I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
nick.winans.io
nick.winans.io
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.
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
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
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.
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).
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.
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 have 6!
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.
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'.
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.
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.
You’re correct that people risk shipping pointless ideas when they let AI drive. But when you’re in the driver’s seat… you have the idea, the vision, you know your customer… AI is a tool in your toolkit.
Launching tomorrow for free at app.youhavetime.co. Paid tiers open in a few months. Tomorrow I find out how the idea resonates.
I'm sure he's on here, if so, hello and thank you for the neat synthesizer board project o/
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'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.
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".
Sorry for the rant, I need to google what ground is.
Breadboard kits are $30~. I designed many ESP boards; it is well documented, and if I mess up something, asking Claude or ChatGPT helps because the documentation is very thorough
It boils down to chips and MOSFETs at the end. Swapping a chip on a premade design with your own idea, especially in the ESP era, is not that difficult, with AI and software testing before sending it to PCBWay.
An ESP32 can nearly meet all the computational needs of a small project, such as a keyboard. You can come up with your own version in a few days, literally. WiFi, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), RAM, disk space- all in one chip. The rest is Python (yes, Python if you don't want to learn anything else). You can build a custom board with what you need; there are countless ESP projects out there that come with board design already. Once you feel comfortable, you can switch to a more specialized chip for a specific purpose.
if anybody is interested, I want both a "both keyboard" and a "both mouse": plug them both in, they're wired, unplug them, they're wireless.
also, is there a mouse with a scrollwheel that I can set to scroll one line (of text) at a time, and is sensitive enough to do between 1 and say 20 lines at a time?
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 ...
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.
This comments sounds more like generalised anti-EU sentiment than a reply to the article.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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."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.
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.
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.