One guy on Quora just posted his idea for an uber simple and lucrative side business; it’s one of the simplest ever. With only $300 and 20 sheets of paper, Matt Schlenker started an iPhone buy/resell business. He even went further and gave a step-by-step blueprint for how you can do it too!
Here is Matt’s how-to guide:
Step 1: Post Fliers
Matt 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.”
He printed out 20 of them and posted them all around his alma mater’s campus. Took about 5 minutes to design, and cost him about fifty cents in total.
Step 2: Determine Buy Prices
Matt wrote a bunch of code that scraped various sites and gave him pricing graphs for every carrier, model, memory capacity combination of iPhone, so he knew exactly what prices to buy at.
This was easy for him since, he’s a tech guy but 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. Matt designed his own 30-point inspection checklist to help him know what to look for.
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, he suggests dropping the offer price significantly or just walking away altogether.
Step 4: Sell (“Flip”)
Once you buy the phone, re-post it on Craigslist or eBay. Matt likes Craigslist because he can meet up with people right in NYC – no shipping debacles – and he doesn’t have to worry about not meeting a reserve price or anything like that.
His turnaround time on an iPhone in NYC was 1-2 days.
This venture has the potential to be “really profitable”. You can scoop up an iPhone 4 for $60 and sell it for $100; or an iPhone 6 for $350 and sell them for $550 the same day.
Why this Side Business Really Works
Matt explains that, “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 than what you both know the phone could go for. You profit off of the effort that they are unwilling to put into selling their phone. iPhones are probably the easiest thing to sell, so basically, people are paying you upwards of $200 to create a Craigslist ad.”
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