Profiting from Broken iPhone Screens Part 2

Alright, y'all, apologies for the cliffhanger last week (get caught up here). Your responses were loud and clear: longer emails are great and cliffhangers are dogwater (as my kids say).

Let’s pick up where we left off, shall we?

If you’ll remember, I was 3 months into launching this iPhone screen remanufacturing biz, and things were going amazingly. If you haven’t heard of product market fit (PMF), the official definition is “the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand.”

But I’d describe it this way:

Normally when you launch a business it feels like sisyphus rolling a stone uphill. You make progress, but it’s just a constant grind. And if this is happening, that’s okay! Sometimes you just have to get over a hump. And sometimes it will stay a grind forever but still be a profitable, growing business. Other times it means your time is better spent on something else.

‍But when you DO have product market fit, that stone is chasing you. And the stone = customers = demand. You can’t keep up with it all!

That means you have tapped into something truly unique and special. It means you’ve found a market inefficiency or a supply and demand gap. It means you’ve found product-market fit.

It means drop everything and go HARD.

Anyway, back to iPhone screens. I had found PMF, and so now the playbook is to keep doing that same thing without getting crushed by that dang stone.

Here’s exactly how we outran the stone:

I spent about 7 hours scraping every single iPhone repair shop from Google Maps. Back then, good software for this was very hard to come by. Today it's quite easy with something like Outscraper or a virtual assistant.

In one tab I had the Wikipedia page for every USA MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area). I remember NYC was first and Carson City, NV was dead last.

On another tab I had my scraping software (I forget the name). One by one I would type:

• iPhone Repair NYC

• iPhone Repair Los Angeles

• iPhone Repair Chicago

• All the way down to Carson City

• 240+ MSAs!

But….BUT 7 hours later I had a CSV worth a million bucks…or $10m! It was every potential customer. It was my TAM (total addressable market). Now, I always start with this.