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

nick.winans.io

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

#51

Post by stanac »

protocolture wrote: post #47
Topology1 wrote: post #25

This is cool, but honestly, I find it hard to believe that 50,000 units were sold.

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.

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

#52

Post by markvdb »

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.

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

#53

Post by argee »

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.

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

#54

Post by Cthulhu_ »

markvdb wrote: post #52

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 wi…

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.

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

#55

Post by Cthulhu_ »

swframe2 wrote: 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.

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/

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

#56

Post by Cthulhu_ »

saghm wrote: post #17
freetime2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#57

Post by orhansavash »

fragmede wrote: post #26
freetime2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It blew my mind how much $1 million is too niche and not a lot of money the first time I heard that.

[flagged]

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

#58

Post by bobsmooth »

protocolture wrote: post #46
system2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#59

Post by tiborsaas »

system2 wrote: post #39
qq66 wrote: 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.

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.

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

#60

Post by heeton »

saghm wrote: post #17
freetime2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

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

I have 6!

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