Spectruss Speakeasy Podcast
Spectruss Speakeasy: The Marketing & Business Podcast for Growth-Minded EntrepreneursWelcome to Spectruss Speakeasy, the podcast where marketing meets real business stories, and where relationships drive success. Hosted by Spectruss, one of Chattanooga’s leading marketing agencies, this podcast brings together business owners, industry experts, and creative minds to share their journeys, insights, and the strategies behind their success.From brand-building and digital marketing to content creation and campaign optimization, we dive deep into the ever-changing world of business growth. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just getting started, Spectruss Speakeasy delivers valuable conversations on navigating challenges, scaling businesses, and making an impact in your industry.Expect real stories, practical strategies, and behind-the-scenes discussions with those who make things happen. Tune in to discover how business relationships, marketing expertise, and innovation can fuel long-term success.
Spectruss Speakeasy Podcast
Kyle Wiens on How iFixit Built The World’s Biggest Repair Library
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iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on the Right to Repair fight: from taking computers apart in a dorm room to making the case in Congress and state legislatures for repair laws with real teeth.
Products we used to open, tinker with, and fix are turning into sealed boxes with proprietary screws, software locks, and "authorized only" tools. Kyle has spent his career fighting that, and now leads a global repair movement.
- What blocks repair: John Deere's software locks, a $2,000 Hyundai brake adapter, and AirPods he rates zero out of ten
- How Colorado passed a law requiring John Deere to sell its repair software to farmers
- The next challenge for open knowledge: AI bots. iFixit once took over a million hits in 24 hours, and is moving toward accounts, rate limits, and an API
- Why Chattanooga became iFixit's hub, and how bike routes and design changes could make the city better
Guest: Kyle Wiens, https://www.ifixit.com/User/2/Kyle+Wiens
iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com
X: @kwiens | Instagram: @kylewiens
Spectruss: https://spectruss.com
For more information, visit our website www.spectruss.com
Why Chattanooga Won
SpeakerSo man, I'm excited to talk today uh because California to here, from 2003 of in your dorm room taking computers apart and selling pieces of it, to now big investment in Chattanooga and lots of employees and even going to Congress and going after companies, right? Like for the right to repair. And so I'm excited to have you on here and chat about it. Um and it's cool that you came here to Chattanooga and you loved outdoors parts. Getting to go mountain bike with you and other people that have been successful and also loved outdoors. I'm excited to talk about that too.
Speaker 2This is a great place.
SpeakerYeah. Well, what what brought why'd you pick Chattanooga? Let's start that out of curiosity.
Speaker 2So we started with a geographic area that we had to be in. We were setting up a distribution center, so we had to be able to get packages to New York and Miami quickly. So that was that was one. And that but that's a pretty big portion of the country. And then we said, where do we want to live in that part of the country? And it was what's the most fun place? Where are there the most outdoor opportunities? Where's their economic momentum? Not necessarily opportunity. There's opportunity a lot of places, opportunity in Memphis. We looked at Memphis, we don't want to be in Memphis. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but uh the you know, where is there a trajectory of improvement and the possibility to, you know, we wanted to both have fun, have you know, like I'm I'm big into mountain biking, so where's their awesome trails? But then also where can we potentially have an impact and leave our corner of uh town better than we found it?
SpeakerYeah, yeah. You've got a sweet spot down there off 11th Street. Um actually grew up there, my dad owned a business across the road from it for a long time, right up the hill from you there.
Speaker 2So that yeah, so we're in Onion Bottom, and it's interesting when we came to town, we were looking, we were driving around, we missed that section of town on like three separate visits because it's in this pocket. It's kind of, I mean, Chattanooga is segmented by all the railroads all over the place. So it's like this little corner tucked in next to public works, and no one goes there. Yeah. You got camphouse, you got church, you got some produce distribution, and you got City Public Works. It's an amazing part of town, and we're only like 300 yards from the choo-choo as the crow flies.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2But you like got to get in a car and drive the choo choo because it right. So there's a lot of opportunities to connect the town. So we saw that we we saw that we were able to get uh a space large enough close to downtown with the potential to improve it. But it was in rough shape. It was uh there were there were homeless people living in the building, there were a lot of animals living in there. Yeah, that it was missing a wall, like a full-on, like thousand-foot-long wall, just missing.
SpeakerBut was there rubble or someone just removed it?
Speaker 2They removed the wall uh and built a parking lot. Yeah, they they had actually the produce back in the day. This is back in the in the 50s and 60s, it was the Dixie Savings produce distribution. So they would there were Dixie savings stores all over the south, and this was their main produce hub. And uh when they built a uh uh uh self-storage next door, they needed a parking lot, and so they deleted part of the building, put on the parking lot, and then didn't bother putting a wall back. So we had to add the wall and and work with the police to find new homes for some people.
Rebuilding A Warehouse Into A Hub
Speaker 2Yeah and uh and then it was a two-year pretty intense construction project.
SpeakerMan. And so how many like uh you gave me a tour in there, you a quick tour one day, and it was awesome to see like the process of you guys like making t taking things apart, and it's you know, taking videos and photos at the same time, but then you've got shipping in the back, and you know, how what's the size of that place?
Speaker 2Like how many employees we're about 50,000 square feet. So I iFixit is the we are the hub of the global repair movement. So if you want to know how to fix anything, whether it's a phone or a toaster or a car, you go to iFixit and you search for your thing. How do I change the oil in my car? How do I put a new battery in my phone? We will help you out. And then our logistics is the supply chain for that. We sell the parts and tools that you need to fix your things.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Uh and so the way that iFixit operates internally is we have teams that are warehousing and shipping parts. We have teams that are writing repair manuals. So we are like, you know, the Hilton or the chain uh Chilton or Haynes manuals for your car. Yeah. We do that for iPhones. So we buy every iPhone. Like my team right now is writing the repair manual for the iPhone 18. Uh so we get the new phone the moment it comes out, we take it apart, we write manuals, we publish them, and then we sell parts around it.
SpeakerYeah. And you've got over 117,000 manuals, is that right?
Speaker 2Yes. Yeah, and more are being added all the time. That is a lot.
SpeakerAnd that started, what, 23 years ago?
Speaker 2Yeah, we started in uh in 2002 uh in the dorms and kind of been doing it ever since. Uh yeah, I learned a long time ago, you know, people would say, Hey, do you have a repair manual for a calculator or a typewriter? And I'd say, no, and then I'd go and look, and it turned out we did. So I I I fix it. I I was looking, I found uh I had no idea we had this. Someone posted a repair manual for a money scanner that detects counterfeit money. So it's like you stick your bills in and it scans Yeah. I found that yes, I thought, okay, I didn't know that such a thing existed or that it broke, but uh people found it and took it apart and posted pictures on they fix it.
SpeakerAnd and so you've got a community that submits these manuals as well as you all making your own manuals.
Speaker 2Right. So the whole thing's a wiki, we're like Wikipedia, so whatever you have that you want to fix. We have uh manuals for helicopter parts, firearms, you name it, anything and everything that would break.
SpeakerOkay.
How iFixit Makes Repair Possible
SpeakerAnd that's gotten you into some interesting conversations of companies like what, John Deere and Apple and Samsung and We've made a lot of big companies, yeah, frustrated with us.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, so the idea is hey, I've got a thing, I bought it, I paid for it, I should be able to fix it. Yeah. And I think 30 years ago that was pretty commonplace, but in this day and age it is not. And so we started by going to these companies and asking nicely, saying, hey, Apple, like, you know, why don't you make manuals available? And they had no interest. And then we started trying to introduce some kind of you know friendly nudges, and they fought us to the nail. We realized, wow, it's not just an accident that you can't fix things anymore. This is a systematic practice that has a lot of legal backing. And if we're going to change that practice, it's gonna take a concerted strategy.
SpeakerAnd you end up going to Congress for this, right? And speaking there.
Right To Repair And Taking On Giants
Speaker 2Yeah. So what we realized was if if we're going to need, if we're gonna be able to fix things again, we're gonna have to force companies to do it. It's not they're not gonna go willingly, which is not something that I'm particularly enthusiastic about adding more regulations to the world. I'm a pretty principled free market person. But in this case, you bought a thing, you know, I bought a tractor. Uh, where can I go to get parts for it? Where can I go to get repair manuals for it? There's no free market of repair manuals for these this equipment, right? Yeah, uh, John Deere writes manuals for their tractors because they need to do it for themselves to sell tractors. So we're in a situation where John Deere has a monopoly, actually, a legally granted monopoly. They have all kinds of intellectual property that they can enforce. Like Ford is out there suing companies to make aftermarket bumpers because they match the shape of their vehicle. They're saying you're copying our vehicles. Well, I'm making a part that fits the car, right?
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2So uh society is accidentally, through a variety of historical accidents, given manufacturers a monopoly over a variety of uh things that um that they can do to enable repair. So if we want society to be able to fix things again, we have to pass laws to to remedy that. Yeah. Uh and so we came up with a framework called Right to Repair that is a set of ideas that says, hey, if you're gonna sell a product, you gotta make repair parts available. You gotta make the service manual available for free. You have to make the tools available. So if you look at an iPhone, uh on the bottom of the phone, there are two screws that are a special proprietary screw that Apple wasn't selling. So it's a special five-pointed screw that they indented that specifically is not a Phillips screw, like my eyeglass screw, right? You can use a Phillips to open that. Uh on it's about the same size on the iPhone. They switched, they used to use a Phillips screw, they switched to a proprietary screw to literally lock you out of your phone. Uh and so I'll do things like we went and we revered, we took a little mold of the of the screw and we made our own screwdrivers and we sell those. Yeah. So that's a way-in. But John Deere actually uses software locks. So in order to fix a tractor these days, you have to have a computer or laptop to plug into the tractor. And John Deere is not making that software available to farmers. So we passed a law in Colorado that requires John Deere to sell that software to farmers.
SpeakerWow, that's a huge win. Yeah, they start doing this with KTM motorcycles now, because a lot of motorcycle companies are picking up on this. We're locking out part of the ECU, which on a dirt bike, you would think, come on, man, like what happened in the good old days at carburetors? Like, yeah, we like the benefits of fuel injection, but it doesn't need to have a locked out ECU or we can't clear codes without going to a dealer, you know.
Speaker 2It's well, and if you're gonna make a racing bike, you start with an off-the-shelf bike and then you change a bunch of parts, and then necessarily you have to change the tuning. Yeah. Right? So it's not possible to make a racing bike without taking something off the shelf and changing the software. Yeah. Uh yeah, we hear from motorcyclists around the world that are just intensely frustrated by this.
SpeakerYeah, and they've got some hacks around like BMW motorcycle bike app as well, which I love the bike, but on the GSA bike, you have to buy this really expensive handheld device. And it is it. Uh I've seen some used, they're like $400, and I forgot the normal retail price, it's probably something around like $400 to $600. Um, but it's still, I don't think it gives you full access to everything.
Speaker 2There's all kinds, so uh let's say you have a Hyundai right now. In order to change the brakes, change the rear parking brake on a Hyundai, you have to buy their $2,000 adapter. You have to pay $3,000 a year for access to their software, and then you have to sign up for locksmith certification through AutoAuth, which requires a business license and a million dollar insurance certificate.
SpeakerNo way.
Speaker 2To be able to click the button to retract the brake caliper so you can insert the new brakes. That is unreal. And that's where it's going, right? This like the idea of a shade tree mechanic, someone who can fix things. So and we saw this across the whole economy where we realized like we have been able to tinker with things, we are rapidly getting to a point where we're not gonna be able to tinker with things, we have to stop that. Yeah. Uh, and that's going, and and like we're at this moment where we can see in the rear view mirror fixing things, and we can see in the future we're not gonna be able to fix things. We're at this rare moment in history where we have vision on both. Yeah, can we change course before we forget that you could have ever fixed things?
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 2Because once we've lost a silo memory of that, we're not getting that back.
SpeakerYeah, that's so true. Uh did you ever think back in 2002 you'd wind up here in 2026, going 27? You know, like Yeah.
Speaker 2My my dream, my uh my thought when we started was hey, you we started because I was trying to fix an Apple laptop and I couldn't find the repair manual. I was really frustrated. I fumbled my way through the repair, and I eventually fixed it, and then I looked and I found that Apple wasn't making those manuals available at all. Not only that, anyone who had the manual was getting legal threats from them. And so Apple had proactively used lawyers, expensive lawyers, to censor repair knowledge from the internet. Wow. And I said, that's crazy, we gotta stop that. So we started writing manuals to replace the ones that Apple had taken down. So when we started, I thought, okay, we're gonna do this, we'll spend like two years, we'll solve the Apple situation, and then we'll do all electronics, we'll spend a couple years on that, and then we'll do appliances. So I thought we would like have solved the electronics right to repair situation in like three years. Yeah. Uh, and it took me 20.
Scaling Parts Inventory And Manuals
SpeakerI along the way, I gotta know, like there had to be obviously Congress things, Samsung, John Deere, it kind of keeps going, it sounds like. But what are like some of the big milestones? You know, like whether it was scaling the business, or because I mean, if you're giving the manuals away, you gotta make your money somewhere, and that sounds like that's parts and that sort of thing that you're selling. It how did that scale? Because you guys have become sizable.
Speaker 2I mean, we started by scaling the business. Uh like we had 20 employees by the time I graduated from college.
unknownNice.
Speaker 2So you just start scaling that. Um, and I mean you have to I mean, business is business is simpler than people think. Like that they you you m sell something for more than you paid for it. Yeah. Yeah. And and then you you do it again and and then you figure out so we we started by by selling parts and tools and found a niche where you know Apple was refusing to sell the parts. So hey, I can sell parts. They gave me an opportunity. Yeah. Uh so we did that for a while for Apple Parts, and we've, you know, kind of been gradually expanding into other things. You know, we sell parts for uh Nintendo's, yeah. I mean, and there's different inflection moments, like during the pandemic, everyone is locked at home. They all uh were playing game consoles way more than ever before. Yeah, and so there's a particular defect on the Nintendo Switch where the left joystick will get stuck, and your game character just constantly moves to the left. It's called uh Joy-Con Drift. Yeah, and so we have a little $20 part that you can use to fix it. And at the time, like you couldn't even buy a new switch, like they were sold out everywhere, so you had to fix it. Yeah. Um, so with business has been, there's been kind of gross spurts like that. There was a point where Apple got caught slowing down batteries or slowing down phones with old batteries, and then Apple said, Well, hey, we'll discount uh battery replacements in our stores. Well, one, there's no Apple store here, yeah, right? Uh two, all their stores were booked out for months swapping batteries. So we said, Hey, yeah, you can do it yourself. It's not that hard. Yeah. So you have kind of these manufacture defect moments that lead to large growth in our business. Gotcha. Uh, and but it's been you know slow and steady and incremental. Um uh, you know, selling repair parts is harder than selling a new thing. You know, you sell a phone, you've got one thing to sell. I sell repair parts, there's 40 parts in there I have to manage and figure out supply chain and stock and write repair procedures. And so it's a much more complicated business. Um, you can think about like if you go into an auto zone, like a typical auto zone has two million dollars in inventory um and tens of thousands of SKUs in that one store. Like an auto zone is a miracle. Like I can walk into an auto zone and for a 2002 F-150, they've got my left tail light, right? Like it's amazing that that exists locally. That's really hard. It's a miracle that they've pulled that off. And we're kind of replicating that in the electronics world.
SpeakerYeah. I mean, how much inventory do you have to keep?
Speaker 2I mean, I think Yeah, we have over a hundred thousand SKUs that we sell. Wow. Yeah, and then just managing the product descriptions and parts compatibility, right? You have if I take a screen off this phone, does it only work in that phone or are there three other phones it works in? Do I need to stock one screen or three? Uh so yeah, that's a lot of the kind of behind-the-scenes plumbing.
SpeakerSo yeah, I'm sure you've got Teams designated just for that, for like making compatibility. And I know you're heavy in technology and AI, so is that helping lift some of that?
Speaker 2Yes, it is. Yeah. But still, like in order to so like the iPhone 18, you know, we we get an iPhone 18. Does a battery from an iPhone 18 work in an iPhone 17? There's no information out there, right? So the only way to find that out is to physically test. So we take a we take both phones and we swap the pieces painstakingly to find out. So AI won't replicate that. Yeah. But there are other pieces of of the work, you know, building out product descriptions and um, you know, improving quality across our catalog and and pruning and dealing with old stuff that AI is really good at.
SpeakerMan, I mean there's so many pieces out there, just versions of iPhone, and then you got Android, and then you got all the phones, and then so uh do you all pick like what's the most search demand, like you analyze demand and then you Yes.
Speaker 2So we start by publishing the content. So we we build out, we run the largest repair manual in the world, so then we can see what people are searching for, and then we pick it off, you know, we just go by priority what's what gets the most traffic, what gets the most interest, and we work, we work down. But yeah, at this moment, authorized in the Google Play Store are 13,000 different Android smartphones. Wow. So we sell parts for a few hundred of those. Yeah. Uh it would be in an ideal world, you'd love to sell it for all 13,000, but uh it the business case doesn't work for that.
SpeakerAnd that's got to be so many parts. And how far down are you getting into chips as processors or like how far down are you going?
Speaker 2Uh it would be nice. That's also we would like to, because the repair shops would like the individual chips, but no, we generally like if you're fixing your phone, I'll sell you a replacement board, I'll say, or you know, your trip over your USB port, I'll sell you a new USB port or a battery or a screen. But we don't get down to the chip level.
SpeakerGotcha.
Speaker 2Do you do that on like computers or any like bigger devices or so I see so we're running a uh microsoldering uh training class.
Microsoldering And The Return Of Tinkering
Speaker 2So um we're in the business of enabling consumers to fix things, but there are some repairs that require specialized training and expertise where you know if you are not a professional, you're not gonna succeed. And that is when it comes to repairing circuit boards. So imagine, I mean, you think about any product, and this microphone, this phone, it's an assembly of components, right? You have 50 pieces, they go in, you put it together. Well, a circuit board is that again, right? So you have a circuit board, there's 200 pieces on it. Some of them are the size of a grain of rice, some of them are chips, some are resistors, all those have to be assembled on there. And so if a circuit board fails, it can be a two-cent piece that fails. I have repaired an iPhone with a piece of wire. Like it was a zero ohm resistor that failed, that removed the you know, right? Um, so uh that kind of repair requ it requires microscopes and soldering training. So we run a workshop where people fly from all over the world here um to our facility to get in front of microscopes with a mentor and learn how to repair those boards.
SpeakerI mean, it's amazing that I mean how many people clearly there's demand for this. And that part, to be honest, kind of gives me faith in humanity some. There's this many people that want to fix their own thing and will learn them because you kind of have to be a little obsessive, I imagine, to learn that sort of intricacy. And yes, especially because I don't know, sounds like you understand all this stuff obviously very well. Electrical current still like I just bought my first multimeter this week and it's still like wrapping my head around ohms, volts, like I understand the basics, but it gets complicated quick, you know. Like how many people are out there that want to do this, you think?
Speaker 2Well, that's where we need to get back to an economy where more people fix things. If you think about like the smallest town in Tennessee, what is the the you know atomic town? It's a post office and a car mechanic. Yeah, like that's that's it. That's your small and so then you build out from there. So repair really is baked into the fabric of the American DNA. It's what literally keeps the country running. We used to have uh TV repair shops, we used to have camera repair shops, vacuum, sewing machines, right? We used to be fixing these things, so we need to get back to that culture again uh where we have more uh resilience. Um uh Matthew Crawford was a uh a PhD philosopher, went to fancy Ivy League school, got a job as a think tank in DC, and realized that he was just absolutely miserable. He's sitting at the computer all day writing things for fancy people to read. And it's just like this is not fulfilling, this is not who I am as a human. And so he quit and he started a motorcycle repair shop.
unknownNice.
Speaker 2And uh he wrote a book about um uh kind of the what it's like to be working with your hands all day and how you feel much more fulfilled and satisfied when you're doing something and you're part of the community. And you can look at the guy driving down the street or at your kid's you know, football game and like, hey, I fixed that bike for him, right? You're you're part of the fabric of the community. Yeah. Uh and I think that's something that we in the I'm I'm a white collar worker, right? We in the that said at computers all day have kind of lost. So I would love to get back to a little bit more of that culture where we are tinkering with our hands, more part of the physical reality and and also the community fabric around us.
SpeakerYeah. I you know, I think whenever economic, like when times get challenging economically speaking, which it seems like you know, credit card delinquencies or you know, home delinquency or mortgage rate delinquencies looking similar to housing market crash numbers. I do see people fixing things more as opposed to the throwaway, you know, trying to fix things. So if you don't have someone like yourself in your company offering that, it's like and we get locked out of it, then we're really screwed.
Speaker 2Yeah, well, we used to know, right? You used to be able to just kind of figure it out, right? You know you'd have a generator would fail, you just start pulling it apart and you figure it out, right? Um a few things have changed where it's harder. One, everything used to be mechanical, so it was self-documenting. So I can pull a generator apart and I can look at everything. And I don't really need a service manager for that generator. I know what a spark plug is and I can figure that out, right? Yeah, that's how my grandfather was tinkering, right? He would fix everything. Well, yes, because it was it was a little bit simpler. Now, you know, the typical household has 38 different electronic devices, right? So just because you fixed a phone, does that mean you know how to fix a blender or a you know your microwave with the you know fancy touch screen, right? So we have to have more information that follows these products around than we did before because we have more stuff, it's more complicated, and it's also not physically self-documenting.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Uh and so that is the importance of having access to resources. And that's you know, we started writing our own manuals, and then we opened up to the community to in an effort to try to scale to how many products are out there in the world.
SpeakerAnd so you guys, now we're just talking about AI.
AI Bot Traffic And Protecting Open Knowledge
SpeakerYou're using AI, you've launched your own AI, but then also I read where we had a million hits by ClaudeBot in 24 hours a few years ago, a couple years ago, whenever it was.
Speaker 2Yes. So uh if you don't run a large website on the internet, you don't realize how most of the traffic on the internet now is bots crawling, right? And so most of our bandwidth calls. Costs and server costs and everything is not serving repair manuals to people, it's serving bots. Uh something like 30% of our web traffic is from Singapore. Yeah. I don't think there are people in Singapore fixing things, right? Right. I mean, there are some, but that's not these are these are data centers that are hitting us. So yeah, at one point last summer we had over a million hits from Anthropic Server in 24 hours. So, and we told them to knock it off. Um, but this is uh this is a challenge. This is we're in this kind of you know transition from the old world of manually, you know, hand-curated website content, which is what I fix it was, to a future where robots uh you know give create the content you want on demand, and what's the bridge look like?
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 2It would be nice if they were compensating us for it. They're not.
SpeakerThat's what I was curious about. That's where I was going with it. Because I I mean, any sort of site like yours, even on the smaller level, like they're now I mean, even authors, all kinds of people that can be screwed over by this, you know, because they're crawling using your content and then regurgitating it for free.
Speaker 1Yeah.
SpeakerUm, where do you see this going in in the short or long term, either one?
Speaker 2I it's hard to say. I mean, the the thing with it's all moving so quickly. Like I I can give you a pretty good feeling where it's gonna be in three months. In three years, I don't know. It's it's it's moving fast. Um, I mean, we are, you know, we we believe in free and open information. I want to provide every human with the repair information, right? But we're like, well, maybe we need to take some of that repair information and require you to sign up for an account before you can access it. Because then if you have an account, we can meter, we can limit. So, hey, you get a hundred manuals a day and not a hundred thousand. Right. Right? So just to keep things at human scale. So it's it's I'm an open source guy, I want all of our information to be free. And unfortunately, the bots are causing us to have to lock it down more than we really want to.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Uh without we're not gonna charge for access, but we are gonna find a way to meter. I mean, I'd be interested in charging the robots for access. I want it to be free for humans, and I'd like to charge robots. It'd be my ideal situation.
SpeakerYeah. I mean, I noticed when you say Singapore, I noticed just on one of our clients' websites that that runs uh um not a huge, but a good sized e-commerce store. Nothing, I imagine, nothing like your traffic. But just last month we saw like a thousand percent increase from Singapore and it was crawling different pages, and and so we started looking at the um the slugs it was crawling, and a lot of them were already like it knew what it was looking for, and it's going through it, and it it's all from Singapore from a data center.
Speaker 2Yeah, but it's not just Singapore, we see huge bot traffic from the US, it's all over the place. Um, one thing, so you know, we're a very large, complex application. Everything is a wiki, there's revision history on pages. So the bots will not only look at the current version of the page, they'll look at every single previous version. Uh, and when they hit that at scale, at this like million hits a day kind of level, that puts extreme load on our databases. So we've actually had a fair amount of downtime over the last couple of years as we've seen these huge traffic spikes with unusual traffic patterns where they're hitting pages that are not optimized. Like if you go to our iPhone 18 battery page, it's really well optimized. It's cached, it serves quickly, it doesn't put a lot of load on our servers. But if you look at revision 19 steps back, yeah, we didn't optimize that page for a million hits a day. Yeah. And so yeah, there's been a lot of engineering effort on our side to go into being able to scale up to handle this amount of traffic. Obviously, we try to block it as well, but there's a there's a cat and mouse game where as we get better at blocking them, they find ways around it. Yeah, yeah. And I don't I mean it may be completely futile to block it entirely. Um, but it is leading us to push people more, go ahead and create an account, and then and then we'll meet your folks at an account level.
SpeakerAaron Powell And you hate to do that because it's awesome what you have right now, but and if you block bots, then you may not get any sort of citation in Chat GPT or any of the big programs, which could be beneficial, but yeah, I think where we're going to go is we we have an API that's really good.
Speaker 2We're gonna try to push the bots into the API, give them API keys as well so that we can meter and like I mean, right? So it should be uh we're happy to give you know folks access to the content. I I don't I'm happy to have it in ChatGPT, but yeah, what you need to you need to consume it in a way that is that is scalable for us as a business. Which is what Wikipedia has done, right? So Wikipedia, of course, you can crawl Wikipedia HTML, but they're going to they have uh APIs and then commercial access APIs that the AI firms are are paying them for, and that's that's probably where we're gonna have to go.
SpeakerGotcha. How long will that take you to roll out, you think?
Speaker 2Is that I'm working on it now. I think we'll roll it out this year.
SpeakerOkay. Nice. Um so back to the Chattanooga
Building A Mission Driven Team In Town
Speakerpart. Are you moving your whole team here? Or you still have because you're from California Rhythm?
Speaker 2Yeah, we're a distributed team. We have a team, so we start in California in San Luis Obispo, which is another town kind of like Chattanooga. It's an amazing place to live. It's got lots of outdoor recreation and surfing and all kinds of fantastic stuff uh to do there. Uh decent mountain biking. Mountain biking's better here. Uh-huh. Nice. Uh, and and then we also have a team in Stuttgart, Germany, where we do our European distribution, and then we have engineers and folks kind of around around the country. Um, so we've uh we've got a solid core of folks here and we're expanding. So we anticipate most of our hiring will be here. Um, but uh we gave our folks at our other locations, we gave them a relocation package and said if you want to move, we're happy that we'd love to have you here, but you don't have to. Yeah. So we have about 30, 35 people here now, and then we'll be ramping up kind of slowly over time.
SpeakerOkay. How many people like uh on your team around the world roughly?
Speaker 2We have about 150 globally. Wow.
unknownYeah.
Speaker 2That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Yeah, but they're a great team. You know, we have a really long tenure, people have been with us for a long time. Believe in the mission, right? Believe that we are. I mean, it's nice to go to work knowing that like not only am I earning my salary and you know making the company money, but I'm I'm you know I I've got something I'll be able to tell my kids, hey, right? Daddy help make you know, make repair possible again.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Uh and that's uh everybody is really bought into this, like you know, we're gonna we're gonna try to leave the world a bit better than we found it.
SpeakerEven uh when I was, you know, you're showing me around your facility here in Chattanooga, you've got like the bike kind of co-op and you you help uh contribute to some of the local people here and you're always giving bikes away or working on fixing up bikes and yeah, so my favorite local nonprofit is White Oak Bike Co-op.
Bikes As Mobility And Community Support
Speaker 2Uh they started in Red Bank. Uh they collect bikes from all over the community. Uh so if you've got a bike in your garage that's got you know missing a wheel or something, they will happily take it off your hands. They uh bring them to the warehouse in Red Bank and repair them. And there's a whole you know crew of volunteers that come together and uh someone makes dinner and everybody wrenches on bikes, fix bikes, and then distribute those in the community. And uh the folks who get free bikes are kids, so they do they distribute hundreds of bikes to elementary schools around the country and uh at the Red Bank Jubilee every year, they give away a couple hundred bikes, just walk up as a kid and they'll give you a bike. Uh and then uh the second audience is bikes for transportation, using bicycles as an economic ladder to get people out of homelessness and back into a job. So if you think about your homeless, okay, you want a home, in order to get a home, you gotta have you know a deposit and money. How do you get money? You gotta get a job. How do you get to your job? Oftentimes folks are stuck. Uh we were talking with one lady who she'd got a job at Applebee's and she was thrilled and she was excited to get going. But Applebee's uh her shift ended at 1 a.m. Carta buses stopped at midnight, and she didn't have a way to get back from work. And if you have to take an Uber, right, that's think about working close to minimum wage, and then you're gonna take an Uber to and from work. Like you could be giving up a quarter of your wages to transportation. So uh uh a bike then becomes that economic ladder that gives you a path, uh, hopefully to get an apartment, get stabilized, and then eventually buy a car.
SpeakerYeah, yeah. It's really I mean, it's I think to so many people they kind of forget about bicycles. It's like they stop riding as kids, you know. Um I've kept riding and then I love motorcycles now, but I still like bikes as well. I love bikes. I mean, it's obsessed about them. That's all I wanted to be when I was younger. I just wanted to be a you know, a really good cyclist and ride my bike everywhere. And there's something about it that is, I don't know, it's really beautiful. Like it's quiet most of the time.
Speaker 2And yeah, it's freedom and yeah. And you feel better and healthier because you're you're exerting energy and and yeah, I'd really like to make you know, help make Chattanooga a more bike-friendly place where it's safe, where it's comfortable, where your kids can ride on the street. You know, kids kids in most neighborhoods should be able to ride their bike to their elementary school, right? The elementary schools are spaced in our communities, so they are close to kids. So i it it should be possible to have a community where kids can ride bikes safely.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Uh and you see that in many parts of the world in the Netherlands, where it rains a lot more than it rains here in terms of days of the year.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Uh uh folks, uh, folks ride uh their bikes a lot more. So I'd I think we could get there.
SpeakerI really like um you've got that transportation meetup. You're back in town now, and it's well, like every uh once one Thursday.
Speaker 2So uh we have a group of folks that get together uh twice a month and work on making uh bike uh you know infrastructure a little bit better. So the first thing we did was we made uh bikechat.com, which is a uh map of all the bike routes or of kind of friendly bike routes. If you're new to town, you want a fun uh you know, you rent one of the city bikes and you want a little place to ride around. There's some cool kind of curated routes. We went and wrote all the routes and picked really safe routes for folks to ride. And that's also got all the all the mountain bike trails. So bike chat.com, it's kind of a cool, you know, little app you can install.
SpeakerSweet. Yeah. I uh so I can join you on one of them, I guess, um late spring, something like that.
Small City Tweaks That Change Everything
SpeakerAnd one thing you said, and um I've told this to other people, maybe a few other people. You may not remember saying this, but we're talking about um even on the riverwalk, like having little trails that shoot off the riverwalk and have like maybe a challenge line, like maybe it's a little pump line, or maybe it's like a balance, you know, two by four or something four by four, you ride down for a little bit. And the thought of that, you know, at first I was kind of like that sounds kind of fun, but it really stuck with me. And it the reason why it stuck with me is because it's it's really just it's playing, right? It's playing. Um, but you're a business owner, you know, and very successful business, very smart person. And when I've been working with some others here and pitching ideas to the city of Chattanooga about like how do we grow as a city economically, short-term and long term. Um, I think bringing that playback to it, it seems so silly to people, but you moved a very successful business to Chattanooga because you wanted somewhere you could play as well. And just that little idea, like Durango, Colorado, I almost moved to in Bend Orton. And back when I was a cyclist and I wanted to be a pro-cyclist. And um when I went to Durango, the trails in Durango that come from the college down to the, you know, there's trails all in the city around it. It was like everywhere you looked, there was something fun to explore and a place to play. And Bend was kind of somewhere, you know, river going through it, trails. It's beautiful. Um, and Chattanooga has some of that, it's getting there, but anyway, that idea that probably most people be like, that's silly. It's those little small things that are kind of fun and playful that really make a city, I think, lovable by people.
unknownRight.
Speaker 2It's that quality of life of being somewhere that people want to be, that people flock to. You have this economic engine tour, you know, brings more people in with tourism. It just kind of creates a more well-off community that then can invest more. So I I totally agree. Um and you see, and this is National Park City, this is the the cities that are uh the most desirable, the most interesting on the world stage are the ones where they are pleasant places to be and live.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2And it it we're we are like we are so close, we have so much, uh, but there are there are little things that we need to address that would just level Chattanooga up. And and yeah, little, you know, the river walk is awesome. Could we make a little more fun? So there is a group who got the county is giving them land and they are building a little, not quite a pump track, but little you know, obstacles and things right off uh the river walk, kind of down by the new baseball stadium. So it's happening. Nice. Got the land, I think they've cleared it, and uh they are uh plan planning it out, they're working on the plan with the city. But hopefully, I would I would hope in the next six months we get something. I think we tend to look at the world as like it is the way it is and we can't change it. And if instead you say, hey, what are these little tweaks that would that would make life more pleasant for everybody? Yeah. Right? There's this problem like, you know, I can complain about it, or can can you just do something and and fix it? Yeah. So like when we when we were designing the the routes for the bike app, we said, well, okay, so we'll have it on your phone, but wouldn't it be nice if there were if there were labels on the side on the and so we went around and we painted uh stencils uh matching the routes. So like there's a there's a loop to go from Coolidge Park to the zoo. So you can start at Coolidge Park and you don't have the app at all, and you can follow the the signs on the street and it will take you to the zoo.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2So how do we how do we make you know this kind of more fun? Because genuinely, if you were to just start at Coolidge Park and try to ride to the zoo, you would probably end up on not very safe streets. Yeah. So we we need to we don't have to totally change the street infrastructure, but we can provide these design nudges to make it safer and more inviting and welcoming and get people access to do something, right? Because how many how many people live in Chattanooga have ridden from Coolidge Park to the zoo? Yeah, that's an adventurous thing. But but how great is it to be able to do the carousel? You can do both carousels in one day.
SpeakerYeah, yeah. I I love that because it's kind of like the rights repair, same idea. You know, it's basically giving power kind of back to the people to go out and do this. Um I and I've been involved over the years. I kind of got away from I'm starting to try to come back and help more, but nonprofits that will, especially if it's government related at all, just take forever to do anything. I'm trying to choose my words carefully because I don't want to completely just bash them, but they can just take forever to get things done when it can be so simple. And I've seen things overcomplicated. I'm not gonna name some things, but uh, Fraser Avenue that has become super overbuilt complicated. I'm like, you know, there's a simple way we could do this that would probably be built better. You know, like it it anyway.
Speaker 2So I like the idea of like allowing some individuals well, and let's you know, how let's have folks, you know, like you could get engaged with your neighborhood. There was a there's a neighborhood, um John John uh uh posts he's happy urbanist on Instagram, and he posted about a neighborhood where they got together and started cleaning the you know the the you know vines that were growing on their sidewalk. And then the City Public Works found out that they were doing it kind of regularly and they came in the day before with their mower and and and mowed things ahead of time so that was easier for them. So City Public Works is interested, I think, in helping if the neighborhoods kind of step up a little bit. So I think we need to realize that the city that we're in is a collective, and we shouldn't just like, oh, the government will take care of it and then we complain that they're slow. Well, why don't we step up and get excited and motivated? How much more fun is it for the public works folks if they know that the neighbors are there working alongside them? It just makes everybody's job uh more fulfilling and I think a happier place to be. So we need to get to where like there's more of a sense of local agency and we are kind of a part of making our neighborhoods awesome.
SpeakerYeah, yeah. That's a great idea. Great concept, too. So all right, I got a couple of rapid fire questions. Or anything else that I missed you want to chat about.
Speaker 2Uh I mean, yeah, I I'm excited about where folks are going with National Park City and the seeds uh drive, where you know there's lots of these little micro projects that are popping up. The uh the little pump track along the river walk was one of the seed uh projects. So I think you'll see a lot more of these where you know folks, there's all kinds of really cool, interesting ideas that people have to you know like pick the thing that you're passionate about and organize and and make it better.
SpeakerYeah.
Lightning Round And Where To Follow
SpeakerYou ready for a lightning round?
Speaker 2Sure, let's do it.
SpeakerOne tool every home should own.
Speaker 2Uh a small screwdriver set. Yeah.
SpeakerThat's a good one.
Speaker 2With all the precision, yeah. I mean, that's everything from being able to take apart your glasses to yeah.
SpeakerYeah. I've got multiple in there from the computer stuff. Yeah. Uh a product you refuse to buy because of how it's built.
Speaker 2Oh, some AirPods are number one.
SpeakerReally? Yeah.
Speaker 2So we take every all the new products apart uh from and we rate them from one to ten on how easy or hard they are to fix. So if it's a ten, it's super easy, straightforward to fix. If it's a one, like a professional is gonna struggle at fixing it. The AirPods are in a zero. Uh it is not possible. So the and but the problem with the AirPods is you buy AirPods, there are three batteries, right? There's one in each earbud, and there's one in the case, and those batteries last two years on the outside. So then you take it apart, replace the battery? No, you can't. You they're they're disposable. But you can't throw them away because uh they go, you throw throw it in the trash, trash truck comes. That what what happens when the the trash truck picks up your trash? It compacts it, right? Yeah. That compaction, if it hits a battery, will spark and light the cardboard on fire in the in the uh trash, and you will see there is very regularly, every week, there is a trash truck somewhere in America that goes up in flames from a battery. So you can't throw them away. And if you talk with the recyclers, I know all the electronics recyclers very well. And I I was at a conference the other day, room of a hundred electronics recyclers, and I said, How many of you would want AirPods in your facility? And not a single one raised their hand. Wow. No one wants these things. This is like the toxic legacy of our digital age. And they're I I get their amazing products, they're convenient, right? They work great for two years, and then they stop. And you should, when your AirPods are dead, you should just go bury them in the garden.
SpeakerThat's I did not think it'd be AirPods. That's very makes sense.
Speaker 2There are wireless earbuds that do the same thing that have replaceable batteries.
SpeakerOkay.
Speaker 2And we actually um uh we just got our hands so with the iPhone 18, Apple released a new version of the AirPods, and we've been taking them apart the last couple days, and they are incrementally better. So yeah, we think it these these newest AirPods will be the first ones that get a two out of ten where we think it might be possible to replace the battery.
SpeakerGotcha.
Speaker 2Uh so our teardown on that should be coming out today tomorrow, and you'll see inside. But Apple made a bunch of changes inside to make it possible because they've known, they've known that this is a disaster. Yeah. And they've shipped tens tens of millions, hundred million AirPods. Uh it's an environmental catastrophe.
SpeakerWow. All right. Um, number three, best piece of advice for someone bootstrapping a business right now.
Speaker 2Uh I mean you can go farther and do more than you ever have before. Um, right? I mean, so it's very fun to be able to build things. Um I I think I think it's just you just go do it.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Like have fun. It's I think it's the most exciting time to be an entrepreneur. Uh, there's so many things where I mean, I did a project this year, personally, that previously would have taken a team of five engineers a year, and I did it in two months. Wow. With AI tooling, right? So it's just so exciting to be able to build things. So I I think I think maybe it's you know, be more ambitious than you would have been before.
SpeakerYeah. If you could fix one thing about Chattanooga, what would it be?
Speaker 2Bikes. It's gotta be safer to ride bikes around. Like I talk with so many people. Oh, yeah, I used to ride, but then my friend got hit. We gotta make it safer.
SpeakerYeah.
unknownYeah.
SpeakerI've had multiple friends killed. I've been hit by cars, I've bounced off of cars, oh man.
Speaker 2That's we we get and and that's it's totally preventable. This is a design issue, right? It's not the car's fault, it's not the city's fault. It's this is a design issue. We need to work on you know designing safe routes and separating them a little bit, right? I don't think we need bikes riding down central necessarily, right? Like let's put them somewhere else. Let's you know and you create separate greenways. Uh yeah, there's a lot that could be done. Uh, but it needs to be intentional and and just maintaining the existing infrastructure. Um, like it was a huge miss. We just repaved um the um Alton Park uh road down. Uh is that central down to Alton Park?
SpeakerUh oh that's um uh the end of Broad Street or Market Street, right?
Speaker 2Market Street, yeah. Repave that. That was a huge miss, right? State came in and did that. There were so many little opportunities to make that, design that road to be safer for pedestrians, like and and it didn't happen.
SpeakerAnd that's that's a great point because that's a road back when I was riding and training a lot I would use to skip Broad Street that goes into uh St. Elmo, because that road's super dangerous, and you've got to hop out. Now now there's the river wall and you can bypass it, but that section to get what I always noticed because I live downtown, um, getting out of town was the dangerous part. Once you get out to like the mountain roads we have around here, it's great.
Speaker 2Yes, it's amazing. Yeah. So I mean you know the big vision should be like it should be possible to ride from like reflection riding to Waldens Park. So if you imagine like going all the way through downtown, get to Stringer's Ridge, connect over to White Oak, like that kind of corridor. If you could do that, and then you had an east-west corridor, right? Then then you provide access for people to you know branch off. So you need that we need to have the grand vision of where it needs to go. And then you're gonna do it, you know, one block at a time. And that needs to be we need to be looking at the paving schedule and say, what are the things that we're already going to do? And then when we do those, let's let's you know fix things up as we go. So when you have like how often are we going to be paving a major street like that? It's gonna be 20 years before they pave that street again. So that's why like we lost a 20-year opportunity to fix this road. It doesn't cost more to design things well or design them badly. It's not about spending more money, it's about it's about doing things right, creating the design affordances to make it safe spaces for both.
SpeakerYeah. I agree. All right, uh, last one on list number five. Where can people find you? iFixit and I or Fix Bot.
Speaker 2Yeah, so I where I fix, you know, uh go uh in the App Store or iFixit.com and uh and check out iFixit. And then I'm generally on Twitter at uh KWens.
SpeakerWell, Kyle, thanks for coming on chat with me, man. It's been good conversation and hope to do more of it.
Speaker 2Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's do it.
SpeakerAwesome.