Four years after its launch, iCracked is taking its wildly successful iPhone trade-in and services business worldwide with plans to open offices in London and Berlin in the next few months.
The company has been on a tear since AJ Forsythe launched the business with his high school friend, Anthony Martin, and Leslee Lambert in 2010.
We’ve written about iCracked, when the company first launched from Y Combinator, and since then it’s been growing pretty solidly. And by pretty solidly, I actually mean lights out.
In July, the company reached the milestone of having its over 600 iTechs generate over $1 million in revenue for themselves.
Using a turnkey model, where iCracked interviews and vets potential iTechs before providing them with the tools, training, and marketing material to open what amounts to an iCracked franchise in their region, the company managed to build out a network of over 600 technicians. And iCracked expects to add 1500 iTechs worldwide over the next 12 months, according to Forsythe.
There are already iTechs who work overseas, but the London and Berlin offices will be the company’s first locations outside of the U.S.
“It’s been a pretty wild learning experience from being a startup in a living room to having 75 full-time employees in Redwood City,” says Forsythe. “We’ve helped create these 600 full-time and part-time jobs that people can start to make extra income and take care of our customers.”
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To start up an iCracked operation, iTechs don’t pay any money to license any content. They buy the inventory that they repair customers’ devices with and charge a mark-up on replacement parts and services. There’s also money coming in from the express sell program, which allows customers to sell their used iPhones to iCracked from roughly $120. The company’s iTechs receive between $30 and $50 for facilitating the transaction.
The repair and trade-in services are netting iCracked more than $1 million per-month, according to Forsythe. “The goal is not to be the largest iOS repair network, but to be the cradle-to-cradle network for iOS services,” he says. “Everyone’s focused on building the software that will run on the hardware, but not many people are focused on running the software that will repair the hardware.”
