[c7b]

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 connecting online than Discord).

[freetime2]

> 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.

[saghm]

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!

[Cthulhu_]

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.

[saghm]

Given the acquisition, that fits with what I'd expect. 50k individual customers probably isn't going to be making a business worth over a million dollars for a product like this (a margin of $200 per sale seems quite high), but if it's an existing company buying it with the idea that they can integrate it into their existing stuff, the math probably works out a lot more.

[notahacker]

Also, and this is the neat bit, 50k people actively looking for recommendations on online communities

[saghm]

True! "I am a user of this type of product" is a much less strong signal than "I'm going out of my way to solicit more information about what products are available for this and how to use them". This isn't the often-cited silly case of "I just bought X, and now I'm seeing ads for buying another X even though I don't need one anymore".

[heeton]

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

I have 6!

[fragmede]

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

[FinnKuhn]

Custom keyboards are really popular - especially a few years ago. Most cases/boards are wired only. I think his product enables those to be wireless too

[davkan]

There’s a quite large community of custom mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. If you are familiar with the audiophile space they have similar spending habits.

[Graziano_M]

It doesn't have to be for that, but yeah, that's the target. At the time, a lot of keyboard designs were based around the pro-micro formfactor, so this made it more-or-less a drop in replacement.

[somenameforme]

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.

[gobdovan]

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, there is no bad idea, only bad execution' and lose years of their lives pursuing something where odds are stacked against them, if there were any odds in the first place. I'd urge people instead to also hear the 2nd part of your comment, and take it as 'experiment with many niche things, there are some that land and land well'.

[somenameforme]

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.

[Klaster_1]

> 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.

[JosNun]

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

[Cool_Caribou]

It was for years pretty much the only way to have a split bluetooth keyboard, the holy grail of keyboards.

[puzzlingcaptcha]

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

[katdork]

the clones are the foundation of many slimevr smol trackers, so it does things other than just keyboards too!