If you haven’t heard of iCracked, they’re an on demand online electronics repair and trade-in company focused on Apple and Samsung devices, YC graduate, and probably one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley.
In this infographic, Hustle Con explains exactly how AJ Forsythe, the 26 year founder of iCracked, grew his company to $25 million in revenue by selling iPhone parts.
The takeaways
Humble beginnings – On the outside, starting a company looks like so much fun, but AJ was just scraping by for the first few years. Even though he was working 80+ hour weeks, iCracked only did $250,000 the first two years so he was most likely paying himself next to nothing.
Patience – iCracked didn’t start scaling their business for 2 years. They’re still not even close to being at scale. Reading TechCrunch makes growth look so fast and easy. It ain’t. It takes time.
Getting into YC without being technical – I was pleasantly surprised to read that AJ and Anthony, neither of whom know how to code, were accepted into YC without having a technical person on the team. They hired their first engineer after getting in.
Infrastructure – With the right infrastructure, anything can scale. My biggest takeaway with iCracked is the importance of being an architect, not just a do-er. Instead of going after the quick but small-time sales, iCracked spent the time to build a scalable and repeatable process. Now, instead of fixing a handful of phones a week, they built a huge network of iTechs and drive so much traffic that they’re able to earn massive amounts of revenue from selling parts.
