# How I turned my Anki side project into a Kickstarter: A Walkthrough

DevFeed: [How I turned my Anki side project into a Kickstarter: A Walkthrough](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-i-turned-my-anki-side-project-into-a-kickstarter-a-walkthrough-27921.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-project-to-kickstarter-a-walkthrough.html>)

Published: 2026-01-30T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Romes' Musings](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/romes-musings.md>)

Topics: [Learning](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/learning.md>)

Tags: [kickstarter](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kickstarter.md>), [project](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/project.md>), [side-project](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/side-project.md>)

## AI overview

A personal walkthrough of developing Kanjideck from an Anki side project into a physical product and launching it on Kickstarter. It covers manufacturing and testing, company formation, accounting, pricing, digital infrastructure, marketing, burnout, and seeking help as a solo entrepreneur.

## Source excerpt

Contents 1 The initial idea (August 2024) 1.1 What if ? 2 Manufacturing physical cards (September 2024) 3 Starting a Company in the U.S. (October 2024) 3.1 Accounting and Taxes 4 Spreadsheets and Pricing (November 2024) 5 Digital Infrastructure (December 2024) 6 Marketing and Ads (January 2025) 7 Burn-out (March 2025) 8 Reaching out for help (October 2025) 9 Launching on Kickstarter (January 2026) 9.1 Murphy's Law 10 Conclusion I think this is my first non-Haskell related post on this blog! This time, I want to walk through how I successfully launched Kanjideck on Kickstarter starting from zero, in my spare time. I want to go over the initial side project, how that turned into a more ambitious idea, manufacturing and testing a physical product, setting up a company, spreadsheets, setting up the digital infrastructure for the business, marketing and ads, burn-out, launching, and reaching out for help as a solo entrepreneur. 1 The initial idea (August 2024) In the summer of 2024, with nothing to do after having finished reading "Babel" by R. F. Kuang (a book which happened to be about language and etymology and that I thoroughly enjoyed), I decided to get back to learning Japanese. Japanese is a challenging language to learn (at least in the West). Mostly, that's due to Kanji, one of the three types of characters used in written Japanese. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic scripts, where to each symbol corresponds exactly one sound, and there are about 50 of each (these can be learnt in about a week). On the other hand, there are about 2,136 Kanji needed for fluency1. Each Kanji is a (potentially complex) symbol with one or more readings and one or more meanings. Anyway, that means there are a lot of Kanji to memorize. I'm a big fan of spaced repetition and Anki. If you don't know about spaced repetition, see "How to Remember Anything Forever-ish". I had tried to study Kanji seriously in the past, but the resources I was using at the time, despite using them consisten