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I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)

nick.winans.io

31–40 of 98 posts

Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)

#31
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 ...

Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)

#32
post #3

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.

What was the product?

viaweb, adobe, microstrategy

Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)

#34
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.

Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)

#35
post #8

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 connecti…

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.

Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)

#39
post #38

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.
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