After 8 years in B2B SaaS, Ryan Kulp made $200k in 5 months with his first hardware product.

Ryan Kulp has earned money doing everything from hosting bootcamps to K-pop to building — and eventually selling — a $100k MRR B2B SaaS product.

Now, he's dabbling in hardware. And his first product, TRMNL, has already brought in $200k since it launched in June.

Here's Ryan on how he does it. 👇

Being a nerd (but not a dork)

I'm a tech bro and musician. I’m a nerd (but not a dork), a hacker (but not an engineer), a marketer (but not a salesperson), and a founder (but not a CEO).

My personal income over the past six years has ranged from $3k to $90k per month, but this number doesn't correlate at all with how hard I worked or how excited I was about the work. It correlates with the value I was responsible for delivering.

I generally consider myself a boring B2B software entrepreneur. And I'm grateful for that — if you can build something that thousands (or even hundreds) of companies depend on to deliver on their own promises, you win.

But I’ve made money through a lot of different projects.

Finding a new business model

Back in 2016, I founded a social proof solution called Fomo. It began as an acquisition of a Shopify app called Notify. Fomo helped e-commerce sellers increase conversion rates and average order value (AOV) on their stores. We’d provide dashboards that demonstrate how much value we were adding, then collect a small monthly fee ($9-99) and repeat the process for thousands of merchants.

Eight years later, when we were at about $100k MRR, we sold it for seven figure. I also sold a few similar projects — some that I founded and others that I acquired as part of a “micro PE” strategy.

But eventually, I wanted to expand beyond subscription software. Beyond the internet itself. So I dabbled in hospitality, hosting dozens of up-and-coming builders at my home for coding bootcamps. Instead of paying for servers I was figuring out steak and gas budgets.

Then, I came halfway back around with TRMNL, which is a mix of one-time hardware sales (e-commerce) mixed with one-time payment software.

I’ve also created several courses on topics ranging from marketing to coding, buying online companies, and even creativity. I’ve also written a few ebooks, covering topics like fitness and even web security. Once I learn something, I share it.

And prior to all this, I lived in Korea and while there I founded a photo studio, Korean board game, and starred on a few Korean TV + radio shows.

Irons in the fire

Here’s what I’m currently working on:

Fera, president and operator (acquired Summer, 2024)

• online review platform for DTC / ecommerce sellers

• team of 11

• 45,000+ active merchants

• B2B SaaS, freemium pricing model

• 7 figures ARR

TRMNL, founder (launched Summer 2024)

• indie hardware product that helps you focus on what’s important

• team of 5

• 1,800 devices sold

• One-time payment, no subscriptions but has a web app + open source software 

• nearly $200k in sales since launching a few months ago

GetReviews, chairman and part-time developer (acquired Fall 2022)

• 230 paying customers

• review collection platform for Amazon sellers

• B2B SaaS with a mix of self-service and enterprise accounts

• $14k MRR

Hacker House, builder and host (launched Fall 2024)

• experiential glass and steel cabin for solo and small team retreats

• built with friends and our bare hands on 50 acres outside Atlanta, Georgia

• short-term rental, < $3,000 total revenue (launched last week)

• worked on this for 9 months and invested nearly $170k

My time commitment for each project changes weekly based on needs. For example, during our 30-day Kickstarter launch at TRMNL, my #1 focus was promotion and customer support. But this month we’re doing a server migration at Fera, so my priorities have naturally shifted.

Since the Hacker House construction is finally complete and GetReviews has a great CEO + developer (not me), I finally have bandwidth again for side projects. So this week I’m recording new original music at a studio in Vancouver, Canada for example.

Ideas in the shower

I came up with TRMNL while experiencing high levels of stress near the end of 2023. I couldn’t put my finger on the source, but I was aimless and lacked big hairy projects.

For several years leading up to this moment, I always had a bunch of irons in the fire, but somehow, having less to do was more stressful.

So, I actually applied to jobs — like more than 20. I had a couple of interviews. Neither was the right fit. I thought I could run away from my stress by going deep on a challenge, but it turns out I didn’t need a challenge. I needed a better environment.

One day, I was in the shower after my first (and last) failed coding interview and I had a bit of an ‘aha’ moment. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a dedicated screen that shows me the most important content, but without the ability to doom scroll or get sidetracked? That night, TRMNL was born.

Birth of a hardware idea

Within a few weeks, I reached out to a couple dozen friends to see what they thought of the idea, and most of the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. So, I made a couple of prototypes with Raspberry Pis and e-ink screens from Amazon. While basic, the device worked and could display things like the weather and my daily schedule. 

To validate the idea I did a few things. First, I made a pitch deck with 3D renders (thanks, wife!). I researched traction in the DIY e-ink and monitor space. And, of course, I did some fun copywriting riffs on what a distraction-free home office could look like for the future of remote work.

Next, I recruited a handful of engineers and marketers to help build the infrastructure for little to no cash. I consider this a form of validation because a lot of people will say, “That’s a great idea!” but asking them to work for sweat equity requires that they actually mean it.

Finally, we executed the quintessential idea validation tactic — presales. I launched TRMNL on Kickstarter for 30 days and we sold >$157,000 worth of devices. Since then, it has been an exercise in hustling to turn this idea into a physical, working product in customers’ hands.

Building the product

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve never played with hardware. Not a single microcontroller in sight. I don’t even know Python or C++ or whatever languages people use to write firmware. But my friend, Stetson, recommended a book called The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Huang and that became my bible.

My MVP was a 10-line “while” loop polling script in Ruby that could be installed on a fresh RPi via micro SD. I pointed it to an API-only Rails web server that generated e-ink-friendly images and returned their absolute URLs inside a JSON response to the device (client).

Next, I bought a 3D printer and began dabbling in modeling and case design. My beginner skills quickly caught up to me, however, so I found and hired an awesome industrial designer on an hourly basis. To upgrade the hardware itself I also found an incredible electrical engineer.

These two guys took over all my crappy progress and turned the idea into a real product. This gave me the opportunity to focus on what I know best: Ruby on Rails and marketing.

Over the next few months, a group of developer friends helped me create a beautiful web application, open-source firmware, and 50 native plugins. We had several stretch goals including the ability to mash up content and build 3rd party integrations, all of which we shipped months ahead of schedule before the end of our crowdfunding campaign. 

It was an electric summer, bookended by a team retreat at my house — a tiny [tiny] thank you for believing in our vision for so many months, and for so little cash compensation. All of this hard work paid off when we sold over $50k worth of devices within the first 24 hours of our launch.

Shipping (in the literal sense)

In mid-October, we started getting the product into the hands of customers. We’re assembling and shipping devices on a daily basis until all pre-orders are fulfilled, then the real work begins: Ongoing customer satisfaction, open sourcing more of our platform, and developing a v2 device. Because why not?

To support myself during the ~7 months we spent building TRMNL in stealth, I mostly lived off savings but also did some software consulting. I built a few MVPs for X followers, hosted two coding bootcamps at my home, and was lucky enough to earn occasional distributions from previous investments.

Just ~45 days after launching TRMNL we did our first profit distribution, which felt great.

Hardware is hard

An ongoing challenge with TRMNL has been the need to innovate ‘backwards’ with our technology. What I mean by that is the constraint of working with old-school, moderate-resolution e-ink technology in the age of 4K. From our font selection to disabling anti-aliasing at the server level, we’ve had a lot of adventures in making brand new tech ‘dumber’ to play nicely with older paradigms.

And hardware is hard in general. I’m still figuring out how to optimize cash flow for an inventory-based business. I'm considering working with investors in the future to scale this part of the operation.

And I didn’t realize how much of a role logistics would play in our business decisions and budgeting. For example, we had a high-fidelity prototype with a custom PCB, enclosure, and software + firmware within 45 days of starting the company. That was February, 2024. Yet we didn’t launch on Kickstarter until the end of June.

Why? Because it takes 30 days for a product sample to arrive by boat. Then a couple weeks for iterations to your injection mold, or to negotiate with a supplier. So much waiting, so little control.

Getting involved in hardware has made me extra grateful for the opportunities in software. To have an idea and build it on your couch — without permission, without funding, without delay.

Succeeding on Kickstarter

Every project is different. I see a lot of chatter about people who know SEO, so they try to use content to grow every company they join. Or people who love pay-per-click advertising, so they do that. This is called having a hammer and treating everything like a nail.

I try to be more prescriptive when planning growth strategies for each of my companies.

Sometimes pure word of mouth outperforms any other tactics I try. Sometimes ranking in organic search is the best bet. And, of course, in some projects, my own brand does most of the selling. This applies especially to courses, lectures, and niche side projects I ship on a regular basis.

With TRMNL, I was surprised to see how effective social media advertising could be with the right target audiences.

Prior to going live on Kickstarter, we launched a “coming soon” landing page in collaboration with a crowdfunding-specialized marketing agency. This was my first time working with an agency, as I’m usually the marketer for my projects. But this was also one of our best decisions at TRMNL, because they were able to dial in audiences, attribution, copy, and creatives within a matter of days.

That pre-launch landing page attracted nearly 2,000 leads (email/phone), which were critical to launch day success and, thus, getting included in Kickstarter’s organic discovery algorithms. We also earned the “Project We Love” badge which garnered even more attention for our vision.

Ultimately, the work was all in the prep: Great photos, obsessing over copywriting, and having an audience primed for launch. The 30-day launch itself was mostly an inbound experience. We didn't really "do" marketing after launch day, we just tried to keep up with inbound demand.

Micro acquisitions

So that's what I'm doing with hardware. But my highest ROI strategy has been micro PE. In fact, I actually helped popularize that term (“micro acquisitions”) when I launched a course on the subject back in 2019.

Here's my strategy:

1. Find founder-led, niche products that are usually solo and technical. There should be no VC-backed competition.

2. Make the product look great (hire designers).

3. Survey customers and re-prioritize the feature backlog.

4. Relaunch — something we call "going (back) to market." This can be a mix of sharing in newsletters, sponsoring creators, trying paid advertising, and other top-of-funnel tactics.

Ignorance is a superpower

One of my goals in life is to remain as ignorant as possible. That said, I’m also a learning machine. So the trick is learning the right things.

I don’t look up useless trivia about pop culture, dates, people, or places. But I do read API docs and Rails release notes. These are domains I need to know about. The rest is just a party trick.

My morning routine consists of an iced americano, Quest protein bar, and a non-fiction book. I’ve done this every day for ~8 years and this habit gets all the credit for my judgment, my ideas, my motivation to push harder, and hopefully my ability to encourage others.

A few of my favorite books that are particularly relevant to indie hackers:

• High Output Management by Andy Grove

• Blue Ocean Strategy by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim

• Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb

These are already on a ton of bestseller lists. They’re not hidden gems. They’ve been read a million times. But synthesizing their concepts into action is very rare. And I don’t think we have the space to do that sufficiently if we fill our brain with useless facts.

Is Tom Cruise 5’3” or 5’7” tall? I have no idea, because it doesn’t matter. 

Ignoring things is one of my superpowers.

How to start

Cut costs and prioritize learning over earning. But also learn quickly.

Your perpetual goal is to develop judgment and observe killer insights that nobody else seems to notice.

Find one customer, five customers, ten customers with that near-secret information.

To get the gears turning just repeat after me: "Someone out there is willing to pay for what I take for granted."

Once you're in the building stage, at some point your marketing tactics should be outperformed by referrals, either explicit (word of mouth) or implicit (you are making a ruckus – Godin).

It is my position that the goal of marketing is to stop doing marketing as soon as possible.

And one other thing: You have to find your purpose. I think mine is to destroy evil. And I’m still figuring out how to connect that to Ruby on Rails.

If you don’t at least try to follow your purpose, you’ll become that vapid, successful indie hacker who you are jealous of today.

What's next

I have significant equity in three different companies right now and would like to exit these positions within the next couple of years. I’d like to pivot to starting a family and doing more things with my hands, from woodworking to hospitality.

Maybe these goals are silly and maybe the timeline is unrealistic. But with a healthy mind, healthy body, good friends, and unlimited ideas (via my home library), I at least have to try. 

Will report back on results!

• Blog - https://ryanckulp.com

• Offensive Ideas - https://x.com/ryanckulp

• Increase Focus - https://usetrmnl.com