1) Focusing on Apple products is really smart. I know people who are quite happy with iPhone 3 or 3GS still. I don't know a lot of people using early non-Apple smartphones (I probably know more people using old Nokia 1100s or even T34s than old smartphones, because they work in places where cameras are banned on campus, and phones are ok in some areas otherwise). Apple products are also well engineered, but have weird special parts which are otherwise hard to source.
2) Having retail, mail-in, and DIY together is more than the sum of the parts. There are some products where I want retail, others where mail in is ok, and others where I'd DIY; depends on the product, the data on the product, and where I am (I ended up buying new laptops to replace broken ones when overseas, since I couldn't be without one for a month to have it shipped off for service).
This could be the Amazon of aftermarket repair -- the one place I go to first and don't bother looking elsewhere to save 5-10% on price.
Sometimes I wonder about the YC investments on things that I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary...
I mean - I guess its cool because they expanded/franchised out to college campuses or something, but I don't find this to be particularly interesting.
It would seem that they must have sold a grander vision to YC; "We will be the Geek Squad of college campuses, everyone on campus has a machine and a phone!" -- there is a real business there, sure, but I am not very excited about it.
Even coming from a career IT background, commoditizing helpdesk/repair and deploying an army of iTech's to college campuses just doesn't interest me.
I am sure that this could make a lot of (boring) money in the future though, so good for them.
Sometimes I wonder about the YC investments on things that I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary...
That's why it's nontrivial to do what we do. The best ideas always look like bad ideas.
A good test for your reaction to a startup idea is "would I have said the same thing about Dropbox when it was first started?" On the face of it, there was nothing revolutionary about Dropbox. There were already dozens of similar things.
There are a lot of domains where the people with least experience tend to have the most definite opinions, but startups are an extreme case of it. I find that as I get more experience with startups, I am extremely reluctant to dismiss ideas that seem unsexy, or crazy, or (my favorite) "toys." In fact, when we use those terms to describe ideas to one another during YC interviews, we usually mean them as compliments.
I'm reminded of Danny Hillis' description of telling Richard Feynman his idea for the connection machine:
One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.
Sam,
iFixit is great for people that want to repair their device themselves. iCracked offers an avenue for the other 90% of people that need their device fixed but have no desire to do it themselves. Think changing your oil yourself or dropping it off at Jiffy Lube. I imagine Jiffy Lube makes a lot of boring money as well.
We have some really cool ideas in the pipeline that will be released over the next few months. iPhone repair is just the beginning, not the end.
I think I met you and your crew a while back (last st. patties?) you were with the girl whose dad founded Intuit I believe... (and your friends who had a wine business)...
Anyway - I think that this is a great business, and I wish you the best. If you are going to be the "Campus Helpdesk" then I am sure big things are in store for you.
Sorry I am not excited - I dont mean that to be a personal slant, I guess I am just old :)
Good Luck! and congrats!
Edit: I am the type that likes to fix my own phone. I have had 15 separate iPhones since the first one launched and I have replaced screens on almost every one of them. I have yet to break my iPhone 4 - but I have replaced them on the original, 3G and 3GS.
"...that I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary..."
As an exercise, try to imagine how big it could get (and what it could morph into) with funding and 5+ years of hard work. Heroku started as a Rails IDE in a browser, by example.
Also, a lot of great companies didn't start with a revolutionary product/feature. They just did what they did REALLY REALLY WELL. Facebook, Amazon, Cisco, Zappos, Dropbox... All entered pretty crowded markets without an obvious differentiator (at first).
I think your expectation is misguided. YC's goal isn't to invest in novel or revolutionary companies. They're here to invest in startups that they think may eventually become big businesses.
I also abhor the question "how is this different than x's offering"? A startup doesn't need to be meaningfully differentiated from other startups-- it needs to be meaningfully differentiated from what the existing market is currently using.
I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary... [...] I don't find this to be particularly interesting [...] just doesn't interest me
I am sure that this could make a lot of (boring) money
I think you've answered your own question. I don't remember YC pledging that every idea they sponsor will be a ground-breaking reinvention of the tech landscape.
On the broadest scale, they want ideas that will be successful and give a good return. "Boring" enterprise software, for example, makes one hell of a lot more money than the latest group photo sharing iPhone app.
I'm assuming that they pitched themselves as a 'way to disrupt the Geek Squad,' which is sort of hilarious, seeing how the Geek Squad's founder, Robert Stephens, specifically set out to do the same thing to hole-in-the-wall computer repair shops when he was a college student with $200 back in the 1990s.
Then Best Buy bought them, and started letting in-store management run the show.
I was a Geek Squad Supervisor during college (and worked part-time for a few years after). The guys who wrote all the Geek Squad software and standard practices from the corporate HQ were great. However, over time the store management began to run Geek Squad like just another department.
Sales managers don't know anything about technical service, so eventually we began to focus on new PC customers (upgrades, software installs) instead of the PCs that were in the back waiting on repair. Eventually Geek Squad just became an extension of the PC sales department at most stores.
I was 'Rookie Agent #63' from 1998 - 2000 when I was in high school (see photo link below), and the company was still about 35 employees. It's a pity that the quality of the service has seemingly declined so greatly. I remember when Robert would mock Best Buy's seeming incompetence and declare unequivocally that the Geek Squad would never own a fleet of vans. So much for that.
About 2 years ago I helped a local cellphone repair shop to promote its services online. Here is what I did to make the shop's iphone repair business very successful.
1) Get it listed on Google maps with the right keywords, this was the top walk in traffic generator and best bang for bucks because local listing was free.
2) Created a webapp to generate ads for Kijiji and Craigslist, app saved adds for later use, this could have been done with any word processor but I found that the owner liked the specialized app more.
3) Get it featured in Kijiji's repair section, after Google this was the best driver of traffic. Craigslist came in last but still a very valuable source of customers.
This was enough to get the owner and his tech too busy. I didn't test facebook, twitter and adwords, but the owner showed me one of his competitor using facebook really well for promotions. If iCracked can somehow streamline management of these channels then it has the potential to become a very valuable service.
ICracked doesn't seem like the typical internet startup: an app/platform. Instead, they're solving a problem that a lot of people face by having a more local solution/presence.
I find it interesting how YCombinator is diversifying the type of companies in their portfolio. Kudos to YC for doing this -- I think it definitely opens up more opportunities for people.
There will be a need to re-create support infrastructure as smartphones and tablets supplant laptops/desktops. The more important and expensive devices become the more likely people will pay to fix rather than replace them.
It seems that the 'worldwide' claim a bit of a stretch. I can only search for an iTech in the US and the front page has a US map on it. (Though it seems you can sign up to be an iTech worldwide.)
Cgislason,
We have a GeoIP service on the site so when your in other countries, our iTechs show up for those specific countries. We are working on broader integrations as well, apart from expanding 4-5 new locations a week.
We also get a ton of mail in repairs from around the world in places we don't have iTechs yet. This has been very popular for US military abroad which we offer extremely discounted prices to get their devices up and working again. We are trying to expand as fast as possible now, so any referrals for iTechs are greatly appreciated!
It might even be worth buying an ad in the deployed Stars & Stripes (CENTCOM; I think you can buy Afghanistan + Kuwait + Qatar + Bahrain edition as a package, and it's not that expensive CPM). This is a perfect service for that market -- when I was overseas, we did this informally based on my purchases of bulk supplies and air force biomedical equipment techs with spare time. The only tricky part is the fee for service thing; it's fine to do cost recovery, but charging another soldier for service sometimes runs afoul of policy. Running the payments through your site might help with that, I'm not sure.
I find it interesting how a lot of businesses have spawned because of the whole apple ecosystem. Just wonderful. There's a problem out there and they are solving it. Wish these guys the best!
2) Having retail, mail-in, and DIY together is more than the sum of the parts. There are some products where I want retail, others where mail in is ok, and others where I'd DIY; depends on the product, the data on the product, and where I am (I ended up buying new laptops to replace broken ones when overseas, since I couldn't be without one for a month to have it shipped off for service).
This could be the Amazon of aftermarket repair -- the one place I go to first and don't bother looking elsewhere to save 5-10% on price.