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.

What to notice is that this wasn't really a startup idea at first but it was someone noticing that commercial wireless keyboards had solved a problem that the DIY ecosystem had not; a number of successful products seem to be from bringing an existing capability into a community that need it.

I switched to ZMK circa 2024, and never looked back at QMK. I am the proud owner of a Corne wireless from typeractive, and it's such a beautiful product. The nice!nano are also a welcome addition.

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!

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).

In the late 80s, a friend turned his comsci class project into a product. The company was making about $25m. It died due to a patent dispute. He later started a dot com that is still very successful.

Really cool to see. I was one of the first 1000 customers, making sure I wouldn't miss the group buy from the other side of the world. Probably the first and last group buy I will ever participate in. But at that time it was an extremely important product for an extremely small group of potential customers.

For anyone out of the loop: Custom mechanical keyboard firmware/hardware have been the embedded hobby product of choice for a few years. It's a bit like sneakers, mechanical keyboards in general, etc. Or like the test-pattern boats makers create using 3d printers. If someone goes on an OSS embedded space and asks "What should I make to learn", the answer will probably be "a keyboard". My point is: This has a bigger market than you might think!

neat product, but where's the FCC ID for an intentional radiator on it? your million dollar product can afford the legally required testing, right?

Hey, i have been using nice nano for couple of years now. It’s absolutely kickass piece of hardware. I love the battery efficiency, the project maturity, and most of all the bluetooth on nicenano is blazing fast and it just works.

The question I have is, what were you exposed to and doing at ages 5, 10, and 15 that made you capable of developing a PCB in your freshman year of college?

Wow, sometimes it can be as simple as "make something people want."

This is such an awful title for this that I almost passed over this story despite being a nano/view customer who has built several keyboards myself. What a strange thing, in the effort to appeal to a wider audience with a clickbaity title you lose signal to the readers who would perhaps be most interested.

Hey cool, I have two of these for a split keyboard. Working great! I am glad the business side seems to have done well, I usually assume these kinds of projects are passion projects that don't always make ends meet.

What a fantastic and actually uplifting story!

It's always so cool for a DIY project to become a product to be born out of someone curiosity to make something better. Great work! I would be interested in reading on how you became one of the largest split keyboard stores if you ever plan on making a post about that.

Very awesome. I think what made this work was it being a very small device that the end user has to understand well.

I tried to design a phone that could fit in a wallet and quickly realized this was beyond anything I could do without millions of funding.

Maybe one day ...

Congratulations and hat tip to you sir! You must have executed incredibly well.

I have to admit I'm a little bit jealous of an environment so conductive to starting a small business. I can see many hurdles in this small EU country to something like this succeeding. The burdens of administration and regulation and the fractured market would make this tricky to pull off. The high taxation also makes one question the wisdom of taking this kind of risk. That's not just a direct brake. All of this also creates a very different attitude, a culture less tuned to entrepreneurship.

That's a really great story, but an awful title

What a nice story. Inspiring.

Love these and the nice!view, used them in every keyboard I built!

This is actually very cool - can definitely see why it's been as successful as it has. Congrats on 50k!

Great work! And hello from the UPL :)

That's impressive. Curious, did you face any unexpected challenges in scaling from a dorm room setup? Always wondered how people manage that leap.

Hah as a satified customer this is really heartwarming to see

Great story. Wish you hadn’t done the bait and switch with the title.

Congratulations! This is a great achievement.

This is cool, but honestly, I find it hard to believe that 50,000 units were sold.

> both of these new boards that popped up are advertised as nice!nanos and are shipped with the exact same firmware I use on the nice!nano, so when someone plugs it in, it says it’s a nice!nano.

Trademark dispute is the way to go. Since there were no stories about an onerous amount of returns of clones to the author, probably not worth it, but returns of clones is why it financially makes sense and not just to enrich lawyers.