and other community donors, including the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation, and The Elkins Foundation.

“The Cullen Trust for Health Care is very honored to support this building along with The Cullen Foundation and The Cullen Trust for Higher Education,” Cullen Geiselman Muse, chair of The Cullen Trust for Health Care, says in a news release. “We cannot wait to see what new beginnings will come from inside the Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower.”

The Baylor campus is next to Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park, a 37-acre project. Rendering courtesy of BCM

The Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower is set to open in 2026. The 503,000-square-foot tower is the first phase of Baylor’s planned Health Sciences Park, an 800,000-square-foot project that will feature medical education and research adjacent to patient care at Baylor Medicine and Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center on the McNair Campus.

The Baylor campus is next to Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park, a 37-acre project that will support healthcare, life sciences, and business ventures. Baylor is the anchor tenant in the first building being constructed at Helix Park.

“To really change the future of health, we need a space that facilitates the future,” says Dr. Paul Klotman, president, CEO, and executive dean of Baylor. “We need to have a great building to recruit great talent. Having a place where our clinical programs are located, where our data scientists are, next to a biotech development center, and having our medical students all integrated into that environment will allow them to be ready in the future for where healthcare is going.”

In the 1940s, Lillie and Roy Cullen and the M.D. Anderson Foundation were instrumental in establishing the Texas Medical Center, which is now the world’s largest medical complex.

“Baylor is the place it is today because of philanthropy,” Klotman says. “The Cullen family, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, and the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation have been some of Baylor’s most devoted champions, which has enabled Baylor to mold generations of exceptional health sciences professionals. It is fitting that history is repeating itself with support for this state-of-the-art education building.”

The Cullen Foundation donated $30 million to the project. Rendering courtesy of BCM

Trending News