refurbished-electronics
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The Smart Lock That Became an Insurance Company
Jared Brier and Eric Schneider set out to build a smart lock. The warranty research sent them somewhere stranger: a business that lets a cracked phone, a school laptop and a carrier checkout share the same machinery.
The $80,000 Side Hustle That Became Stock4Less - and the Inventory Bet Small Sellers Can Copy
Gentille Gohoho started with a few marine parts, 300 listings and two hours a day. The catalog grew because he followed the buyers - but a broad, global inventory also makes delivery discipline the whole game.
The iPhone 8 Never Died. It Just Moved to St. Louis.
A women-owned shop in St. Louis has built a roughly $5.7M business out of the phones, tablets and laptop parts the rest of the market wrote off - and its best customers are schools and the government.
Circular
Circular is a Singapore-based, Y Combinator-backed startup that lets people and businesses subscribe to premium tech devices - iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, ThinkPads - for a flexible monthly fee instead of buying them outright. When a subscription ends, the device is returned, refurbished, and passed on to the next customer, aiming for roughly six subscription cycles before recycling. The model spreads the cost of a device across several users, undercuts retailer payment plans, and keeps working electronics out of landfills.