The part that resonates with me most is the timing and luck acknowledgement. I built a solo Saas product over the past few months using Calude Code as my development partner. Total cost $600. Launching in 3 days. The tools available now means the barrier to building something has basically collapsed. A weekend in a dorm room in 2020, a few months with AI coding in 2026. Same DNA... find the gap, build the thing and ship it.
This is a really cool story. If the author is reading: It would be interesting to read about your experiences with marketing and building support for your products. I know you said a lot of it was luck and timing, but it would be helpful to get your thoughts on which moves you made that best took advantage of that luck and timing.
I have dozens of friends who launched group buys for small boards around this price range for different niches that never took off. Some of them even had superior products to the popular offerings, but getting traction is hard.
Hey! I'm the author. I think my good timing and luck showed up mostly through my initial Reddit post garnering a ton of attention. I road that wave to the group buy. From that single Reddit post I had tons of people interested and got them to join a community Discord. Remember that this was right when covid lockdowns had started, seriously good timing for me.
I worked hard to move fast, engage, and share often on my community Discord[1]. The early messages in the announcements channel might be a good place to see how I was communicating early on. It was a pretty exciting time for me where we were all sharing ideas and figuring out how to make my initial prototype into something that all hobbyists could use. I think past that, word of mouth kept the Discord growing, and by the time I had the group buy, I didn't even post on Reddit because there were already thousands in my Discord ready to buy.
After that I worked with vendors to get it in ecommerce storefronts ASAP to not let the hype die out. Within weeks of the group buy being filled, people who had been waiting that missed it could purchase from a "standard" mech keyboard storefront. I used Reddit here to keep things going.
I really do think timing and luck was most of it, but hopefully this gives some insights to what I was doing. Building a community, sharing often, and collaborating to help turn it into an ecosystem ASAP.
What to notice is that this wasn't really a startup idea at first but it was someone noticing that commercial wireless keyboards had solved a problem that the DIY ecosystem had not; a number of successful products seem to be from bringing an existing capability into a community that need it.
I switched to ZMK circa 2024, and never looked back at QMK. I am the proud owner of a Corne wireless from typeractive, and it's such a beautiful product. The nice!nano are also a welcome addition.
There is a growing community of enthusiasts starting to sell ZMK powered boards from traditionally QMK based designs, so if you're interested, Etsy is where all of this is happening. MochuKeeb is a good example.
Thanks a lot for your part in the journey to modern, wireless custom keyboards Nick!
I admit, I barely understand what the product does, much less how there's 50k people wanting this. This is a component you can use if you're building a DIY keyboard and want to make it wireless? Seems profoundly niche to me. Am I missing something?
Anyway, congrats on finding and reaching your market! The Internet at its best (although part of me wishes this nerd community had found a more self-hosted way of connecting online than Discord).
> Seems profoundly niche to me. Am I missing something?
As someone who dreams of someday starting a "lifestyle business", I love that it is profoundly niche.
It gives me hope that I can go out and solve a problem that is important to me, but too niche for investors to bother with, and earn some money from it.
Yeah, it sounds like there just legitimately are 50K people who are in this niche. Maybe the fact that people might assume there are fewer is why there was a gap in the market for the author to fill!
I think this is the Big Thing when it comes to making things - underestimating the market. Mechanical keyboards is a multi-billion industry, and building them yourself is a percentage of that.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if this product managed to end up in the supply chain for a lot of the keyboard manufacturers, which would be a huge boost to sales volumes.
I sit here typing on my DIY split keyboard powered by 2 nice!nanos. It's worth noting that a typical wireless split keyboard (separate left and right halves) uses 2 nice!nanos, so really it's only 25k people interested. That's assuming each person only builds one split keyboard, which... All the keyboard fans I know start with one, but don't stop there :p
Custom keyboards are really popular - especially a few years ago. Most cases/boards are wired only. I think his product enables those to be wireless too
There’s a quite large community of custom mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. If you are familiar with the audiophile space they have similar spending habits.
It doesn't have to be for that, but yeah, that's the target. At the time, a lot of keyboard designs were based around the pro-micro formfactor, so this made it more-or-less a drop in replacement.
There are billions of people in the world. 50k is 0.005% of a billion, so 1 in 20000. This is the reason I think money/market-motivated thinking, that often leaves people pursuing something they're not especially personally enthusiastic about, is wrong for most people. If your goal is to be a billion dollar grow-fast multinational company, okay, but if your goal is to just live a comfortable life and create something neat - then it's much better to sell a niche thing that you enjoy, than a mass market thing you just want to make a buck off of.
For a gaming example of this, it's often cited somehow as a negative that "only" 14% of games released on Steam will earn more than $50k. The way I look at that figure is that there are now about 20,000+ games being released on Steam per year, and so that means that each year some 2,800 games will go on to earn $50k+ - that's more than 7 games a day, every single day. I'm a pretty big gamer, but don't think I could list 2,800 games in total across all systems and my entire life - yet that is how many new games go on to earn $50k+ on Steam every single year.
For most things, there aren't 50k reachable, aware, motivated, solvent buyers. Making enough people aware of your existence may be more expensive than the total profits made from your endeavour.
I am only pointing this out because I know people who would hear the first part of your comment and get their egos attached to an idea since they interpret it as 'there are billions of people, so I only need a tiny percentage, there is no bad idea, only bad execution' and lose years of their lives pursuing something where odds are stacked against them, if there were any odds in the first place. I'd urge people instead to also hear the 2nd part of your comment, and take it as 'experiment with many niche things, there are some that land and land well'.
I wouldn't agree there. One important thing that works in your favor is that there's an inverse relationship between marketing costs and market size, and a big part of that is because of a similar inverse relationship with word of mouth. Even the most fringe topic you could think of is generally going to have communities built up around it, and the more niche - the more 'airtime' ideas that cater to that community are going to get. Like in this case - his 'marketing' was a Reddit post and a Discord, for a total marketing spend of $0.
By contrast when appealing to a large market, marketing becomes a major part of breaking through simply because word of mouth is much more difficult to get going when you're vying for a market that a million other competitors, many quite competent themselves, are also vying for. To go with the games example again, if you're trying to create a platformer - you're probably going to fail, even if you create a pretty good game. It's just a completely oversaturated market, even if that market is massive. By contrast if you're making e.g. a Starflight clone - you're probably going to succeed if it's even remotely decent. It's very niche, but consequently also very underserved market with tremendous word of mouth potential.
In the late 80s, a friend turned his comsci class project into a product.
The company was making about $25m. It died due to a patent dispute.
He later started a dot com that is still very successful.
Reminds me of the guy (Mitch Altman) that invented the tv-b-gone, a universal remote that turns every TV off. He made a small fortune off of that and now goes around teaching people IoT and the like.
I'm sure he's on here, if so, hello and thank you for the neat synthesizer board project o/
I have one. It's fantastic. Although, I don't see as many televisions in public spaces anymore. Maybe because now it's smartphones that anesthetize the masses.
I can't find any references to the company online anymore. The product was a c++ interpreter (created from the founder's compiler class project) and IDE. This was before java/python/javascript/etc. The interpreter would catch errors and you could mix interpreted code and binary code. Pure software displaced it.
Really cool to see. I was one of the first 1000 customers, making sure I wouldn't miss the group buy from the other side of the world. Probably the first and last group buy I will ever participate in. But at that time it was an extremely important product for an extremely small group of potential customers.
Exactly the same thoughts here (I've been looking into FCC part 15 myself too). And IIRC nRF has some pre-cert stuff to avoid going through the full gauntlet.
I'm guessing he's using the fact that dev boards are excepted (as opposed to final products). Somewhat unfortunate though, as these do end up in a lot of people's boards.
nRF modules are pre-certified to avoid this issue, but OP integrated the chip into their own design so the certification is entirely on them to obtain compliance.
And that's why he built the product and I didn't. Some people just do it and solve for regulatory problems once they have pmf. I get lost in regulatory weeds and never get off the ground.
The product launch was a group buy of minimum 400 units. You can choose one of "compete with China" or "expensive product testing requirements for small-run products".
For anyone out of the loop: Custom mechanical keyboard firmware/hardware have been the embedded hobby product of choice for a few years. It's a bit like sneakers, mechanical keyboards in general, etc. Or like the test-pattern boats makers create using 3d printers. If someone goes on an OSS embedded space and asks "What should I make to learn", the answer will probably be "a keyboard". My point is: This has a bigger market than you might think!
The question I have is, what were you exposed to and doing at ages 5, 10, and 15 that made you capable of developing a PCB in your freshman year of college?
Designing a PCB is not that complex. You can find a YouTube video, download the design software, order it from PCB Way, and get it in a few days. The problem is finding a useful product worthy PCB idea.
You make it sound like knowing electronics is an afterthought, who cares about what a capacitor, resistor, transistor is and just throw some microcontrollers on the board and the magic happens.
Sorry for the rant, I need to google what ground is.
Hey, i have been using nice nano for couple of years now. It’s absolutely kickass piece of hardware. I love the battery efficiency, the project maturity, and most of all the bluetooth on nicenano is blazing fast and it just works.
Hey cool, I have two of these for a split keyboard. Working great! I am glad the business side seems to have done well, I usually assume these kinds of projects are passion projects that don't always make ends meet.
This is such an awful title for this that I almost passed over this story despite being a nano/view customer who has built several keyboards myself. What a strange thing, in the effort to appeal to a wider audience with a clickbaity title you lose signal to the readers who would perhaps be most interested.
For his defense, the business is really 1M$ and he really started in his dorm room. So clickbaity but factually true, unlike many other clickbaity stories out there.
It's always so cool for a DIY project to become a product to be born out of someone curiosity to make something better. Great work!
I would be interested in reading on how you became one of the largest split keyboard stores if you ever plan on making a post about that.
Congratulations and hat tip to you sir! You must have executed incredibly well.
I have to admit I'm a little bit jealous of an environment so conductive to starting a small business. I can see many hurdles in this small EU country to something like this succeeding. The burdens of administration and regulation and the fractured market would make this tricky to pull off. The high taxation also makes one question the wisdom of taking this kind of risk. That's not just a direct brake. All of this also creates a very different attitude, a culture less tuned to entrepreneurship.
What hurdles would those be? I'm sure that as long as you do your administration properly, selling electronics from your proverbial bedroom isn't a major issue.
This comments sounds more like generalised anti-EU sentiment than a reply to the article.
I'm very much pro EU, and I don't want to deviate from the OP's excellent original article too much, but here are few Belgium specific examples. Not too many of them hold for all EU member states, but those would still make for significant hurdles:
- You need to formally set up as a company. Where are you going to do so?
- Not allowed from student housing.
- If your parents rent their home, their rental contract usually forbids this. It would cause the landlord significant taxation issues, so almost all rental contracts forbid this.
- Establishing the simplest allowable entity able to send invoices. Just establishing would cost ~115€, or ~134€. The article student author mentions $100 being a lot of money to them.
- Provincial tax. Most Belgian provinces have a yearly tax on the existence of any company, no matter how small or inactive. My native province's rate for example is 140€. That's ~$163 at today's rate.
- Local tax. Many local governments tax business activity separately.
- Social security.
- Registration and exemption documents. No cost, but an added significant administrative burden to prove you are in the exempt bracket for your first ~2000€ earned.
- Work too many hours or earn too much. Your parents risk losing your child benefits. Note that this is separate from dependent deductions. What if money is tight for them?
- Peppol electronic invoicing. If you buy or sell anything b2b, you're required to use the peppol electronic invoicing network. No self made pdf's allowed. Set up software. Pay for a subscription.
- Banking. Better get a separate bank account for your business, or you give fiscal authorities the right to start looking into your private accounts.
- Fiscal uncanny valley. Combine any regular tech job with a sole proprietorship side gig. You pay ~53.5% in income taxes and ~21% in social security contributions on the net side income, keeping about 1/3 of your net taxable income.
- VAT and administration. Have you seriously tried to sell across intra-EU borders as a student and stay compliant?
- Hope you didn't use Amazon FBA or any 3PL partner in a different EU country.
- I just imported a single camera module from China. It cost $49 including shipping. 21% EU import VAT and administrative handling by the national post monopoly combined cost me 35.17€, or $40.93 on top.
- Forget about doing your first year accounts yourself. You'll make costly mistakes. The tax administration doesn't bark. It bites. Do you have the cash to outsource trimonthly VAT declarations and income tax accounting? Good luck finding someone competent under 1k€/~$1163.
- Earn over a relatively low token amount. If you're from a family with 3+ kids, your parents risk losing a 3k€+ net tax advantage. This can in some cases make for a significantly >100% taxation rate between parents and student children. What if your parents can't afford the tax increase?
- Student status. Drop below 27 ECTS points of course load and you're not a student entrepreneur anymore. You're suddenly a full-time entrepreneur, with the full load of responsibilities. Example: 3.6k€/year in social security contributions, even on zero or negative income. Where are you going to get the money?
- Physical product.
- Belgium has some of the highest outgoing shipping rates across any courier or postal services. Good luck competing against similar initiatives, including from other EU member states.
- Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive. It also requires your product to have accompanying notes in the language of the EU country where you sell.
Some of this just needn't apply, especially from a UK perspective; you can operate as a sole trader with very little paperwork until you make £85,000 and have to register for VAT. You don't need a company shell or a business bank account.
"Social security" equivalent: as a sole trader you do have to pay National Insurance above a minimum threshold.
(one of the massive differences between UK regulatory culture and the EU is that the UK is very good at having "de minimis" thresholds so you don't have to worry about compliance until you've actually made decent money. EU rules tend to apply as soon as you sell a single item, which is ridiculous)
> Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive.
This on the other hand is a real problem. WEEE as well.
> shipping rates
It is insane that it is cheaper to ship from China than intra-EU.
Every country has hurdles. It's not like the US doesn't have weird worlds of tax exemptions, and 50 sets of state tax regulation to consider [or outsource to your fulfilment platform...] when shipping to consumers, and if I was a US business importing microelectronics from China, 21% import tax that doesn't change every couple of months would sound like a *dream...
Of course every country throws hurdles onto the student entrepreneur's path. Belgium, unlike the Baltics, the US (for now) or many others, just happens to be a world championship contender in this discipline.
Doesn't really seem like a bait and switch to me. He legitimately designed and produced and sold the first thousand from his dorm room. Is your complaint that he left the dorm room before hitting $1M revenue from it? Seems irrelevant.
Yup, people who are into niche hobbies can be almost obsessed with it. Like a guy having 50 zippo lighters, or someone having collection of retro consoles. Same here, people are building more than one keyboard because they love it.
If you find that hard to believe, keep in mind this is just one product in a rather crowded niche marketplace, so there's undoubtedly tens of thousands more similar products that have already been sold.
> both of these new boards that popped up are advertised as nice!nanos and are shipped with the exact same firmware I use on the nice!nano, so when someone plugs it in, it says it’s a nice!nano.
Trademark dispute is the way to go. Since there were no stories about an onerous amount of returns of clones to the author, probably not worth it, but returns of clones is why it financially makes sense and not just to enrich lawyers.
That's gonna be tough; as author mentioned, they're made and sold primarily in China, for 3$ a piece (no wonder they're popular). The clones also have a different PCB design (it doesn't say nice!nano on it), so they're not that easily mistaken.
The part that resonates with me most is the timing and luck acknowledgement. I built a solo Saas product over the past few months using Calude Code as my development partner. Total cost $600. Launching in 3 days. The tools available now means the barrier to building something has basically collapsed. A weekend in a dorm room in 2020, a few months with AI coding in 2026. Same DNA... find the gap, build the thing and ship it.
This is a really cool story. If the author is reading: It would be interesting to read about your experiences with marketing and building support for your products. I know you said a lot of it was luck and timing, but it would be helpful to get your thoughts on which moves you made that best took advantage of that luck and timing.
I have dozens of friends who launched group buys for small boards around this price range for different niches that never took off. Some of them even had superior products to the popular offerings, but getting traction is hard.
Hey! I'm the author. I think my good timing and luck showed up mostly through my initial Reddit post garnering a ton of attention. I road that wave to the group buy. From that single Reddit post I had tons of people interested and got them to join a community Discord. Remember that this was right when covid lockdowns had started, seriously good timing for me.
I worked hard to move fast, engage, and share often on my community Discord[1]. The early messages in the announcements channel might be a good place to see how I was communicating early on. It was a pretty exciting time for me where we were all sharing ideas and figuring out how to make my initial prototype into something that all hobbyists could use. I think past that, word of mouth kept the Discord growing, and by the time I had the group buy, I didn't even post on Reddit because there were already thousands in my Discord ready to buy.
After that I worked with vendors to get it in ecommerce storefronts ASAP to not let the hype die out. Within weeks of the group buy being filled, people who had been waiting that missed it could purchase from a "standard" mech keyboard storefront. I used Reddit here to keep things going.
I really do think timing and luck was most of it, but hopefully this gives some insights to what I was doing. Building a community, sharing often, and collaborating to help turn it into an ecosystem ASAP.
[1]: https://discord.gg/HAA4Hnepf if you want to see the announcements channel
RE: Competing clones of your prodcut
If you could go back in time, would you still make the keyboard firmware fully opensource?
I am sure having the product open source would have helped keep the community going during the early stages.
I'm asking because I'm in a similar situation and evaluating the pros and cons of open sourcing the source code for my product.
> After that I worked with vendors to get it in ecommerce storefronts ASAP to not let the hype die out
Give yourself credit for this move, because it might seem obvious to you, but I suspect a lot of people wouldn't have bothered!
In any case, thank you for writing this up and congrats on everything :D
What to notice is that this wasn't really a startup idea at first but it was someone noticing that commercial wireless keyboards had solved a problem that the DIY ecosystem had not; a number of successful products seem to be from bringing an existing capability into a community that need it.
I switched to ZMK circa 2024, and never looked back at QMK. I am the proud owner of a Corne wireless from typeractive, and it's such a beautiful product. The nice!nano are also a welcome addition.
There is a growing community of enthusiasts starting to sell ZMK powered boards from traditionally QMK based designs, so if you're interested, Etsy is where all of this is happening. MochuKeeb is a good example.
Thanks a lot for your part in the journey to modern, wireless custom keyboards Nick!
I admit, I barely understand what the product does, much less how there's 50k people wanting this. This is a component you can use if you're building a DIY keyboard and want to make it wireless? Seems profoundly niche to me. Am I missing something?
Anyway, congrats on finding and reaching your market! The Internet at its best (although part of me wishes this nerd community had found a more self-hosted way of connecting online than Discord).
> Seems profoundly niche to me. Am I missing something?
As someone who dreams of someday starting a "lifestyle business", I love that it is profoundly niche.
It gives me hope that I can go out and solve a problem that is important to me, but too niche for investors to bother with, and earn some money from it.
Yeah, it sounds like there just legitimately are 50K people who are in this niche. Maybe the fact that people might assume there are fewer is why there was a gap in the market for the author to fill!
I think this is the Big Thing when it comes to making things - underestimating the market. Mechanical keyboards is a multi-billion industry, and building them yourself is a percentage of that.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if this product managed to end up in the supply chain for a lot of the keyboard manufacturers, which would be a huge boost to sales volumes.
Also, and this is the neat bit, 50k people actively looking for recommendations on online communities
If you like building keyboards, you’ll end up using a couple of these.
I have 6!
It blew my mind how much $1 million is too niche and not a lot of money the first time I heard that.
I sit here typing on my DIY split keyboard powered by 2 nice!nanos. It's worth noting that a typical wireless split keyboard (separate left and right halves) uses 2 nice!nanos, so really it's only 25k people interested. That's assuming each person only builds one split keyboard, which... All the keyboard fans I know start with one, but don't stop there :p
Custom keyboards are really popular - especially a few years ago. Most cases/boards are wired only. I think his product enables those to be wireless too
There’s a quite large community of custom mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. If you are familiar with the audiophile space they have similar spending habits.
> This is a component you can use if you're building a DIY keyboard and want to make it wireless?
Pretty much so, yes. I used similar, nice!nano inspired modules (SuperMini) to build these after I purchasing for a keeb build that didn't pan out:
1. Headphone hook that automatically switches output device to headphones when you take them off.
2. Bicycle wireless shifting module to retrofit my old wired Di2 levers.
Very noob friendly and cheap to experiment with. You can even program it with Python.
It doesn't have to be for that, but yeah, that's the target. At the time, a lot of keyboard designs were based around the pro-micro formfactor, so this made it more-or-less a drop in replacement.
A lot of people picked up building mechanical keyboards as a hobby during COVID. It probably wouldn't have the same impact today.
There are billions of people in the world. 50k is 0.005% of a billion, so 1 in 20000. This is the reason I think money/market-motivated thinking, that often leaves people pursuing something they're not especially personally enthusiastic about, is wrong for most people. If your goal is to be a billion dollar grow-fast multinational company, okay, but if your goal is to just live a comfortable life and create something neat - then it's much better to sell a niche thing that you enjoy, than a mass market thing you just want to make a buck off of.
For a gaming example of this, it's often cited somehow as a negative that "only" 14% of games released on Steam will earn more than $50k. The way I look at that figure is that there are now about 20,000+ games being released on Steam per year, and so that means that each year some 2,800 games will go on to earn $50k+ - that's more than 7 games a day, every single day. I'm a pretty big gamer, but don't think I could list 2,800 games in total across all systems and my entire life - yet that is how many new games go on to earn $50k+ on Steam every single year.
For most things, there aren't 50k reachable, aware, motivated, solvent buyers. Making enough people aware of your existence may be more expensive than the total profits made from your endeavour.
I am only pointing this out because I know people who would hear the first part of your comment and get their egos attached to an idea since they interpret it as 'there are billions of people, so I only need a tiny percentage, there is no bad idea, only bad execution' and lose years of their lives pursuing something where odds are stacked against them, if there were any odds in the first place. I'd urge people instead to also hear the 2nd part of your comment, and take it as 'experiment with many niche things, there are some that land and land well'.
I wouldn't agree there. One important thing that works in your favor is that there's an inverse relationship between marketing costs and market size, and a big part of that is because of a similar inverse relationship with word of mouth. Even the most fringe topic you could think of is generally going to have communities built up around it, and the more niche - the more 'airtime' ideas that cater to that community are going to get. Like in this case - his 'marketing' was a Reddit post and a Discord, for a total marketing spend of $0.
By contrast when appealing to a large market, marketing becomes a major part of breaking through simply because word of mouth is much more difficult to get going when you're vying for a market that a million other competitors, many quite competent themselves, are also vying for. To go with the games example again, if you're trying to create a platformer - you're probably going to fail, even if you create a pretty good game. It's just a completely oversaturated market, even if that market is massive. By contrast if you're making e.g. a Starflight clone - you're probably going to succeed if it's even remotely decent. It's very niche, but consequently also very underserved market with tremendous word of mouth potential.
It was for years pretty much the only way to have a split bluetooth keyboard, the holy grail of keyboards.
In the late 80s, a friend turned his comsci class project into a product. The company was making about $25m. It died due to a patent dispute. He later started a dot com that is still very successful.
Reminds me of the guy (Mitch Altman) that invented the tv-b-gone, a universal remote that turns every TV off. He made a small fortune off of that and now goes around teaching people IoT and the like.
I'm sure he's on here, if so, hello and thank you for the neat synthesizer board project o/
I have one. It's fantastic. Although, I don't see as many televisions in public spaces anymore. Maybe because now it's smartphones that anesthetize the masses.
What was the product?
I can't find any references to the company online anymore. The product was a c++ interpreter (created from the founder's compiler class project) and IDE. This was before java/python/javascript/etc. The interpreter would catch errors and you could mix interpreted code and binary code. Pure software displaced it.
viaweb, adobe, microstrategy
Really cool to see. I was one of the first 1000 customers, making sure I wouldn't miss the group buy from the other side of the world. Probably the first and last group buy I will ever participate in. But at that time it was an extremely important product for an extremely small group of potential customers.
neat product, but where's the FCC ID for an intentional radiator on it? your million dollar product can afford the legally required testing, right?
Exactly the same thoughts here (I've been looking into FCC part 15 myself too). And IIRC nRF has some pre-cert stuff to avoid going through the full gauntlet.
I'm guessing he's using the fact that dev boards are excepted (as opposed to final products). Somewhat unfortunate though, as these do end up in a lot of people's boards.
nRF modules are pre-certified to avoid this issue, but OP integrated the chip into their own design so the certification is entirely on them to obtain compliance.
And that's why he built the product and I didn't. Some people just do it and solve for regulatory problems once they have pmf. I get lost in regulatory weeds and never get off the ground.
Not really, no.
The product launch was a group buy of minimum 400 units. You can choose one of "compete with China" or "expensive product testing requirements for small-run products".
For anyone out of the loop: Custom mechanical keyboard firmware/hardware have been the embedded hobby product of choice for a few years. It's a bit like sneakers, mechanical keyboards in general, etc. Or like the test-pattern boats makers create using 3d printers. If someone goes on an OSS embedded space and asks "What should I make to learn", the answer will probably be "a keyboard". My point is: This has a bigger market than you might think!
The question I have is, what were you exposed to and doing at ages 5, 10, and 15 that made you capable of developing a PCB in your freshman year of college?
Designing a PCB is not that complex. You can find a YouTube video, download the design software, order it from PCB Way, and get it in a few days. The problem is finding a useful product worthy PCB idea.
You make it sound like knowing electronics is an afterthought, who cares about what a capacitor, resistor, transistor is and just throw some microcontrollers on the board and the magic happens.
Sorry for the rant, I need to google what ground is.
Its been on my todo list for like 4 years and whenever I try I bounce off pretty hard. That said get a bit closer each time.
KiCAD is pretty good.
Hey, i have been using nice nano for couple of years now. It’s absolutely kickass piece of hardware. I love the battery efficiency, the project maturity, and most of all the bluetooth on nicenano is blazing fast and it just works.
Wow, sometimes it can be as simple as "make something people want."
Hey cool, I have two of these for a split keyboard. Working great! I am glad the business side seems to have done well, I usually assume these kinds of projects are passion projects that don't always make ends meet.
This is such an awful title for this that I almost passed over this story despite being a nano/view customer who has built several keyboards myself. What a strange thing, in the effort to appeal to a wider audience with a clickbaity title you lose signal to the readers who would perhaps be most interested.
For his defense, the business is really 1M$ and he really started in his dorm room. So clickbaity but factually true, unlike many other clickbaity stories out there.
Yet here you are engaging with the article. In my mind, the clickbait title has done its job.
If it didn’t have the clickbaity title you probably would have never known the article existed.
What a fantastic and actually uplifting story!
It's always so cool for a DIY project to become a product to be born out of someone curiosity to make something better. Great work! I would be interested in reading on how you became one of the largest split keyboard stores if you ever plan on making a post about that.
Very awesome. I think what made this work was it being a very small device that the end user has to understand well.
I tried to design a phone that could fit in a wallet and quickly realized this was beyond anything I could do without millions of funding.
Maybe one day ...
Congratulations and hat tip to you sir! You must have executed incredibly well.
I have to admit I'm a little bit jealous of an environment so conductive to starting a small business. I can see many hurdles in this small EU country to something like this succeeding. The burdens of administration and regulation and the fractured market would make this tricky to pull off. The high taxation also makes one question the wisdom of taking this kind of risk. That's not just a direct brake. All of this also creates a very different attitude, a culture less tuned to entrepreneurship.
What hurdles would those be? I'm sure that as long as you do your administration properly, selling electronics from your proverbial bedroom isn't a major issue.
This comments sounds more like generalised anti-EU sentiment than a reply to the article.
I'm very much pro EU, and I don't want to deviate from the OP's excellent original article too much, but here are few Belgium specific examples. Not too many of them hold for all EU member states, but those would still make for significant hurdles:
- You need to formally set up as a company. Where are you going to do so?
- Establishing the simplest allowable entity able to send invoices. Just establishing would cost ~115€, or ~134€. The article student author mentions $100 being a lot of money to them.- Provincial tax. Most Belgian provinces have a yearly tax on the existence of any company, no matter how small or inactive. My native province's rate for example is 140€. That's ~$163 at today's rate.
- Local tax. Many local governments tax business activity separately.
- Social security.
- Peppol electronic invoicing. If you buy or sell anything b2b, you're required to use the peppol electronic invoicing network. No self made pdf's allowed. Set up software. Pay for a subscription.- Banking. Better get a separate bank account for your business, or you give fiscal authorities the right to start looking into your private accounts.
- Fiscal uncanny valley. Combine any regular tech job with a sole proprietorship side gig. You pay ~53.5% in income taxes and ~21% in social security contributions on the net side income, keeping about 1/3 of your net taxable income.
- VAT and administration. Have you seriously tried to sell across intra-EU borders as a student and stay compliant?
- Earn over a relatively low token amount. If you're from a family with 3+ kids, your parents risk losing a 3k€+ net tax advantage. This can in some cases make for a significantly >100% taxation rate between parents and student children. What if your parents can't afford the tax increase?- Student status. Drop below 27 ECTS points of course load and you're not a student entrepreneur anymore. You're suddenly a full-time entrepreneur, with the full load of responsibilities. Example: 3.6k€/year in social security contributions, even on zero or negative income. Where are you going to get the money?
- Physical product.
Some of this just needn't apply, especially from a UK perspective; you can operate as a sole trader with very little paperwork until you make £85,000 and have to register for VAT. You don't need a company shell or a business bank account.
"Social security" equivalent: as a sole trader you do have to pay National Insurance above a minimum threshold.
(one of the massive differences between UK regulatory culture and the EU is that the UK is very good at having "de minimis" thresholds so you don't have to worry about compliance until you've actually made decent money. EU rules tend to apply as soon as you sell a single item, which is ridiculous)
> Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive.
This on the other hand is a real problem. WEEE as well.
> shipping rates
It is insane that it is cheaper to ship from China than intra-EU.
Every country has hurdles. It's not like the US doesn't have weird worlds of tax exemptions, and 50 sets of state tax regulation to consider [or outsource to your fulfilment platform...] when shipping to consumers, and if I was a US business importing microelectronics from China, 21% import tax that doesn't change every couple of months would sound like a *dream...
Of course every country throws hurdles onto the student entrepreneur's path. Belgium, unlike the Baltics, the US (for now) or many others, just happens to be a world championship contender in this discipline.
That's a really great story, but an awful title
Love these and the nice!view, used them in every keyboard I built!
What a nice story. Inspiring.
This is actually very cool - can definitely see why it's been as successful as it has. Congrats on 50k!
Great work! And hello from the UPL :)
That's impressive. Curious, did you face any unexpected challenges in scaling from a dorm room setup? Always wondered how people manage that leap.
Hah as a satified customer this is really heartwarming to see
Great story. Wish you hadn’t done the bait and switch with the title.
Doesn't really seem like a bait and switch to me. He legitimately designed and produced and sold the first thousand from his dorm room. Is your complaint that he left the dorm room before hitting $1M revenue from it? Seems irrelevant.
Congratulations! This is a great achievement.
This is cool, but honestly, I find it hard to believe that 50,000 units were sold.
I've personally bought at least 10 of these things. Some of us build keyboards for fun!
Really? Why?
I know people who made like 3 or 4 of these keyboards from kits.
That I think they are insane and just buy the chinese knockoffs does not negate the existence of the other guy.
Yup, people who are into niche hobbies can be almost obsessed with it. Like a guy having 50 zippo lighters, or someone having collection of retro consoles. Same here, people are building more than one keyboard because they love it.
If you find that hard to believe, keep in mind this is just one product in a rather crowded niche marketplace, so there's undoubtedly tens of thousands more similar products that have already been sold.
> both of these new boards that popped up are advertised as nice!nanos and are shipped with the exact same firmware I use on the nice!nano, so when someone plugs it in, it says it’s a nice!nano.
Trademark dispute is the way to go. Since there were no stories about an onerous amount of returns of clones to the author, probably not worth it, but returns of clones is why it financially makes sense and not just to enrich lawyers.
That's gonna be tough; as author mentioned, they're made and sold primarily in China, for 3$ a piece (no wonder they're popular). The clones also have a different PCB design (it doesn't say nice!nano on it), so they're not that easily mistaken.
The author is incentivized to go after companies in his country selling the clones.