With the new iPhone 5s and 5c out this week, it’s an opportune moment for the 30-person startup from Redwood City. iCracked basically started out of a dorm room at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where co-founder AJ Forsythe gained a reputation on campus as someone who could fix iPhones on the cheap.
He parlayed that skill into a business that’s on track to do eight figures in revenue this year by selling repair kits and deploying contractors or “iTechs” to fix or buy back devices on the spot. They have more than 400 of these skilled contractors throughout the world.
To date, they’ve had a buyback service where you can mail in your phone. But that business is relatively small with a few thousands devices sent in each month.
But today, they’re launching a way that you can call up someone on-demand in the next few hours to take iPhones or iPads off your hands. Depending on the storage, condition and model of the device, they’ll pay up to a few hundred dollars for the latest iPhones or iPads. It’s available in the San Francisco Bay Area now, but they’ll widen out the reach of the program later on. They’ll expand to Southern California next month, then New York.
The coolest part is that iCracked will hand you a branded debit card carrying the value of the device. The company spent a year working on this because they didn’t want the financial risk of having contractors walk around with hundreds or thousands of dollars in cash. When an iTech accepts a device, they can load the debit card with money on the spot and hand it over.
Then you can use it like a regular debit card from your personal bank by taking out cash at an ATM or buying goods at a store. The whole in-person transaction should take 15 minutes at most.
The new service ties into iCracked’s ambition of being the ‘AAA’ for people’s devices.
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