hunt them down for trademark infringement. Next, they tried
PBFixit, which didn’t stick either. “People thought it stood for
peanut butter,” says Soules. Still, people came. “We didn’t make
money our frst month,” says Wiens. “We made money our
second month. And we’ve made money ever since.”
They roomed together, sleeping in bunk beds so they’d
have more space for inventory. Sophomore year, they moved
of campus to a two-bedroom apartment, and eventually to
a three-bedroom house with a three-car garage that served
as a parts warehouse. Taking care of business while keeping
up with classes presented certain challenges. “I’d be on the
phone with a customer, trying to walk them through install-
ing their hard drive, and I’m looking at the clock thinking,
‘I have a midterm across town in 20 minutes,’” says Wiens.
“You can’t tell the customer that.” Eventually, they hired
help. One day, an employee arrived for work at the house
having forgotten his key, so he picked the lock. The boss was
impressed. “To this day, we still teach lock-picking to new
employees,” Wiens says. (At times, iFixit has sold branded
lock-pick sets despite certain complications; it’s illegal to
ship them via U.S. mail.)
“In the beginning, we were very carefully iterating on the
customer experience around parts,” says Wiens. “Then custom-
ers would say, ‘Well, that’s fne, but how do we install it?’ So we
wrote them a manual. And they would say, ‘Well, that’s fne, but
we don’t have tools,’ and so we sold them
the tools. And they would say, ‘Well,
the tools are too expensive,’ so then we
started building kits and just bundled
the tools into the price of the parts. It turns out that we were
doing something that nobody else in the parts business was.”
The year they graduated, 2007, was the same year the
iPhone made its debut, presaging a dramatic shift in their
revenue stream from fxing computers to fxing handheld
devices. What had begun as a part-time gig was by now a
proftable, fast-growing business. It didn’t provide them with
just spending money while they were in college—it paid for
college. It also covered the down payment on the $690,000
house in Atascadero that would serve them over the years,
sometimes overlappingly, as their shared home, an employee
bunkhouse, and iFixit’s headquarters. “This could very well
be a career for us,” Soules remembers thinking senior year;
the thought had never occurred to him before. So much for
worrying about fnding a job.
THE FRONT DOOR AT IFIXIT headquarters on the edge of down-
town San Luis Obispo is locked. A sign says “by appointment
only.” There is a bell, however, to which a smiling, bearded
20-something responds. He leads the way through an empty
waiting room into a steel-girded, skylighted barn, flled with
other bearded 20-somethings and a few of their female coun-
terparts. This building used to be the car dealership where
Wiens got his lift. He left the other lift out
back for his employees’ beneft, though it’s
“WE STILL TEACH
LOCK-PICKING
TO NEW EMPLOYEES.”
•
UNDERNEATH IT ALL
Kay-Kay Clapp, iFixit’s director of outreach,
hard at work at (well, under) her desk at
company headquarters.
•
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
A set of screwdriver heads, waiting to
be mounted on an iFixit-branded handle.
On their frst day at iFixit, new employees
are given a desk. There’s one catch: They
have to assemble it themselves.
CONTINUED
ON PAGE 100 •
TECH
