Here's a super simple business that I started with $300 and 20 sheets of paper:
An iPhone buy/resell business.
Step 1: Post Fliers
I created a really simple flier that said something like "Want to make up to $300 for 15 minutes of your time? Sell that old iPhone collecting dust in your drawer. Accepting all models and carriers. Text XXX-XXXX."
I printed out 20 of them and posted them all around my alma mater's campus. Took about 5 minutes to design, and cost me about fifty cents in total.
Step 2: Determine Buy Prices
I wrote a bunch of code that scraped various sites and gave me pricing graphs for every carrier, model, memory capacity combination of iPhone, so I knew exactly what prices I should buy at.
You can do it much more simply, though.
When someone texts you, just search that item - for example "Verizon iPhone 5 64GB" - on eBay. Look at the "closed" (important!) auctions and average the 10 most recent sale prices. Offer 60% of this number.
Step 3: Meet and Buy
When you meet with the person, you MUST inspect the phone. I have an infographic for a ~30-point inspection if you want it.
Basically, you want to check:
- Screen - Brightness, Pixels, Touch Sensitivity
- Camera - Photo, Video, Flash
- Audio IO - Quality, Volume, Crispness
- Apps - Internet, GPS, App Store
- Hardware - Power Button, Volume Buttons, Silence Toggle, Home Button
- Service - Call, Internet using WiFi/Carrier, Text
If any of these are malfunctioning, I'd either drop my offer price significantly or just walk away altogether.
Step 4: Sell ("Flip")
Once you buy the phone, repost it on Craigslist or eBay. I like Craigslist because I can meet up with people right in NYC - no shipping debacles - and I don't have to worry about not meeting a reserve price or anything like that.
My turnaround in NYC was 1-2 days.
This was a really profitable venture for me. I would scoop up an iPhone 4 for $60 and sell it for $100. I bought a few iPhone 6's for $350 and sold them for $550 the same day.
At the end of the day, people are busy. They have a lot of stuff to do, and they don't want to go through the hassle of that nightmarish task known as "selling online".
You capitalize on the convenience of being able to put cash in their hand in minutes for no effort on their part. Of course, you leverage this convenience by offering less that what you both know the phone could go for.
You profit off of the effort that they are unwilling to put in to sell their phone. iPhones are probably the easiest thing to sell, so basically, people are paying you upwards of $200 to create a Craigslist ad.
Cash Money.
Comments