Posted by mattrighetti 18 hours ago
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.
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
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.
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
There is a growing community of enthusiasts starting to sell ZMK powered boards from traditionally QMK based designs, so if you're interested, Etsy is where all of this is happening. MochuKeeb is a good example.
Thanks a lot for your part in the journey to modern, wireless custom keyboards Nick!
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).
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.
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.
I have 6!
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.
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.
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'.
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.
I'm sure he's on here, if so, hello and thank you for the neat synthesizer board project o/
I'm guessing he's using the fact that dev boards are excepted (as opposed to final products). Somewhat unfortunate though, as these do end up in a lot of people's boards.
The product launch was a group buy of minimum 400 units. You can choose one of "compete with China" or "expensive product testing requirements for small-run products".