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I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
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Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#82I 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…
I sit here typing on my DIY split keyboard powered by 2 nice!nanos. It's worth noting that a typical wireless split keyboard (separate left and right halves) uses 2 nice!nanos, so really it's only 25k people interested. That's assuming each person only builds one split keyboard, which... All the keyboard fans I know start with one, but don't stop there :p
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#83The part that resonates with me most is the timing and luck acknowledgement. I built a solo Saas product over the past few months using Calude Code as my development partner. Total cost $600. Launching in 3 days. The tools available now means the barrier to building something has basically collapsed. A weekend in a dorm room in 2020, a few months with AI coding in 2026. Same DNA... find the gap, build the thing and ship it.
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#84This 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.
I think that’s a bit of a shame if true, on this website, with this product.
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#85Earlier 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.
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.
I understand, but from a college room in 6 months, you can learn all the basic electronics and complex schematics. 2 weeks would be enough to study all of the components; there are not many. Starting with Ohm's law and logic after that would be sufficient. People are confused because of the tiny boards made by cutting-edge companies that look like magic.
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.
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#86The 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?
IIRC, I made my first PCB around age 17 using electrical tape and a Sharpie, with Radio Shack etchant. It's not that hard.
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#87The part that resonates with me most is the timing and luck acknowledgement. I built a solo Saas product over the past few months using Calude Code as my development partner. Total cost $600. Launching in 3 days. The tools available now means the barrier to building something has basically collapsed. A weekend in a dorm room in 2020, a few months with AI coding in 2026. Same DNA... find the gap, build the thing and s…
If you don't mind sharing, what's your product? I found that ideas are a dime a dozen, but finding the people who will pay for it is the hard part. AI will more than happily suggest terrible ideas no one would pay for.
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
most of the same obligations exist in the US, OP is probably just completely noncompliant
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the product?
I can't find any references to the company online anymore. The product was a c++ interpreter (created from the founder's compiler class project) and IDE. This was before java/python/javascript/etc. The interpreter would catch errors and you could mix interpreted code and binary code. Pure software displaced it.
Very cool. Thank you
Re: I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
#90Fun read! This is a good story to share. I spent over a year building a complex SaaS product for a narrow market, but it was something I personally needed and was interested in. It was a second full-time job as a solo developer, but the chances are if you are interested in something and find it worthwhile, others will too. It's worth it! Great work. Fun story. Thanks for sharing