alt Hacker NewsI 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).
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> 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.
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
There’s a quite large community of custom mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. If you are familiar with the audiophile space they have similar spending habits.
> 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.
A lot of people picked up building mechanical keyboards as a hobby during COVID. It probably wouldn't have the same impact today.
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.
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.
It was for years pretty much the only way to have a split bluetooth keyboard, the holy grail of keyboards.
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