YC?s iCracked Is Blowing Up With A New ?Uber? For iPhone Repairs Service

Yes, you can fix that smashed iPhone on demand now. That means no visits to the Apple store, or intensive DIY efforts. A YC alum called iCracked launched a real-time, iPhone or iPad repair service a little over a month ago. Think of it like an “Exec” or an “Uber” for your broken iPhone that you can order straight to your door. With hardly any publicity at all, the service is blowing up: it boosted iCracked’s number of monthly customers by about 250 percent and the company tells me the business is eyeing “eight figures” in revenue for this year. The changes add iCracked to a growing class of startups like Exec, Uber, Zimride’s Lyft, Instacart and Postmates that are all trying to solve the logistical issues of delivering products and services in real-time in urban cities. “We want to be the ‘AAA’ for your device,” explains AJ Forsythe, the company’s CEO. “We’re doing on-demand repair and buyback for just about every major city in the U.S.” He shared some of the maps above and below with us, showing actual completed repairs in the last 30 days. Above is the San Francisco Bay Area, and just for good measure to show that this isn’t a Silicon Valley-only phenomenon, he showed us a map of South Florida (below). “We’re trying to get to a place where we can get someone to them in the shortest amount of time at the click of a button,” he said. He partnered with a 20-year-old from the U.K. named Martin Amps, who had built a dispatch system just months ago. Amps never implemented it because it was so specialized, but Forsythe found him on a Hacker News posting and thought the system could be of use to iCracked. Up until then, iCracked’s three-prong business model worked similarly. But it didn’t operate in real-time. Customers would have to mail-in their devices or schedule appointments with iTechs. iCracked earns revenue in three ways: it does 1) repairs, 2) buybacks and 3) sells do-it-yourself kits (pictured right) for people who want to fix phones themselves. The company has more than 350 “iTechnicians,” who work as contractors and are trained to quickly fix broken iPhones and iPads. They earn decent salaries of between $70,000 and $100,000 a year. Forsythe says he’s selective and he only ends up hiring about 2 to 3 percent of iTech applicants. While these “iTechs”

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