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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)

#71

Post by Klaster_1 »

c7b wrote: 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…

> 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.

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

#72

Post by Hnrobert42 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55
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/

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.

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

#73

Post by Hnrobert42 »

Palomides wrote: post #12

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?

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.

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

#74

Post by foysauce »

argee wrote: post #53

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.

Yet here you are engaging with the article. In my mind, the clickbait title has done its job.

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

#75

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

c7b wrote: 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…

A lot of people picked up building mechanical keyboards as a hobby during COVID. It probably wouldn't have the same impact today.

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

#76

Post by somenameforme »

gobdovan wrote: post #43
somenameforme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#77

Post by xeyownt »

argee wrote: post #53

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.

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

#78

Post by markvdb »

notahacker wrote: post #68
markvdb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usua…

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.

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

#80

Post by MattRix »

argee wrote: post #53

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.

If it didn’t have the clickbaity title you probably would have never known the article existed.
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