I Made a Million Dollar Product from My Dorm Room - Nick Winans
I Made a Million Dollar Product from My Dorm Room<br>2025-03-23 This post shares the story of the nice!nano; a wireless, Pro Micro-compatible microcontroller board I made in my freshman year of college. The nice!nano powers tens of thousands of keyboards, has inspired many, and changed my life.
Over my first winter break in college, I created what I called the Dissatisfaction65, a wireless 65% keyboard inspired by the Satisfaction75. I don’t remember exactly why, but I wanted to try making a DIY wireless keyboard after having made a few wired ones. The Adafruit 32u4 Bluefruit LE microcontroller was used to accomplish wireless since the open-source QMK keyboard firmware supported Bluetooth with this specific board. The project looked great in the end, but its performance was awful. The typing latency was nearly unusable, and it only lasted a few days on battery even with a huge battery inside.
Seeing all the low-latency, long battery-life wireless products from companies like Logitech and Apple, I knew that something better was possible. In the next two months I dove into the world of wireless microcontrollers and DIY keyboards. I quickly learned that Nordic microchips were the hobbyist’s choice and the Pro Micro format reigned as king for DIY keyboards. In my search I discovered three microcontrollers trying to fill the gap between the two: the BlueMicro, the nRFMicro, and the BLE-Micro-Pro.1
BoardRetail CostForm FactorOpen SourceBlueMicroN/AToo LargeYesnRFMicroN/AYesYesBLE-Micro-Pro~$40YesNo<br>The BlueMicro’s form factor meant that I couldn’t build most Pro Micro keyboards since it would interfere. The BLE-Micro-Pro was pretty expensive, locked down, and only sold in Japan. The nRFMicro was pretty close. At first, I decided to modify the nRFMicro to fit my needs, but I soon realized my goals were a bit too ambitious, so I restarted from scratch.
The nice!nano was born#
The weekend (yes, the whole thing was designed in a weekend) I created the nice!nano, I don’t think I left my desk for more than sleeping and getting food from the dining hall maybe three times. It was just me, KiCad, Nordic’s Infocenter2, nRFMicro wiki, and the Adafruit nRF52840 Feather schematic. I put together the schematic and BOM, laid out the PCB, and routed (and re-routed) the connections. On the other side I came out with the thinnest Pro Micro compatible nRF52840 based board.
Over the next week I created a name and found my PCB assembler. The name is based on my online username, “Nicell”. I wanted to continue the spirit of metric naming of the Pro Micro and came up with “nice!nano”. The stylized lower-case pixel font mark was created to sit atop the antenna. After reaching out to a few assemblers, the cheapest option for producing five was about $100. That was a lot to spend on what could’ve easily been a broken design, but after a few days of meticulously re-reviewing my designs, I paid.3
A few weeks later the boards showed up at my door. I was both ecstatic and terrified they wouldn’t work. As I plugged in my first one I closed my eyes, tensed up, and peeked. To my surprise and relief, they worked! Over the next couple of weeks I built a Lily58 with them and got a modified version of QMK working on it. In my testing I found the board could last a few weeks on a 110mAh battery. When comparing to the Dissatisfaction65 that lasted a few days on a 2,500mAh battery, we were looking at over a 100x improvement in power efficiency. I was elated, and I posted my fully wireless Lily58 on Reddit and it got quite a bit of interest.
Over the next few weeks my tiny Discord grew into a sizable community focused on wireless keyboard innovation. I launched an interest check for a group buy, made a few more refinements of the nice!nano, and then I was ready to launch the group buy in mid June.
Group buys are awful#
As a college student, I didn’t have the money to bank roll a purchase of 1,000 nice!nanos, so I ran a group buy pre-purchase. At the time I had set a minimum purchase amount of 200 pieces for the order to go through and a maximum of 1,000 because I didn’t think I could handle more than that. I set the end date for a month later. In the end, it wasn’t even open for a day.
The sale went live on June 20th at 11am central. Within the first few minutes I had met my minimum purchase amount. I remember sitting in my childhood bedroom (thanks covid) on the Shopify dashboard watching orders pour in. It was an incredible feeling. Within just seven hours all 1,000 nice!nanos had been sold, ending the group buy. In the next two months I got all the product in and shipped out the 400+ unique orders with the help of my family.
My mom posted about the fulfillment process on Facebook. It was a family effort!
With the success of the group buy, you might wonder, what’s so awful? Well, it was extremely stressful holding on to so many people’s money without a physical product to back...