Circuit Labs is one person in Clark, South Dakota, fixing phones at night and on weekends and driving them back to the people who own them. This is the honest version of how that happened.
I work full time at a butcher shop. Long shifts, on my feet, and a son at home I want more hours with than the job leaves me. Before Circuit Labs I tried to build a repair business the ordinary way, and I watched it get crushed. I could have dragged it along out of pride. I let it die instead. That hurt more than I like to admit, and it's the reason I don't do anything the ordinary way anymore.
The discoverySomewhere in that I started noticing something about the people around me. Everybody has a cracked phone. Almost nobody gets it fixed. Not because they don't want to. Because the fix lives thirty miles away, behind a counter, with a price you don't hear until you're standing there. Out here a phone repair is the errand that quietly doesn't happen for three months while you run your thumb over the crack.
The problem was never the repair. I've been taking electronics apart since before anyone paid me to. The problem was the trip. So I stopped trying to build a shop and built a route instead.
The transformationNow I come to you. Clark, Watertown, wherever's easy. I take the phone, fix it at my bench, and bring it back, often the same day. No storefront, no waiting room, no rent I'd have to pass on to you. Your phone stays locked the whole time it's with me. I never need your passcode.
And every repair gets photographed on the bench, before and after, and logged as a numbered Subject. Because "trust me" is cheap, and a record of real phones isn't.
The missionHere's the part I don't usually say out loud. Circuit Labs is how I buy back time with my son. I get to do that by being useful to my neighbors, and that keeps me straight. I'm not the cheapest and I'm not the most expensive, but your phone will leave looking new. If a repair isn't worth doing, I'll tell you not to pay me. I'd rather be the guy who talked you out of it than the one who took the money.
Clark is Lab 00. The first one. I'm building it carefully enough that someday another town gets one too.
Text me what's wrong. I'll take it from there.
Dan
Immediacy forces inventory.
Scheduling makes rural viable.
That's the lab, in two lines.
How a job goes. You text me the phone and what it's doing. I text back a quote before anything is touched, then a run day. I pick it up, fix it, bring it back, and you try it before I leave. The whole thing, step by step, is on the Procedures page.
Why "Lab 00"? Clark is the first Circuit Labs. The route, the intake, the way each repair gets a Subject number, all of it is built so it could be repeated somewhere else by someone else. That's what the zero means. It's the proof copy.
Why the Subject numbers? Because a numbered archive of real phones, before and after, says more than I ever could. It's in the Subject Files. The customer is never in frame and never named.
Reviews. I don't invent them and I don't buy them. If I've fixed your phone, the real place to say so is the Google review page.
Never need your passcode. Your phone stays locked the whole time it's on the bench.
Not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but it'll leave looking new.
Text me what's wrong. I'll quote it straight, pick it up, and bring it back.
Rather I text you first? Leave your number in the form and I'll text you.