Building the LIT DUO 1: From Physics to Light Meters, Kickstarter Strategy & Building in Europe – Focus Check ep112

by Felix TappeinerApril 16^th, 2026

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In this week’s episode of Focus Check, Johnnie sits down with Marko Pirc, founder of LIT Systems and the creator of the LIT DUO 1 light meter. It is a rare, candid conversation about what it really takes to build a professional hardware product from scratch in Europe: the failures, the crowdfunding mechanics, the supply chain reality, and the product decisions that led to one of the most distinctive instruments the cinema lighting world has seen in years.

Sponsor of this episode is NANLITE. Check out the section at 31:55

First off: We are aware this is an unusual week to publish an “evergreen epsiode”, given the huge amount of news coming out ahead of NAB. Truth is that we are about to fly out to Vegas, and with some of the team out (shooting / paternity leave), we couldn’t produce a news episode this week. But that means that next week – Focus Check from NAB – will be even more interesting! Nevertheless, this episode with Marko Pirc, the maker of the LIT DUO 1 light meter, ROCKS. So give it a watch/listen, and let us know below what you think!

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A childhood spent taking things apart

(01:15 in the episode)

Marko grew up in a village of seven houses in Slovenia, the only child of factory workers. With no siblings and plenty of time, he channeled his curiosity into dismantling toys – not to break them, but to understand how they worked. A family trip to Stuttgart introduced him to the German RC model brand Graupner, and from that moment, radio-controlled aircraft became a decade-long obsession that shaped his engineering instincts for life.

By his mid-teens, Marko had competed in the World Space Modeling Championship in Baikonur, Kazakhstan – arriving by military cargo plane, seated on wooden chairs, with military-issued visas. He also obtained a glider pilot license at 16, which he noted with amusement is something countries allow before you can drive a car.

Physics, underwater snoots, and the first company

(08:35 in the episode)

Choosing his university path, Marko was challenged by his physics professor with a remark that mechanical engineers were simply physicists who weren’t sharp enough for high-end mathematics. That was enough. He enrolled in physics – not because he had a plan, but because he was drawn to the hardest challenge available.

During his studies, he co-created an underwater snoot for a Slovenian photographer competing in the underwater photography World Championship in Korea. The custom light-shaping tool helped the photographer win second place – the best result any Slovenian had ever achieved in the discipline. Orders from fellow competitors followed immediately. A company was born, though Marko never took formal ownership, staying focused on finishing his academic path. That company still operates today, producing world-class underwater strobes.

The Sekonic article that changed everything

(15:07 in the episode)

Still a student, Marko was also shooting commercially on the side when he came across an article – possibly reposted by PetaPixel or DPReview – originally published by Sekonic. The headline argued something along the lines of five reasons why a smartphone accessory could never replace a professional light meter.

For Marko, it landed like a starting gun. He saw it as the reasoning of an industry that simply didn’t understand where technology was heading. He got on his bicycle, found his university friends in the city centre, and announced what they were going to build next. The result was the Lumo – a small probe that plugged into the headphone jack of an iPhone 4, harvested power from the audio signal, and used that to run a digital light sensor. The first smartphone light meter was launched in 2013–2014.

Kickstarter: what nobody tells you

(20:24 in the episode)

Lumo was crowdfunded – and so was every product Marko built after it. His account of running Kickstarter campaigns is one of the most practical breakdowns of hardware crowdfunding you’ll hear from a founder who has done it multiple times.

The core insight: Kickstarter does not bring you customers. It is a payment processor and a hosting platform. The traffic, the anticipation, the email list – all of that has to be built before you press launch. In the first 60 seconds after launching the LIT DUO 1 campaign, the team made 100,000 euros. In the first ten minutes, they had 200,000. That was the direct result of 15,000 subscribers built over months through four euros per day in Meta ads – a rate Marko discovered was the sweet spot for a niche product with a limited total addressable audience.

He also walks through a practical email delivery problem: when you have 15,000 subscribers from a web form, how do you actually reach them without landing in spam? His solution was Google Groups – adding subscribers and sending the launch announcement as a group message, which bypassed spam filters and promotional tabs far more reliably than standard email marketing tools.

The LIT DUO 1 campaign closed with around 3,000 units. With the Kickstarter Late Pledge option left open until shipping began, a further thousand-plus devices came in. Total shipped to date: approximately 3,500–3,700 units at roughly €600 each.

And yet – after every campaign, Marko says he swore never to run a Kickstarter again. The overhead is immense. Running the campaign is a parallel project to the actual product development, requiring press outreach, community management, and constant attention. His conclusion: crowdfunding is best used not to scale a company, but to validate and fund the very first version of a product – without giving away equity.

Lit Flash, Profoto, and Stockholm

(35:07 in the episode)

Between the Lumo and the LIT DUO 1, Marko built Lit Flash – a 26-watt-second handheld Bluetooth Xenon strobe that connected to an iPhone and enabled flash sync at any shutter speed, including HSS. The project was patented and launched on Kickstarter in 2019, but it was not commercially successful. What it did do was put Marko in contact with Profoto, the Swedish professional lighting brand, who were exploring smartphone-native photography tools at the same time.

By September 2019, Marko had moved to Stockholm and was working at Profoto. Over the years, he accumulated responsibilities across smartphone integration, app development, firmware, TTL algorithm design for smartphones, quality assurance, and eventually hardware product management. He describes the company as feeling like a startup despite its 100 to 150-person headcount, with the flat hierarchy typical of Swedish corporate culture.

The patent from Lit Flash was eventually transferred to Profoto. Marko is pragmatic on patents in general: for a small company without the resources to pursue legal action, a patent mostly reveals how something works without providing real protection. His advice is to only patent what you can afford to defend.

Building the LIT DUO 1 with no money and a 5 am alarm

(58:52 in the episode)

The LIT DUO 1 began as a hobby project – industrial design sketches done in Figma and Sketch in the hours before his Profoto workday began. The core question Marko kept asking himself: if there were no constraints at all, what light meter would I build?

The technical inflection point was a sensor. In 2023, AMS Osram – an Austrian-German semiconductor company – released a multi-channel, multi-spectral sensor on a single chip. No complex mechanical assembly, robust, low-cost, no aging drift. When Marko saw it, he knew the product was now feasible. He also knew – and resented knowing – that he wasn’t going to walk away from it.

He raised a one-page landing site with a subscription box, ran 200 euros of Instagram ads at five euros a day, and gained 5,000 subscribers in a month. The media picked it up. There was nothing built. It was a sketch and a concept. But the demand was real.

With around 40–50,000 euros of personal savings and a loan, Marko assembled a small team of freelance engineers from his previous life in Slovenia and offered each of them a below-market rate with a commitment to pay the difference if the campaign succeeded. All of them said yes.

Why the LIT DUO 1 is a remarkable product

(01:01:08 in the episode)

The LIT DUO 1 packs five instruments into one pocket-sized, CNC-milled aluminum body: color meter, exposure meter, illuminance meter, spectrum analyzer, and flicker meter. At approximately €600, it competes with products that cost multiples of that – Sekonic’s color meters start at €1,500 and above.

The UI was designed entirely by Marko, informed by informal user testing with gaffers and DOPs using printed PDFs of the interface before a single line of firmware was written. The result is a device Johnny describes as having build quality that made him hesitant to show it to his children in case they mistook it for a Game Boy.

The flicker measurement capability stands out. Using the device’s spectral sensor and an algorithm developed partly with the help of ChatGPT, the LIT DUO 1 can calculate exactly which shutter angles and frame rates to use to avoid flicker artifacts entirely – a feature that some users purchase the device for exclusively. Marko notes it could justify a standalone product at this price point on its own.

Durability is a genuine differentiator. The design philosophy – minimizing assembly parts, integrating springs directly into button structures, using snap-fit diffusers with no screws or glue – translates to a fault return rate of approximately 0.03%. The diffusers require extremely tight production tolerances but contain zero adhesives and zero fasteners. They simply click in.

Manufacturing in Europe – a deliberate choice

(01:08:37 in the episode)

The LIT DUO 1 is designed in Sweden and assembled in Lithuania, the result of an 80-plus-candidate global manufacturing search. The Lithuanian partner came close enough to Asian pricing to make the European option viable. Critically, Marko can be on-site within a few hours when something needs fixing – he visited the facility around 13 times in a recent six-month period.

He also notes a broader trend: European consumer electronics brands have been actively near-shoring for the past five years, and Asian manufacturers are opening production plants inside Europe – in Slovakia, Poland, and Spain in particular. The knowledge and supply chain infrastructure is being rebuilt.

On the supply chain pressures of today, Marko is frank. Tariff uncertainty and the reallocation of chip manufacturing capacity toward AI are pushing MCU prices up and delivery times out. As a young company without an established credit score, LIT must prepay all purchase orders before components are even sourced – a cash flow constraint that means their bank account is effectively empty at all times, because every available euro is immediately deployed into the next production batch.

What’s next – firmware 2.1, third-party apps, and games

(01:11:42 in the episode)

A significant firmware update is on the way, including full remote control of the LIT DUO 1 via Android, iPhone, and Mac, and a collaboration with a third-party app that Marko says will excite anyone working in commercial video or film production. The update also introduces contrast and color difference measurement between multiple points – a frequently requested feature from working cinematographers.

Games are also coming. The device has 6 megabytes of flash memory set aside for them. Snake, Doom, and Tetris are planned. There are 3,000 discarded memory chips sitting next to Marko’s desk as a reminder of the decision to double the flash memory one week before the first production batch went to manufacturing.

In terms of company direction, Marko thinks in 10-year arcs. The milestone he’s working toward: being recognized as the second serious light meter company in the world. Right now, he says, they’re obscure niche challengers doing well. The next milestones are a second product model, a broader range, and enough devices in the field to make that claim credible.

To learn more about LIT Systems, please visit their website and check out their webshop.

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