iCracked's Growth Struggles
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A story about how iCracked, an iPhone repair company, grew to significant revenue but struggled after raising venture capital.
"iCracked was started by my friend AJ Forsyth. They raised about $20-30 million from Andreesen Horowitz. What iCracked did was iPhone repair - switching an iPhone screen only takes a few hours of training, anyone could figure it out.
They would send leads to repair people and take a small cut of the charge. They'd charge $150 to fix your phone and take maybe $20. To get leads, you had to buy iPhone parts from them. They were doing something like $30 million a year in ecom sales just selling screens.
I think what went wrong was they raised too much money and probably spent too much on ads. I'm not sure if it was quite venture scale - they got to like $20-30 million in sales but couldn't figure out how to get bigger. The founder had crazy aspirations like having drones come and drop off stuff. They tried to launch more things and probably lost focus.
There are other services out there just like them that do $30-40-50 million a year in revenue. I think you could have a nice company that makes $30-40M in sales, but the industry probably wasn't cut out for the founder's bigger aspirations."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.