At Minute
Nils Madison spent years at Apple's exploratory design group, working on prototypes for future hardware products—including early iterations on the original iPhone. But by 2013, despite the prestige, he felt the pull to build something of his own. "I'm from Sweden originally and we don't have a very strong entrepreneurship culture," he explained. His time in San Francisco had infected him with startup ambition. When visa constraints forced him back to Sweden, rather than returning to corporate life, he made the leap: he'd start a company in Malmö.
The insight was elegant: people want to monitor their homes for security and peace of mind, but cameras feel invasive. What if you could get the same insight from sound and environmental data—breaking glass, smoke alarms, window pressure changes—processed entirely on-device with zero privacy leakage? No voice recordings sent to the cloud. No data collection. Just metadata.
Nils didn't have a customer base or distribution channel. So he did what smart hardware founders do: he went to Kickstarter to validate the market before committing to mass production. The bet paid off. "One of the people who watched the video and it purchased the product. And with knowing that number, you can feel pretty certain that you know, whatever resources you put into taking the product from a concept stage to to the real thing and you can sell it later." They hit 7% conversion on video views—a strong signal.
The Kickstarter campaign raised $250,000. Combined with $300,000 in angel funding (from sources including Hampus Jacobson, who'd sold his company to Blackberry for $150M, and Sean O'Sullivan, the VC credited with coining "cloud computing"), Nils had runway.
By the time of this interview, At Minute had sold 4,000 units at $99 each. They were shipping about 100 per day as they worked through fulfillment and early product refinement. Nils was deliberately moving slowly—not pushing hard on sales yet, but learning from the first cohort of users and fixing bugs. With an eight-person team and plans to bridge into 2016 before a larger funding round, the company was in the classic hardware sweet spot: enough validation to build the real product, small enough volumes to stay lean and agile.
- •The founder's deep hardware expertise from Apple gave him credibility to design a technically sophisticated solution that solved a real privacy concern others overlooked.
- •Kickstarter served as both a validation mechanism and customer acquisition channel, allowing the team to measure demand (7% conversion) before committing to expensive manufacturing.
- •The one-time pricing model aligned with hardware economics and reduced customer acquisition friction compared to subscription models, making early adoption easier.
- •Solving his own pain point—wanting home monitoring without privacy invasion—ensured the product addressed a genuine need rather than a hypothetical market.
- •Angel funding from operators with hardware/acquisition experience (Hampus Jacobson, Sean O'Sullivan) provided both capital and strategic guidance for navigating manufacturing and growth.
- 1.If you have deep technical expertise in your category, lead with that credibility in your founding narrative and use it to identify an under-served angle (privacy in monitoring, rather than just monitoring itself).
- 2.Launch on Kickstarter with a clear video demonstrating your solution, then use conversion rate (7%+ is strong) as a quantified signal to justify raising institutional capital and committing to manufacturing.
- 3.Price your hardware product as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription to reduce friction on first-time buyers, then optimize manufacturing and fulfillment with early cohort feedback before scaling sales.
- 4.Deliberately constrain initial sales velocity (100 units/day vs. maximum capacity) to prioritize product refinement and user learning, which compounds into better retention and word-of-mouth.
- 5.Recruit angel investors who have successfully exited hardware or acquired companies, so they can provide operational guidance beyond capital during the manufacturing and early scaling phase.
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