Entrepreneurial Pursuits

Last Updated 2.19.19

Cash4MacBooks

Cash4MacBooks introduced many industry-firsts, such as performing advanced repairs on liquid damaged printed circuit boards (PCB) at scale and automating the creation and emailing of pre-paid shipping labels. The business operated out of my 1B1B apartment for 18 months until mid-2015 when I relocated to a dedicated five-room office in Downtown Boston. Under my ownership, yearly revenue grew from $40k to $200k, and in early 2016, I sold the business to a larger competitor.

Cash4MacBooks was an eCommerce business I acquired in 2013 that purchased, refurbished, and resold Apple MacBook, iPhone, and iPad models. Instead of buying and reselling devices as the previous owner had, I introduced a refurbishing stage and re-wrote the price quote algorithm to favor liquid damaged MacBooks. The offer prices for these devices were consistently higher than industry competitors whose business model was primarily buying and selling, not advanced repairs.

SpeakEasy VOIP Phone Case

The SpeakEasy was a concept for a 3-in-1 VOIP case for the Apple iPod that sought to provide a low-cost alternative to traditional cellular devices and plans. The case’s main features were an enhanced microphone and headset speaker, built-in rechargeable battery for recharging the iPod’s built-in battery, and a durable outer shell to protect against accidental damage. The project fulfilled a requirement for an Entrepreneurship course I was enrolled in during the Fall-2013 semester at Suffolk University.

The body of the Proof of Concept (POC) case was printed on my first 3D printer – a Solidoodle 2. A video of it being made can be viewed here.

Facial Recognition

The Faces project explored the feasibility of using a smartphone’s embedded peripherals to map a person’s head and facial features with precision. The project began when a client, a well-known vinyl wall graphics company, expressed interest in developing a new product line of bobbleheads with customers’ real facial features cloned onto the figures’ head. The client intended to build the recognition technology into their branded app, which would upload the customer’s facial mapping data to the client’s factory for manufacturing on a fleet of color 3D printers.

Faces was a side-project I pursued from mid-2014 up until early-2015 when the client decided to cease further development. The decision came after testing showed that with the state of 3D printing technology in 2015, it would take between 12-16 hours to print a single head.

TuneRipper

TuneRipper was a concept for mail-in music CD ripping service for digitizing large libraries of physical media. The idea for TuneRipper came in 2010 after finding a broken CD duplication machine. I repaired the device, an MF Digital Scribe Series robotic duplicator, upgraded its four-CD drives, and added album lookup software FreeDB, MusicBrainz, Tracktype, and AMG.

On the TuneRipper website, customers could select from multiple codecs and archival storage options, expedited turn-around times, and per-disk CD repair. Media mail-in options, which I went onto use at Cash4MacBooks, gave customers the option to either self-ship using the packaging of their choosing, or receive a shipping kit with CD spindles, foam packaging, box, and pre-paid return shipping label.