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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

Given the acquisition, that fits with what I'd expect. 50k individual customers probably isn't going to be making a business worth over a million dollars for a product like this (a margin of $200 per sale seems quite high), but if it's an existing company buying it with the idea that they can integrate it into their existing stuff, the math probably works out a lot more.

Also, and this is the neat bit, 50k people actively looking for recommendations on online communities

True! "I am a user of this type of product" is a much less strong signal than "I'm going out of my way to solicit more information about what products are available for this and how to use them". This isn't the often-cited silly case of "I just bought X, and now I'm seeing ads for buying another X even though I don't need one anymore".

If you like building keyboards, you’ll end up using a couple of these.

I have 6!

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