About Thinglet
An independent technology company in Palm Desert, California. Owner-operated since August 2011.
The short version
Thinglet started in 2011 as Thinglet Software and Marketing, doing websites and advertising for businesses in the Coachella Valley. That work still happens, and it now has its own company name and its own front door.
What changed is everything around it. Over fifteen years the shop kept building tools for itself, and a fair number of those tools turned out to be more interesting than the client work that prompted them. Monitoring systems. Reporting engines. Price trackers. An agent platform. A news operation with no human anchors.
So Thinglet is now the parent: a technology company that builds, tests, launches and operates things. Thinglet Marketing sells marketing. Thinglet A.I. sells AI software and consulting. This is the company they both belong to.
None of it came from a business plan. It came from running a small shop long enough to notice which problems kept repeating, and being stubborn enough to build the thing that fixed them.
By the numbers
Where sixteen years actually went.
What the work has actually been
Sixteen years is long enough to have done several different jobs under one roof.
Fixing computers
The repair bench came first, and it never entirely went away. Viruses, dead drives, networks that dropped every afternoon. It is unglamorous work that teaches you exactly how people actually use technology rather than how vendors imagine they do.
Building websites
Hundreds of them, across restaurants, medical offices, real estate, pools, nonprofits, aquatic centres and the local chamber of commerce. Custom built, hosted and maintained rather than handed over and forgotten.
Running networks
Managed IT for valley businesses. Backups that actually run, phone systems, guest Wi-Fi at scale, and the kind of compliance work that only gets noticed when it is missing.
Marketing, on every channel
Search, social, email, and the traditional side too. Local television, radio and billboards, written and produced in-house. Most agencies pick one half of that. We did both because clients needed both.
Writing software
The tools we built to run the shop turned into products: an AI agent platform, a marketing audit, an analytics reporter, a client CRM with monitoring folded in, a time clock, a live price index.
Publishing
Books, under our own imprint. A practical guide to AI for small business owners, and illustrated adventure series for children. Different muscle, same instinct for finishing things.
Local, and staying that way
Everything here has been run from Palm Desert. Our clients are neighbours, which is a different relationship from being an account number in another time zone, and it changes how you behave when something breaks at five on a Friday.
The founder is a member of the Palm Desert Area Chamber of Commerce and speaks locally on AI and emerging technology. Over the years the shop has done discounted and pro bono work for valley nonprofits, schools and community organisations, on the reasoning that a company's health is tied to the health of the economy around it.
We are not trying to become a national agency. We are trying to build good things and be reachable by phone.
Sixteen years, roughly
The short version of how a computer repair shop became a technology company.
Online, early
Pat starts running web businesses in the Coachella Valley during the first dot-com boom, which is early enough to have watched local business technology reinvent itself several times since.
Palm Desert Geeks opens
A small computer repair shop in Palm Desert. Fixing PCs, removing viruses, helping people get online. Hands-on work in a simpler tech era, and the same shop and phone number are still running today.
Thinglet Software and Marketing
Founded 16 August. The repair shop's clients kept asking for websites and advertising, so the web and marketing side got its own company name.
A boutique web and mobile firm
The public description at the time reads as a boutique mobile and web development firm out of Southern California. Custom design, development, hosting and maintenance, with a stated preference for doing it properly.
Building tools for ourselves
Running client sites and networks at volume means writing your own tooling. Monitoring, reporting, a time clock, a CRM. None of it was a product yet. Most of it eventually became one.
The AI side gets its own company
Thinglet A.I. splits off to sell working AI software and training rather than treating it as a line item on a marketing invoice.
Products, not just projects
An agent platform, a daily AI tools directory, a marketing audit, an analytics reporter, a price index, a news operation with no human anchors. Several of them start earning on their own.
Thinglet becomes the parent
Marketing and A.I. keep their own front doors and their own customers. Thinglet stops selling services here and becomes the company they both belong to: the place where things get built, tested, published and occasionally retired in public.
How we work
Build useful things
If it does not save someone time, money or aggravation, it is a demo. We try to be honest with ourselves about which one we are holding.
Keep the human in charge
Automation should hand people better decisions, not take the decision away. Every system we build has somewhere a person can step in.
Publish what we learn
The failures are more instructive than the wins and almost nobody writes them down. We do, including the ones that make us look slow.
Own the whole stack
We run our own servers, write our own code and fix our own mistakes at two in the morning. It makes us slower to promise and faster to deliver.
Where we are
77564 Country Club Dr. Suite 220
Palm Desert, CA 92211