Today we’d like to introduce you to Naveed Mian.
Naveed, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My name is Naveed Mian. I am a current Shareholder, Executive and Co-founder of a growing media tech known as Adapt Media Solutions in the DMV area. I am also a 21-year-old business student at Howard University, majoring in International Business and Finance. I Traded high volume Stocks at 19, Managed celebrities and built a corporate Infrastructure of a company at 20. After getting a lot of success in the stock market at 19, I was given a nickname as the brown warren Buffett.
From a young age, I would study the stock market, economics and a lot of the powerful corporate leaders we know today. I had a tremendous love for books and the people who shared a similar story to mine. I come from a family that migrated to the US in the early 2000s. I came to the states at the age of four years with my mom. By being from the blood of immigrants, we came to the United States for the American dream, the dream we could not find from our country. When my father first entered this great country, he came with a finance degree and a duffel bag of Hopes from our country but he lacked the “American Education” so he was forced to work minimum wage jobs just so he could afford to live here and at the same time have enough financial means to send back home so my mom and I would be taken care of.
My father would work nonstop hours as mechanic days and nights just so ends could be met. When you have hopes and dreams, you don’t let them die just because you’re tired, you keep moving and that was my dad. Soon in the early 2005s my father had worked so many years and he had saved up enough to start his own business, he bought his first tow truck and started a towing business (In the early 2000s the trucking industry was booming). A few years after my father started his business, we bought our first home in 2008, right before the great financial crisis. This was when my story started. In the early 2008s we bought a home not knowing the market conditions, home prices were falling and we didn’t know and we bought anyways. Soon after buying our home, we were faced with a financial crisis of our own. The business started taking a decline and soon after, we almost faced foreclosure. During this time, I was a nine-year-old kid who only had two things to worry about: School and homework. The day I came back from school, my parents were not home, so I did what I do best: watch TV.
I remember vividly the day I was sitting and the doorbell rang, I opened the door and I was this nine-year-old kid who had just gotten a Foreclosure notice a minutes after opening the door, I was told to sign and give it to my parents, the moment I got that notice I felt a fear go through my body, because I knew something wasn’t right, maybe the world was about to fall apart. It was this moment when I found out we could be losing our home because of what? Some banks went bankrupt. My interest grew from here, every day after school, I would spend some time in the library, teaching myself things that a normal kid my age should never be teaching themselves. I would read books on top of books about economics, the stock market, banks at just nine years old. I was teaching myself what normal people never get a chance to learn about, financial literacy and how our economic system works. Luckily around this time, my dad never let our home go under.
Soon after this part of my life, I developed an interest in billionaires and millionaires and how they got to where they were. When I entered High School, I was lucky enough to choose where I wanted to go, so I chose Howard High, the school with the ROTC program. So I could discipline myself and learn what normal kids my age couldn’t. I always found myself doing things that others were afraid to do or didn’t know how to do.
Soon after getting into high school, I started wrestling, I met another kid by the name of Bryce Hall who at that time was a rising YouTube star and now is a well-known celebrity. I was introduced to the social media world through him through the years we went to school together and wrestled, this was when I studied his career and what worked best for him, soon after graduating I went on to college and he went on to live his Hollywood dream. After a few months into college, I started my entrepreneur journey as a YouTube manager by helping YouTube stars that I had gotten in contact with through countless emails and one of them is now a really good best friend of mine, Soloin.
After the first semester of college, I started trading stocks, I had the previous knowledge and I wanted to implement it. I went to my parents and asked if I could borrow some money to invest in the stock market. They trusted me and gave me everything they had at that time. I managed to put together 10k. I went into the market knowing that if I lost everything, I would sell my 2008 Nissan Altima to pay them back. A month into trading, I lost nearly 4k and only had 6k left. I lost what I had saved, but I wasn’t gonna give up. I still had 6k left, which was the money my parents let me borrow. I took a month’s break and studied the market a little more and I came back and went all in. I knew if I had lost everything, my parents would get every cent back and I would truly be the only one losing. I remember I spent hours researching a company and went all in the next day for cents on the dollar. The next week I remember waking up and seeing 24k. I sold and gave my parents their money back and kept ongoing. I invested in a penny stock that everyone was afraid of but I knew it was worth way more. At 19, I was making more than the professors teaching me every six months.
From 19-20, I was invited to numerous celebrity events and meetings through my management years and I had the pleasure of meeting with a few executives of rising multinational companies. To this, I have worked with Bryce Hall, Soloin, Different Culture TV, The Minorities, Taylor Holder, KingVader Brittanya Razavi, Moe Razavi, Juhahn Jones and The Great Khali and a few other well-known celebrities and influencers in the media world.
After coming back home, I partnered with a team and we created a tech company known as Adapt Media Solutions in early 2019, with a mission to change the way businesses utilize technology in the changing media world.
Has it been a smooth road?
Some of the struggles from my past were the naysayers. Coming from a brown/middle-eastern background, I was always taunted and called racial slurs. I remember when I was young in the 5th grade, I was in the special education program because I was a slow learner compared to everyone else. I was treated like an unequal to the other kids. Which obviously motivated me to do better. During the last month of that school year, I was interviewed and I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a Businessman like my dad. My teacher said, “how about something else, a truck driver?”. They would try to make my goals “realistic” to what they knew at that time, but I knew what was realistic for me and I was not going to let someone decide my future for me.
Please tell us about Adapt Media Solutions.
So Adapt Media Solutions is a membership-based media/technology business, it was launched in the April of 2019, In the very beginning we were actually a company geared more towards real-estate agents, our goal was to revolutionize the way businesses utilize technology for marketing in real estate and then we expanded as we saw more potential in other sectors like sports/government/and small businesses. Our company was originally created as a disrupter in the traditional real-estate sector.
We saw that many real-estate companies were using a classic form of marketing, examples being: in-person home walkthroughs and online listings with only photos. Our company was created to actually change that, we introduced a new concept in the market of doing Home-walkthroughs but through video and through drones, the agent would walk around the house while our cameraman would follow and record that agent. The agent would be recorded while doing the same thing they would do while touring an ordinary home buyer. Our goal was to introduce a friendly home buying experience without the hassle of both parties giving up too much time. There were companies like us but none of them were as sophisticated. They were mostly a one-man gig.
We went out, recorded, edited, and gave instructions on how it should be done marketing-wise. As we saw a tremendous success, we also saw a bigger vision of offering this service to anyone who needed it.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I don’t think it matters where you start. It’s all about dedication and hustling. You can start from the deserts of Egypt, but if you don’t know how to implement knowledge, then you and your business will stay where you are indefinitely. When my start-up company first launched, it wasn’t a smooth ride. Every door we knocked, they turned us down because we were just kids running a business. Our company started in Tyson’s Corner VA, the HOT spot for business around the DC, Maryland and VA (DMV) area. We knocked on doors, offices until at-least one person said yes to us and gave us a chance. So my answer is that any place is a good place if you know how to navigate around it.
Contact Info:
- Website: AdaptMediaSolutions.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/naveed_mian/?hl=en
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naveedmian/
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