He got retailers like Best Buy to sell the Pebble. Since then, Migicovsky has built a thriving developer community (over 26,000 have written over 6000 Pebble apps - everything from golf aids to one that rolls six-sided dice for Dungeons and Dragons) introduced a premium model, Pebble Steel and forged partnerships, including one with Jawbone that takes Pebble more deeply into the quantified-self personal fitness category. “And it had a price point that was enticing and did not scare people away.” It remained Kickstarter’s biggest project until last August, a record of 862 days. Why get greedy?) “It felt fresh and tangible,” says Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler. (It could have been more: Migicovsky pulled the plug a week before the period ended. And they kept coming: a total of 68,929 people ordering over $10 million worth of Pebbles. Would-be customers pledged that sum in two hours. The goal of the 37-day campaign was to raise $100,000 in pre-orders.
To pay for all of that, Pebble took to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter on April 10, 2012. He renamed the product, made it compatible with multiple operating systems, made the watch waterproof, and contracted with Chinese factories to produce thousands of units. In a hail-Mary move, Migicovsky rebooted his company. Migicovsky left the program with around $300,000 total and spent all of it on manufacturing Blackberry-compatible InPulses that he couldn’t sell. But not InPulse investors were steering clear of hardware startups in those days. For almost all of the young companies in that group, the bonus was a launch pad for more significant sums from angel investors or venture capital firms. Every startup in the group received $150,000 at impossibly favorable terms. He was 25 and had already been at it for three years.Įarly in the session, the Y Combinator founders learned that they would be offered funding from investor Ron Conway and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
Still, he felt confident that his plan was a winner - to put the notifications, weather info, sports scores and other timely data (like time) on a wrist display. He had arrived from Waterloo, Ontario, with a little funding from the government and an ungainly wrist computer that worked only with the BlackBerry OS. His company, then called InPulse, might have been the only hardware startup in the bunch. I first met Migicovsky when he was a founder of one of 43 startups enrolled in the Winter 2011 session of the Y Combinator incubator. That’s something else that the biggest company in the world can’t match. What’s more, Pebble is going back to Kickstarter to launch it. Tall (6’ 6”) and male-modelish (you would cast him for a Superman sequel, set in the period between Smallville and Metropolis), the 28-year-old CEO bounded into the office with a hop in his step and his usual puppy-dog smile. For a broken man, he seemed pretty chipper. But the Pebble-ites in attendance seemed to be surprisingly calm, conducting their morning routines as if the world had not crumbled around them. I arrived early so as not to be trampled by a rush of employees seeking to divest stock options. I was even feeling a little guilty at my shameful attempt to rubberneck a promising business at just the moment when dreams turned to twisted metal.
#TIME BANDIT APPAREL WINDOWS#
Though Pebble has since carved out a sweet niche for itself, I suspected that the shockwaves from Cupertino the previous day might have shattered the windows and upended the whiteboards in the loft-like space in central Palo Alto where Pebble was headquartered.
Pebble’s big breakthrough had come two years earlier, with a record-setting Kickstarter debut. It was the day after the lavish event announcing the Apple Watch, the long-anticipated wrist computer that many observers predicted would be the end of the nice little smart-watch business called Pebble that Migicovsky had been building since 2008. I made it a point to visit Eric Migicovsky on September 10, 2014. Photo: Vivian Johnson # In the battle for your wrist, a small company thinks it can hold off the tech giants by going back to its Kickstarter roots- with a watch called Time