This is the story of a guy who found a niche and stuck with it. The guy is a programmer named Nick who was worried about Apple’s wireless AirPods. He thought they looked stupid.
“I didn’t have particularly high hopes when Apple first announced AirPods. I figured they would sound like their wired EarPods, which are fine but not particularly impressive. I was blown away when I first tried a pair of AirPods. Obviously, they can’t compete with a really nice set of over/on-ear headphones, but they’re astonishing when you take their form factor into consideration,” he said.
Convinced that the product had legs, he looked at them more closely and began reading Apple forums. He confirmed his hunch: people didn’t want to look like Ben Stiller in that one scene[1] in Something About Mary and, sadly, white wireless earbuds hanging out of your ears looked goofy.
He decided to do something about it. He invented Blackpods[2].
“After the announcement, there was a lot of chatter in the Apple ecosystem about how they looked (which I agree is a bit silly in their natural white color). The opportunity to create a more stylish, less obtrusive version that matches some of the other iPhone colors seemed obvious.”
Nick bought a few pairs of AirPods and began the long, laborious process of figuring out how to paint them. After a bit of testing he figured it out and commercialized the process.
“There are very few flat surfaces, optical sensors, and multiple acoustic openings (all of which are tiny, requiring millimeter precision). Coming up with a masking process that was not prohibitively expensive or time consuming was a huge challenge, but people seem to be...
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