From Inmates To Infants: An Entrepreneur Finds His Niches

Although the phrase "find your niche" is thrown around ad nauseam these days, Sterling Heights entrepreneur Ryan Santangelo says it's no joke. He's found three niches of his own.

 

"I know that's a cliche, but it's really true," Santangelo explains. "There's a market that was being missed, and we came in and filled that hole."

 

For the last two businesses they started, Santangelo and his brother Pete found similar niches for two very disparate sets of clients: business owners and prisoners. Dynamic Media, which they started in 2004, provides SiriusXM programming to businesses; Secure Media Systems, founded in 2008, provides prison-safe MP3 devices and media download kiosks to inmates. 

 

For their latest endeavor, the Santangelos have tapped into an entirely different market: new parents. The new project, a high-tech baby monitor called SafeToSleep, was inspired by Santangelo's own frustrations as a parent of two.

 

"My brother and I both have kids," Santangelo says. "We were shocked at how terrible baby monitors were. When you go to buy a monitor, it's really kind of junk, these little walkie-talkie kind of things. And the new monitors are designed around features that are really for the parents, you know: take a high-definition picture of your baby and post it to Facebook."

 

So, using a combination of licensed technology and original developments, the Santangelos wirelessly linked a fiber-optic sleeping mat to a smartphone app. The mat monitors each breath the baby takes, and parents can set the app to alarm if breathing stops or slows. The product debuts this month with a MSRP of $329, but it's been in development for two years. Santangelo says the testing process, conducted at a hospital in Singapore, took six months.

 

"There were 65 babies involved, all the way from preemies up to about 20 pounds," he says. "The babies would lay on the mats and the nurses would manually count the breath rate of the child, then they'd look at the wired cardiorespiratory monitor, then they'd look at the number our technology was reading."

 

Once SafeToSleep was refined to match the accuracy of the hospital's monitors, Santangelo says it was time to "announce it to the baby world." The product debuted in October at the ABC Kids Expo, a major trade show for the children's products industry. The Santangelos set up a booth with fake babies to demonstrate the technology ("We bought these babies that were designed by this artist, and we basically cut them open and put a device inside that would breathe and make the chest thump," Santangelo says). Santangelo says the booth drew heavy traffic, which he credits to presenting a high-tech product in a surprisingly low-tech market.

 

"There were a lot of bibs and cribs and stuff like that, but we were one of the few exhibitors to have anything that was technological in nature," he says. "There's been way more innovation in toys than there has been in infant safety, and we don't understand why."

 

That spirit of common-sense innovation has pervaded Santangelo's business endeavors. With Dynamic Media, it meant selling business owners on licensed and legal satellite radio programming. With Secure Media Systems (which the Santangelos sold last spring), it meant creating a specialized clear-plastic MP3 player that would display a prisoner's identification and couldn't be weaponized. Both businesses have seen smashing success: Dynamic Media is the nation's largest provider of SiriusXM to businesses, and Secure Media Systems equipment is in hundreds of prisons nationwide.

 

Santangelo says his businesses are in Sterling Heights to stay, though. Between Dynamic Media and SafeToSleep, the Santangelos employ 13, three of whom were hired last year. And they're anticipating hiring an additional 20 for a SafeToSleep call center. 

 

"We always joke that Sterling Heights is the Silicon Valley of Michigan, because there's a great deal of innovation," Santangelo says. "The automotive base pulls in a lot of really talented people, and for companies like us, that's a windfall of a talent pool to pull from. You go to Washington or California, you're competing with Google or Microsoft for talent."

 

And having lived in Sterling Heights since he was six and his brother was three, it only makes sense for Santangelo to stick around.

 

"We're born and raised here," he says. "This is home for us."


All Photos by David Lewinski Photography