We all have passions, but it takes courage and confidence to turn our hobbies and extracurricular pursuits into careers. Caleb Chandra had a stable job as a teacher, but five years ago, he packed up his textbooks and launched Monokei, a business that designs and sells mechanical keyboards.
I also met many like-minded designers online and realised I could bring their ideas to life and pay the bills at the same time. After a few years of trial and error, I decided to make the jump to entrepreneurship. HOW BIG IS THE MECHANICAL KEYBOARD MARKET? AND WHO ARE THE MAIN CUSTOMERS? IS IT WRONG TO ASSUME THAT IT IS MOSTLY GAMERS AND ENGINEERS?
This is an interesting question, because we're actually selling both types of keyboards at the moment, both keyboard kits and our latest offering, a pre-built called the Monokei Standard. Monokei keyboards are known for our attention to detail, which can be ignored by other companies targeting the mass market. We feel that our experience creating boutique custom keyboard kits helps us to deliver the same grade experience for our prebuilt keyboards.I don't think there's a way to immediately determine a good mechanical keyboard from a not so good one. It's a little bit like cars – one can look extremely good from the outside but perform terribly on the road.