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

Reminds me of the guy (Mitch Altman) that invented the tv-b-gone, a universal remote that turns every TV off. He made a small fortune off of that and now goes around teaching people IoT and the like.

I'm sure he's on here, if so, hello and thank you for the neat synthesizer board project o/

What was the product?

Exactly the same thoughts here (I've been looking into FCC part 15 myself too). And IIRC nRF has some pre-cert stuff to avoid going through the full gauntlet.

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.

And that's why he built the product and I didn't. Some people just do it and solve for regulatory problems once they have pmf. I get lost in regulatory weeds and never get off the ground.

Not really, no.

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".

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.

For his defense, the business is really 1M$ and he really started in his dorm room. So clickbaity but factually true, unlike many other clickbaity stories out there.

Yet here you are engaging with the article. In my mind, the clickbait title has done its job.

If it didn’t have the clickbaity title you probably would have never known the article existed.

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!

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

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'.

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 usually forbids this.  It would cause the landlord significant taxation issues, so almost all rental contracts forbid this.

- Establishing the simplest allowable entity able to send invoices. Just establishing would cost ~115€, or ~134€. The article student author mentions $100 being a lot of money to them.

- Provincial tax. Most Belgian provinces have a yearly tax on the existence of any company, no matter how small or inactive. My native province's rate for example is 140€. That's ~$163 at today's rate.

- Local tax. Many local governments tax business activity separately.

- Social security.

  - Registration and exemption documents. No cost, but an added significant administrative burden to prove you are in the exempt bracket for your first ~2000€ earned.

  - Work too many hours or earn too much. Your parents risk losing your child benefits. Note that this is separate from dependent deductions. What if money is tight for them?

- Peppol electronic invoicing. If you buy or sell anything b2b, you're required to use the peppol electronic invoicing network. No self made pdf's allowed. Set up software. Pay for a subscription.

- Banking. Better get a separate bank account for your business, or you give fiscal authorities the right to start looking into your private accounts.

- Fiscal uncanny valley. Combine any regular tech job with a sole proprietorship side gig. You pay ~53.5% in income taxes and ~21% in social security contributions on the net side income, keeping about 1/3 of your net taxable income.

- VAT and administration. Have you seriously tried to sell across intra-EU borders as a student and stay compliant?

  - Hope you didn't use Amazon FBA or any 3PL partner in a different EU country.

  - I just imported a single camera module from China. It cost $49 including shipping. 21% EU import VAT and administrative handling by the national post monopoly combined cost me 35.17€, or $40.93 on top.

  - Forget about doing your first year accounts yourself. You'll make costly mistakes. The tax administration doesn't bark. It bites. Do you have the cash to outsource trimonthly VAT declarations and income tax accounting? Good luck finding someone competent under 1k€/~$1163.

- Earn over a relatively low token amount. If you're from a family with 3+ kids, your parents risk losing a 3k€+ net tax advantage. This can in some cases make for a significantly >100% taxation rate between parents and student children. What if your parents can't afford the tax increase?

- Student status. Drop below 27 ECTS points of course load and you're not a student entrepreneur anymore. You're suddenly a full-time entrepreneur, with the full load of responsibilities. Example: 3.6k€/year in social security contributions, even on zero or negative income. Where are you going to get the money?

- Physical product.

  - Belgium has some of the highest outgoing shipping rates across any courier or postal services. Good luck competing against similar initiatives, including from other EU member states.

  - Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive. It also requires your product to have accompanying notes in the language of the EU country where you sell.