GoRoostr: Bucks County Mac reseller has made $1M+ in payouts

Jonathan Steingart likes fixing broken Macs.

Back when he worked at a Center City print and design firm, he’d spend his lunch hour buying broken Macbooks off of Craigslist or Ebay. Sometimes he’d even skip out for a few minutes to go pick one up from a seller. Then he’d fix them up and resell them.

When he couldn’t find an easy way to get more broken laptops, he decided to start a company that would help him do that. That’s how GoRoostr was born.

Based in Southampton, just across the Northeast Philadelphia border, GoRoostr buys Macbooks and now iPhones and iPads and resells them to wholesale, local or online buyers. Steingart doesn’t refurbish as many himself as he used to because he doesn’t have as much time (he has two staffers who he trained to fix Macs, one full-time, one part-time), but also because many of the devices he gets aren’t broken.

Since May 2012, GoRoostr has purchased more than 2,500 Macbooks and more than 700 iPhones and iPads, Steingart said. The company has made just more than $1 million in payouts to customers, he said.

The site was built by cofounder Greg Thompson, who works part-time on the project and full-time as a developer at Center City social marketing company PeopleLinx. Thompson has also worked on projects at ad agency allen & gerritsen (formerly Neiman) like a Twitter-powered Nerf gun and a social media-powered candy machine.

Thompson and Steingart are both 28 and live in Bucks County. They’ve been friends since middle school.