How I made my first sale (a $179 pre-order) of a server administration device

This morning, I made the first sale of my new product!

A customer from my pre-sale interest list placed a $179 pre-order through Stripe.

It's actually the first time I've ever sold anything in a pre-sale, so I'm very excited.

Backstory

For the past few years, I've kept a homemade server in my office. I use a separate VM for each of my projects, so I built my own VM server to host the 8-15 VMs I have running at all times. I manage it through SSH or a web interface, so the server has no keyboard or monitor attached.

The problem was that anytime the server failed to boot, I'd have to drag it over to my desk, disconnect my main computer, attach the server to my keyboard+monitor, debug it, then put everything back. It's fairly tedious, and I wanted a way to be able to manage my server remotely even if it failed to boot. I also wanted a way to reinstall the OS or modify BIOS settings without having to attach a physical keyboard and monitor.

My Product

I created a device called KVM Pi that captures video output from a computer and displays it in a browser window. KVM Pi can also emulate a keyboard, allowing you to send keystrokes to a machine through the browser as if there were a real keyboard attached.

It's a little bit like remote desktop / VNC, except that the target machine doesn't need any software installed — it doesn't even need network connectivity. Because KVM Pi interacts with the target machine at the hardware level, you can manage the target even when it's in BIOS or during a reboot.

• Rebooting a server to begin an OS install
• Managing a laptop
• Video latency test

The road to my first sale

I wasn't sure if there would be a market for this, but I had the benefit of wanting to build it for myself regardless. That meant that I could build first and find customers later. Here's how I found my first customer.

1. I wrote a blog post that shared my progress in building KVM Pi (when only the keyboard part worked)
2. Shared the blog post on Raspberry Pi forums / subreddits. The post got a decent but not huge reaction, the biggest being a writeup in Tom's Hardware, a popular tech blog.
3. Created an "interested buyer" mailing list and linked to it from my blog post (I've since replaced it with a link to my sales page). I got 11 subscribers this way.
4. Shared progress with my subscribers and sent a Google Forms survey to gauge interest and price preferences
5. Five of my 11 subscribers responded to the survey, and 60% (3 people) said they were happy with the $180 price I had in mind.
6. Created a sales page with photos and demo videos.
7. (today) Announced the pre-sale to my subscribers.

Next steps

• Finish writing KVM Pi's software and documentation.
• Write a new blog post about the process of building KVM Pi.
• Share blog post with relevant subreddits (/r/raspberry_pi, /r/homelab) and Rasbperry Pi forums.
• Make YouTube videos of interesting use cases for KVM Pi (e.g., you can use KVM Pi to manage a regular Raspberry Pi that has no network connection).

Questions and feedback welcome!