No. 01 · Business · 2021–23
SalmonCat Studios
A mechanical keyboard company I co-founded. Our flagship Aozora Kit raised $231,849 in its first 30 days, 4.6× the goal, on 849 direct pre-orders.
- Role
- Co-founder
- Launch
- $231,849 / 30 days
- Orders
- 849
A mechanical-keyboard company I co-founded and ran end to end. Our product, the Aozora 69, set out to do something the custom-keyboard market said you couldn’t: deliver a highest-end finish at an entry-level price. Making that math work is the whole story.
Premium spec, half the price
Custom mechanical keyboards are an enthusiast hobby with enthusiast prices. A milled-aluminum board with a custom PCB normally ships through a group buy at $250–$500+, and the boutique makers running them all competed for the same buyers who could already pay. We chose not to play that game on its own terms.
The Aozora was a deliberate flank: match the premium spec, halve the price, and grow the market underneath the incumbents. Three decisions made that more than a slogan.
Attack the cost base, not the price tag
Every boutique maker carried a similar boutique cost structure, so they all clustered at similar prices. We competed a layer down, on cost itself. DFM, direct component sourcing, and buyer self-assembly built a structurally lower unit cost rivals couldn’t match, which let us list at roughly half and still hold ~50% margin. The low price was a symptom; the cost base was the strategy.
Grow the market, don’t fight for share
At $250–500 the hobby was gated, and every maker was competing for the same enthusiasts who could already pay. We aimed instead at the people that price excluded: newcomers and the priced-out. Bringing new buyers into the category is a far better game than a share war against entrenched names.
Win on a transparent value comparison
Milled 6061 aluminum, custom hotswap PCB, brass plate, VIA: the same spec sheet as boards costing twice as much, laid side by side. We never positioned as “cheap.” We positioned as the identical thing, honestly priced, and let buyers do the math themselves.
The spec sheet we asked buyers to compare
- Layout
- 65%-style · 69 keys
- Body
- Milled 6061 aluminum
- Mount
- Sandwich mount · 6° typing angle
- PCB
- Custom hotswap · VIA · ANSI & ISO
- Plate
- Brass or aluminum, buyer’s choice
- Badge
- Swappable cloud, brass or aluminum
The position is easy to describe and brutally hard to fund. At half price there’s no margin to waste, so the entire product had to be engineered for cost from the first sketch, and the launch had to pay for itself.
From $350 to $138 a unit
The launch price was only possible because we drove the unit cost from an opening factory quote of $350+ down to $138, a 61% reduction, without touching the spec that made the board desirable. That gap is what funded the whole company.
What one Aozora kit cost us to make
At the opening quote, every kit would have sold for less than it cost. At the shipped cost, about half of each order was margin.
SalmonCat cost and order records, 2021.
See the numbers
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Opening factory quote | $350+ |
| Shipped unit cost | $138 |
| Average launch order $273 | $273 |
| ≈ 49.5% gross margin | $135 a unit |
Five factory revisions
I co-developed the milled-aluminum tooling with the factory over five formal design-for-manufacture passes: simplifying geometry, loosening tolerances where they didn’t matter, and cutting finish steps the factory billed for. Dozens of internal CAD iterations of the top, bottom, plate and badge came before the cut.
Sourced through the shortage
We launched into the 2021 global chip shortage. Rather than pay spot-market markups that would have blown the bill of materials, I sourced the controller and the scarce PCB components directly, protecting the unit cost the whole price depended on.
Designed for self-assembly
A custom alignment mechanism let buyers assemble the board themselves. That removed a paid factory assembly step worth about $7–8 a unit, and turned the build into part of the product experience enthusiasts actually wanted.
The cost didn’t fall in one negotiation. It fell across those five revisions and a long internal CAD history, and later revisions kept improving the board after launch too, a USB-C bottom case and a flex-cut plate, without raising the price.
A launch that paid for itself
We sold the Aozora through a direct-site group buy: a pre-order run on our own storefront, not a crowdfunding platform. That wasn’t just how keyboards sell; it was the capital strategy.
Customers paid in full at order, weeks before anything was built, so the pre-orders financed the factory order. No debt, no investors, no speculative inventory: we only ever manufactured what was already sold. The group buy was the financing round and the demand test in a single 30-day window.
How the pre-orders paid for production
- 01 Build demand Interest-check threads, renders, sound tests
- 02 Open the group buy A 30-day pre-order window
- 03 Collect cash up front Paid in full at order
- 04 Place the factory order Funded by the pre-orders
- 05 Manufacture and ship Build only what has sold
~$0working capital at risk: production was paid for before it began
The window cleared the $50k goal in under a week and closed at $231,849, 4.6× target, on 849 orders at a $273 average. No marketplace fees, no platform cut: we owned the channel, the customer relationship and the data.
The 30-day group buy against its goal
- Orders
- 849
- Average order
- $273
- To clear the goal
- Under a week
SalmonCat storefront, June 2021.
See the numbers
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Goal | $50k |
| Raised | $231,849 |
| Orders | 849 |
| Average order | $273 |
| To clear the goal | Under a week |
Demand before product
Months of interest-check threads, renders, sound tests and community feedback on Reddit, Geekhack, Discord, YouTube and Instagram meant launch day opened to an audience that already wanted it. The group-buy model only works if the want is real first.
The data told us what to build
Brass plates outsold aluminum 4:1; the Hakushi white colorway broke away at 34% of orders. Owning the storefront meant we saw those signals directly and stocked to them.
What buyers chose
Plate metal: brass outsold aluminum 4:1
Colorway: Hakushi against the other four
SalmonCat orders.
See the numbers
| Question | Share | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Plate metal: brass outsold aluminum 4:1 | Brass | 80% |
| Plate metal: brass outsold aluminum 4:1 | Aluminum | 20% |
| Colorway: Hakushi against the other four | Hakushi | 34% |
| Colorway: Hakushi against the other four | Sumi, Aizome, Sakura, Fukai | 66% |
Then we had to ship it
Launch demand outran fulfillment fast. Rebuilding the pack-and-ship flow took us from about 20 to about 100 orders a day: the unglamorous half of a launch, and the half that decides whether customers come back.
Orders shipped a day
About five times the shipping rate.
See the numbers
| When | orders a day |
|---|---|
| At launch | ~20 |
| After the rebuild | ~100 |
Closing it the way we ran it
We’re winding the company down through 2026, by choice, not by failure. That was a strategic call as deliberate as the launch.
Three things pointed the same way. The custom-keyboard boom cooled after 2021–22, so a second act would have been swimming upstream. As founders we had moved on to school and careers. And SalmonCat was always scoped as a finite venture: ship one excellent board to a community we cared about, not build a forever-company. Chasing a repeat group buy to keep the lights on would have been worse business than a clean, deliberate close.
So we’re closing it the way we ran it. The plan is to open-source the Aozora’s files (PCB, plate, case CAD, build guide) under a non-commercial license, so the community can keep building, repairing and modding their boards long after support ends. A product is a promise to the people who bought it; winding one down responsibly is the last part of keeping that promise.
What it taught me
SalmonCat is the clearest proof I have of owning something commercial end to end. I didn’t analyze a business from the outside; I made the calls that decided whether it worked. The pricing position, the supplier negotiation, the launch mechanics, the fulfillment recovery: each one was a problem where the constraint was real and the money was real.
The throughline I keep coming back to is that the strategy and the engineering were the same problem. “Premium board, entry price” wasn’t a slogan. It was a unit-cost target that every CAD revision and every sourcing decision had to hit. Holding a business goal and a technical constraint in the same head, and refusing to let go of either, is the part of consulting and analysis I’m actually built for.