Profiting from Broken iPhone Screens

Do you see how many 0s are above? That's because I'm ambitiously and irrationally optimistic. Let's get to newsletter #9,999, what say ye?

So lets get to it, yeah?

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When I was 23 I was managing an iPhone repair store in Tuscaloosa, AL. Sexy, right? Heh. I started the store as a senior and quickly grew it to 4 locations, but I was hating my life. Retail is tough, and hard to scale, and I'm not great at operations (but I didn't know it yet).

Anyway, one day I got a call that would send me down a 7 year rabbit hole. The caller asked "Hey, can we buy your broken iPhone screens?"

My mind started buzzing. Why does he want our broken screens? In fact, why haven't we just been throwing them away? I had no good answers.

What I did know was that this call sounded like a lot more opportunity than making a few hundred bucks. I was about to compete with this guy.

For some unknown reason we kept our screens in a box in the back of the shop. I suppose we didn't want to put them in a landfill or something. Anyway, back to the cold call.

This guy wanted to buy our broken glass for $4 each. I told him "no thanks," hung up, and immediately got to googling.

I learned that a new process of remanufacturing iPhone screens had just been developed in China. I was enthralled.

This is how the caller's business model worked:

• Buy broken iPhone screens for $4 each

• Receive and test the units to ensure that the LCD still lights up with no dead pixels.

• Carefully package and ship to China to be remanufactured on a machine that looks like this:

• Sell for $10 each and profit!

Heh, if only it were that easy. We all know that ideas are easy but execution is not only hard, but often complex.

Ideas are supposed to be simple though, right? If they weren't simple then we'd never launch. It's a law of the universe to keep us humanoids building cool stuff.

Anyway, I resolved right then and there to get out of the retail business. Why?

Because RETAIL SUCKS, REMEMBER?

Yes, it's true. The idea that I could actually make money without my introverted self having to talk to people in person sounded downright dreamy.

A month after I made this resolution I got a call from a competitor, offering to buy me out.

I couldn't say yes fast enough. That led me to starting LCDcycle.

The day after the deal was signed I incorporated LCDcycle and got to launching. Our first quarter's sales went like this:

1. $28k

2. $86k

3. $152k

But how? How did we grow so fast? I'm not great at sales or cold calling, but I found some people that were, and they basically did it all for me.

BUT...we are already all out of time, so I'll discuss our growth strategy and tactics in the next edition.

Thanks!

Chris Koerner