From Toaster Oven to Deck of Cards: How CisLunar Industries Turned an Internal Tool Into Their Primary Revenue Driver

From Toaster Oven to Deck of Cards: How CisLunar Industries Turned an Internal Tool Into Their Primary Revenue Driver

You’re building something ambitious. Something that requires custom components because nothing off-the-shelf will work. So you build those components yourself, get them working, and move on to the real product—the thing you’re actually trying to sell.

What if that throwaway component you built is actually more valuable than your core product?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Gary Calnan, CEO and Co-Founder of CisLunar Industries, shared how a power converter they built for their space debris recycling furnace accidentally became their primary commercial revenue driver. The discovery didn’t come from market research or product strategy—it came from a collaborator’s casual observation that changed everything.

For hardware founders grinding through development, this story reveals a pattern worth watching for: sometimes your most valuable product is hiding inside the tools you’re building to make your actual product work.

The Component Nobody Planned to Sell

CisLunar won their first NASA SBIR contract in 2021 to develop a metal recycling foundry for processing space debris. The furnace used electromagnetic induction to heat and control metal without physical contact.

They needed a power converter to drive that induction system. But nothing available would work. “Everything we went to go buy off the shelf for this project was, like, big and expensive and not really designed or ever would be designed to go to space,” Gary explains.

So they built their own. The first version was roughly the size of a toaster oven.

Then CisLunar hired an electronics engineer who happened to move to Fort Collins. Gary describes him as “a brilliant electronics engineer with experience in a variety of different things, including Tesla coils, which happens to have similar electronics to our furnace.”

That engineer took their toaster oven-sized converter and miniaturized it to the size of a deck of cards. Same power throughput—2 kilowatts—radically different form factor.

They still had no idea they’d just built their next business.

The Moment of Recognition

CisLunar took their miniaturized power converter to a collaborator at Colorado State University. They wanted to discuss the metal processing technology—that was the real product, the core vision. The power converter was just infrastructure.

The collaborator looked at their deck-of-cards-sized power system and said something that changed CisLunar’s trajectory: “You know what, guys? This thing looks a lot like a power processing unit for propulsion and for other things, too, that people need in space.”

That observation sparked a cascade of realizations. Gary explains the insight: “Everything in space, all the satellites you see, except for when you light the rocket with chemical propulsion to send it somewhere, everything else is electrical. Electricity is coming from solar panels or maybe a nuclear reactor or some battery or something. And then it’s being transformed from the state that it comes from that source…transformed into a different type of voltage and amperage and frequency to be used in another use case.”

Thrusters need power conversion. Welding systems need it. Satellite buses need it. Radio transmitters need it. The entire space industry runs on converting electrical power from one form to another, and CisLunar had just built a component with “potential applications across the entire industry.”

They’d been so focused on their furnace that they hadn’t seen the broader market sitting in their hands.

Why This Pattern Matters for Hardware Founders

CisLunar’s story reveals three principles for recognizing when internal tools have external value:

Build with exposure, not in isolation. CisLunar regularly shared their work with collaborators and experts. “We made a decision early on that we were small and we didn’t have our own pile of wealth to use to build a business. So we had to go out and tell the story and try to find partners that we could work with,” Gary explains. That openness created the conditions for the CSU collaborator to see what the team couldn’t.

If you’re building in stealth or only showing work to your immediate team, you’re missing perspectives that could spot opportunities you’re too close to see.

Maintain flexibility in component design. CisLunar didn’t optimize exclusively for their furnace. Gary’s philosophy: “We always try to approach what we’re building to maintain as much flexibility as how it could be applied as possible.”

That flexibility meant when they realized broader applications, they didn’t need to completely redesign. Build components with some generality—not so generic they don’t work well, but not so specialized they can’t adapt.

Watch for adjacent market signals. When the CSU collaborator made that observation, CisLunar could have dismissed it. But they investigated and discovered few manufacturers in the higher power segment where the industry was trending. “We see a lot of the satellite market trending towards is these larger, more capable satellites,” Gary notes.

The Commercial Reality

CisLunar’s discovery solved a brutal problem: their metal processing vision had a decade-long timeline that didn’t align with VC expectations. “One of the big challenges we’ve had with your typical investor, VC investor, is that our time horizon to get to commercial viability for metal processing is not your typical five to seven years,” Gary admits.

The power converter business changed that. “The power converter business will drive commercial sales and help us to grow the company on a commercial basis over the next few years,” Gary says.

They recently flew their power converter on a suborbital flight with Think Orbital. That successful demonstration opened commercial doors that didn’t exist when they were just building a furnace component.

What to Look For in Your Own Build

If you’re building hardware, you’re creating custom components to make your core product work. Most will remain internal infrastructure. But some might be products in disguise.

The question isn’t whether you should productize every internal tool. The question is whether you’re creating conditions to recognize when an internal tool has external value.

That means building with flexibility. Sharing your work with people outside your team. Staying alert to offhand comments from collaborators who see your technology differently. And being willing to explore adjacent opportunities even when they weren’t part of your plan.

CisLunar didn’t set out to be a power systems company. But they built their components well, shared their work openly, and stayed flexible enough that when opportunity knocked, they could answer.

What components are you building right now that someone else might need?