iHealPhones was a phone repair and computer servicing business born out of my garage in the Golden Hills east of Sacramento called El Dorado Hills, California. When the iPhone and other touchscreen phones were released into the world, there were suddenly millions of users breaking their devices out and about. Users were so desperate to repair their screens, that they turned to a (then) unqualified techie kid like myself to fix many common issues like screen breaks and software issues. iHealPhones gave me the reputation at my high school as the "phone guy", which caused many jobless high schoolers to ask for a free phone fix. These requests got so bad, that I had to make a shirt that said "No, I will not fix your phone for free." (I know, pretty cringe.) I learned HTML, CSS, PHP, JS, and Flash to build a quick website to direct customers to contact me and read up on my pricing.  This eventually led to supporting them in more than just iPhone repairs: such as laptop repairs, software installations, general tech advice, and beyond.  When the iPhone 4 came out, there was a sudden influx of users wanting custom colors on their device, so I installed LCDs and digitizers that were colored everything from transparent to pink!

This tech repair and troubleshooting knowledge I learned directly applied to the inception of my project: Minute.tech. The business was a great opportunity for me to learn from my (many) mistakes, and it gave me the confidence and passion for computer engineering and business! iHealPhones as a business needed to pivot to more than just fixing screens because device manufacturers like Apple began to lock down their hardware and software to ensure customers were exclusively going through Apple's expensive and wasteful planned obsolescence cycle. Since then, the Right to Repair movement has been making major gains, so there is hopefully a future for end-users to have autonomy over fixing their devices.