ERE—STAND ON THAT,” says Kyle Wiens, positioning himself
opposite his visitor and reaching for the switch. Then
comes the electric hum, followed by the soft jolt and the
ground receding. It’s a car lift, mechanic’s grade, salvaged
from a dealership, reinstalled on a concrete pad in Wiens’s
backyard in Atascadero, California.
Wiens—who’s wearing jeans, a checkered shirt, steel-rimmed glasses, and the kind of haircut you might give yourself with a pair of dull scissors—has about two sloping acres
on a rise overlooking U.S. Highway 101, midway between Los
Angeles and San Francisco. The high hills beyond are green
from this winter’s drenching rains. There’s a stucco main
house, a prefab outbuilding, a chicken coop, a patio with a
monster grill, and a work shed that houses motorcycles, dirt
bikes, kayaks, wetsuits, a generator, a compressor, a welding
torch, hammers, wrenches, and drills, as well as several small
piles of disassembled equipment: his many works in progress.
The lift is just outside the shed. Wiens uses it for jobs most
people would delegate to a professional, like swapping out
the transmission on a truck. And for cheap thrills: “It’s so cool!”
It’s also there because fxing stuf is his life’s work. Wiens,
33, is co-founder and CEO of iFixit, a company whose mission,
he says, is to “teach everybody how to fx everything.” On
iFixit’s website is a vast library of step-by-step instruction
sets covering, well, let’s see: how to adjust your brakes, patch a
leaky fuel tank on a motorcycle, situate the bumper sensor on
a Roomba vacuum cleaner, unjam a paper shredder, reattach
a sole on a shoe, start a fre without a match, fll a scratch in
an eyeglass lens, install a new bread-lift shelf in a pop-up
toaster, replace a heating coil in an electric kettle, and—iFixit’s
specialty—perform all manner of delicate repairs on busted
Apple laptops and cell phones. More than 25,000 manuals in all,
covering more than 7,000 objects and devices. Last year, according to Wiens, 94 million people all over the world learned how
to restore something to tiptop working condition with iFixit’s
help, which frankly was a little disappointing. Wiens’s goal was 100 million.
Some of the knowledge stored on
iFixit’s website is produced internally.
Most comes, wiki-style, from the world
at large. Either way, the information
is always free. You don’t have to register.
There’s no advertising. IFixit makes
about 90 percent of its revenue from
selling parts and tools to people who wouldn’t know what to
do with them if iFixit weren’t also giving away so much valu-
able information. The rest comes from licensing the software
iFixit developed to write its online manuals, and from training
independent repair technicians, some 15,000 so far, who rely
on iFixit to run their own businesses.
“We impact the economy in a far bigger way than we capture
ourselves,” Wiens allows. He’s OK with that. That’s how you get
to everybody and everything. But it’s a real business. A 14-year-
old, 125-employee, fve-time Inc. 5000 honoree growing 30
percent year over year, iFixit topped $21 million in sales in 2016
and delivers steady profts. “We give away a whole lot for free,”
says co-founder Luke Soules, who’s 32. “We like that, and it still
works, even if only a fraction of those people give us money.”
Consider how we as consumers relate to our electronic
gadgets and gizmos. We can’t live without them, but we have no
more idea about what goes on beneath their shiny exteriors
“WE GIVE AWAY A WHOLE
LOT FOR FREE. WE LIKE
THAT, AND IT STILL WORKS.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHAUGHN AND JOHN
