In this episode of the My First Million podcast, hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri dissect Ease (also referred to as Ease Wholesale), a newly launched marketplace that matches wholesale buyers and sellers of used smartphones through a bid/ask, stock‑market‑style interface. They outline the claimed market opportunity—$46 billion annual sales and 230 million units—and note the platform’s early traction: roughly $400 k gross merchandise volume (GMV) per month, an 8 % take rate, and 20 % month‑over‑month growth. The founders are former phone brokers who previously moved $8 million of inventory and appear to be bootstrapped. The hosts praise the business model’s alignment with the founders’ expertise but raise concerns about intense competition from established players such as Swappa and Gazelle, and the potential cost of acquiring distribution and user attention. They debate whether the company should stay lean and profitable with minimal fundraising or pursue larger capital to scale. Throughout, they intersperse personal anecdotes, market‑size calculations, and skeptical yet optimistic commentary on the venture’s prospects.
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So I'm going to do this one. I don't know exactly how you say it, Ease Wholesale or Ease Wholesale.
I love that you're bringing that up.
Yeah, really interesting company. So basically the premise is it's a marketplace for buying and selling used smartphones. And, you know, I'll tell you some of their stats. I haven't sort of verified how real these are, but They say that used smartphone sales are $46 billion a year annual market. They say that 230 million smartphones are sold per year. You can do the math, that checks out. They have— so what they did is they made a marketplace where you could, if you have phones and you're a wholesaler, you can basically say, hey, I'm either, I'm looking to buy or looking to sell. And they made it like a stock market. You basically put a bid up, you say, I'd like to buy this iPhone. And if somebody has it, they can fill your order and they can basically like do that. They can close your transaction out there, your ticket out. Or you could say, I'm selling 100 of these specific Android phones and somebody could say, I'll buy 10 of those. And so they made it easy. They said that most of this used to happen through Facebook groups, WhatsApp, sort of the underground, you know, just using social tools, but there wasn't a marketplace and that was focused on this. And so They have $400,000 in GMV so far. Now GMV, you know, you can assume maybe they're making, you know, in the tens of thousands of dollars themselves.
So GMV, gross merchandise volume. Volume, okay.
So basically how much is total sold through their market. So if a cell phone sells for $1,000, that's $1,000 of GMV. Their cut might be 5%, 10% of that. But this is because the smartphone, if the smartphone, if the used smartphone marketplace is this big, and they have some stats about how fast it's growing. They say that used smartphone sales is growing faster than new smartphone sales per year because, you know, Apple is trying to like make the old model irrelevant so quickly. And sure, some people do upgrade, but there's all these other phones still out there that are still very good phones.
I, uh, like, I, I can afford new phones. I, up until my most recent phone, all of them have been used.
And the, the best part about these guys is, so, um I believe that they were bootstrapped. I'm not 100% sure, but they, so they've gotten to this point. They themselves were former buyers and traders of cell phones, and they had sold prior to this just as brokers $8 million worth of cell phones and then decided to create a sort of technology marketplace out of this. So if you think about it, market, love it. Style of business, marketplace, love it. So I love that they're going for used smartphones. I love that they're doing a marketplace. I love that they came from a background where they actually did this manually before and were, sort of prolific brokers.
A++.
Love this, love this company here on the YC list.
Okay, I like it. Let me play devil's advocate here, which is, okay, so I looked up a few. Okay, so first of all, I think that this is a lot harder than people think. The reason why I think it's a lot harder is I think it's incredibly competitive with a lot of people who are already very established. So I think getting distribution and getting eyeballs on their product is going to be prohibitively expensive, maybe. Um, I also think that— so there's a company called Swappa. Do you know Swappa?
Uh, no, but I see your note here.
Okay. Here's why this is interesting. I've actually used it before, but I didn't— but what's interesting is I posted, or I have a thread that I found of the guy who's— so Swappa is the same thing, but slightly different. I don't know how it's slightly different, but it's the same. It's a, you buy used cell phones. What's interesting is that in 2011, the guy who started SwapUp posted on Hacker News and he said, hey, I'm launching this thing on the side. Here's what it does. And so you can actually go and like see how he started it. And it's, I don't know how big it is right now, but it comes up number one when you Google buy used cell phones. So I would imagine it does, I bet you it does $50 million in sales at least because I'm comparing it to the person that's number 2, which is Gazelle, which is a big company, but anyway, Swappa bootstrapped. And so I, if I was a greedy, if I was these Ease guys, how do you say it? Easy? If I was these Ease guys and I— Easy or whatever. What did you say?
Let's go with easy.
If I was easy, I would be greedy and want to raise very little money, like less than $1 million, and just see how I can just make this really profitable.
But, um, yeah, they say launched 3 months ago, $400K GMV monthly, 8% margin, profitable and growing at 20% month over month. Of course, easy to be profitable when you have 2 people and you're not taking salaries. But nonetheless, I think this could be a profitable business because of the you know, the sort of take rate.
