[Aurornis]

This is a really cool story. If the author is reading: It would be interesting to read about your experiences with marketing and building support for your products. I know you said a lot of it was luck and timing, but it would be helpful to get your thoughts on which moves you made that best took advantage of that luck and timing.

I have dozens of friends who launched group buys for small boards around this price range for different niches that never took off. Some of them even had superior products to the popular offerings, but getting traction is hard.

[Nicell]

Hey! I'm the author. I think my good timing and luck showed up mostly through my initial Reddit post garnering a ton of attention. I road that wave to the group buy. From that single Reddit post I had tons of people interested and got them to join a community Discord. Remember that this was right when covid lockdowns had started, seriously good timing for me.

I worked hard to move fast, engage, and share often on my community Discord[1]. The early messages in the announcements channel might be a good place to see how I was communicating early on. It was a pretty exciting time for me where we were all sharing ideas and figuring out how to make my initial prototype into something that all hobbyists could use. I think past that, word of mouth kept the Discord growing, and by the time I had the group buy, I didn't even post on Reddit because there were already thousands in my Discord ready to buy.

After that I worked with vendors to get it in ecommerce storefronts ASAP to not let the hype die out. Within weeks of the group buy being filled, people who had been waiting that missed it could purchase from a "standard" mech keyboard storefront. I used Reddit here to keep things going.

I really do think timing and luck was most of it, but hopefully this gives some insights to what I was doing. Building a community, sharing often, and collaborating to help turn it into an ecosystem ASAP.

[1]: https://discord.gg/HAA4Hnepf if you want to see the announcements channel

[virgil_disgr4ce]

> After that I worked with vendors to get it in ecommerce storefronts ASAP to not let the hype die out

Give yourself credit for this move, because it might seem obvious to you, but I suspect a lot of people wouldn't have bothered!

In any case, thank you for writing this up and congrats on everything :D

[kirtivr]

RE: Competing clones of your prodcut

If you could go back in time, would you still make the keyboard firmware fully opensource?

I am sure having the product open source would have helped keep the community going during the early stages.

I'm asking because I'm in a similar situation and evaluating the pros and cons of open sourcing the source code for my product.