I loved, loved, loved my Pebble Time. It did everything I wanted out of a smart watch, especially eliminating my phone-checking habit, because I was always on top of whether new emails were worth reading, it was a sanity saver during an intense M&A process. Also, it somehow had a super long-lived battery, and it had so much more personality than most electronic devices, with its little 8-bittish animated icons, reminded me of a Gameboy Advance or something. Thanks for making one of my favorite devices of the last decade, Eric.
Pebble had an incredibly clever design for their watch apps. The watch itself had a limited processor and even more limited RAM but it could hold a few apps and those apps had a lot of capability.
Each app had both a on-watch component and an on-phone component and you could install these apps from their own app store and same app worked on both iOS and Android. They got around both the app install limitations on iOS and the cross-platform compatibility issues by making the on-phone portion run in the platform's JavaScript engine.
You could, for example, create a weather application that fetched the weather from the Internet and displayed it on the watch. The on-phone app would fetch the weather from the Internet using JavaScript code and then transmit that data to the corresponding C-based watch app. Watch apps could even have settings that were just HTML pages.
I always impressed by the cleverness and simplicity of that design.
"We sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales."
So from 0 to 2 million in 4 years?
I was just explaining to my child that many "failures" are only failures from a strange but important angle. They might have been profitable at the time they were canceled, but they were perceived by their maker as less profitable than some other potential product. A venture might net $1m/year and be deemed a wild success. Or it might be deemed a failure if the maker thinks they could net $5m/year on a different venture using the same resources.
> The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.
How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky".
For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
> How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence?
One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.
This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!
Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.
One way to do it is to start small, build something, ship it to customers, get feedback and then iterate from there. This is a bit harder with hardware, though, but not impossible. We actually built an entire smartwatch called inPulse before Pebble, sold and shipped it to 1000 early customers, then got feedback from them. This is how we learned which features to put into Pebble.
> I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
User feedback is not about taking what they say at face value, it’s about all the other nuanced things they do when you present them a solution to their problem. You have to understand all the minutia like their facial expressions…stuff like that. Most people don’t do it well from what I’ve seen. From my experience, you ask people if they like something and they say yes a lot, and that it’s wonderful. It’s still about solving something / doing something better - to discover that, you really need to understand humans. Lots of quick iteration and more user feedback is important until you get it right. You will know when you get it right.
Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…
Apple has both a sixth sense about this stuff and deep enough pockets to be wrong for quite a while before they have to give up.
If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.
There is a whole group of learning around Lean Customer Development[1]. Those processes (and a bunch more) help you identify, with reasonable confidence, that folk will pay for your solution. This process is one part of "The Lean Startup" process
Travel and surround yourself with new experiences and different kinds of people and build intuitions for things people want by becoming like these people. Share experiences, needs, wants, outlooks.
Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously.
If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution.
the canonical YC advice is to make something that you want, then to go find people like yourself and see if they want it too. whether that turns into a real market or not has a lot of luck, but it's often surprising how promising being your own user can be, especially when you solve a hair-on-fire problem for yourself!
That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.
I did eventually buy an iPhone 13 mini. Still somewhat disappointed by it. What I really wanted is something like an iPhone 13 mini pro. I used the zoom on my iPhone 12 pro and never the wide angle, if they only pick two cameras, please give me the zoom.
It also would have been nice to have the better screen.
I was excited to iPhone mini but FaceID was a really serious deal breaker in pandemic. Some people may just bought iPhone SE with TouchID. Finally I bought it in 2022 with iOS 15.4, but it's too late for Apple not to stop future mini line.
> Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ?
If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird.
It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.
>> For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.
They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.
The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.
As one of those people who said up-and-down that they wanted an iPhone Mini, but also was one of the few who bought one, the key thing I saw that turned people off was the battery life compromises for active screen-on usage. People have become used to 8 hours screen-on time, and the iPhone 12 Mini's 5 hours just isn't enough for a tech-y crowd, I think.
I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
> many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
I have a 12 mini. Love, love the size, but batt life hurts and I miss the 2x lens more than I expected. I hope it lives another generation or two to resolve camera and batt trade-offs.
iPhone mini: price and battery life. Outside USA there is a huge market of great value Android phones. iPhone mini was an opportunity for a small screen affordable iPhone, but it was not delivered as such. Not everybody wants a 6" phone, not everybody wants a $1000 phone, but the opposite is also not true.
For those who don't know - Eric's new company, Beeper [1], is a proprietary Matrix chat client with hosted Matrix bridges to other chat platforms. The bridges are open sourced which is a huge contribution to the Matrix ecosystem.
Three ex-Pebblers went on to found Memfault(YC W19, https://memfault.com), taking what they learned about managing a fleet of IOT devices and building a suite of monitoring and OTA tools to support other hardware companies.
Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices. Memfault is all about making it easier to create the next Pebble.
Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space? The best case scenario is to exist long enough to get a billion dollar exit from a major tech company, who will then immediately gut parts of your product that don't support their own business goals. The more likely one is to be sold for parts (like Pebble) or just cease to exist entirely.
It is sad that there is so much innovation being left on the table in that space because the market simply doesn't allow it.
You have to look outside of mass-market consumer products.
The problem with mainstream tech is that it's a race to the bottom. Consumers have extremely high expectations for both the product and the ongoing support. Only the biggest companies can afford to amortize the R&D costs across enough units to compete.
Step into niche hardware and hobbyist domains and there are small companies everywhere. The smaller markets are too small for big companies to play in and the users are savvy enough that they're willing to pay for high margin products instead of picking whatever is cheapest at Best Buy.
Some other companies that are tracking towards sustainable success that we look at are:
* Oura
* Wyze
* Peloton (though they made some growth mis-steps)
All three of those follow a subscription model to get off of the "‘consumer electronics’ release cycle" that Eric calls out in his post. That's not the model that we're following, but we do have an alternate strategy to avoid falling into that same trap.
Problem is, there are plenty that don't get headlines because a single-product category company isn't going to generate profits like a conglomerate like P&G. You also can't simply just throw tech into every product category.
> Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space?
Epiphan Video ([1], [2])? They are fairly successful at selling their hardware to video streamers (both, b2c and b2b). They didn't do IPO as there was no pressure to do so - they primarily bootstrapped themselves. It's not a well-known story, but the market did allow them to exist & succeed.
What is success to you? If success means customer success and probable longevity of the company (and growth and valuation are secondary factors) then Niche Coffee’s espresso grinder is a consumer hardware success.
Thinking about it a lot of third wave coffee products fit the bill. The Decent espresso machine is another and makes the “should buy an Italian machine” argument no longer apply.
There are also successful coffee scales. Lots of new stuff!
Fully automatic machines that are better than a great barista are probably coming. Maybe an upstart could do it.
Of course the sales volumes might be too low to be consider a success on HN or even shark tank for that matter. But i would be happy to have that much success in a new product.
If you're reading this, Eric, you and your team kicked ass with your product line (well, most of them) and tooling and I still tout Pebble as the best smart watch ever and it's a shame it went under.
The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk. As a hacker I loved your tooling as well.
I'm happy I was part of your space by creating and submitting a watchface. I see tooling like Playdates latest effort and it reminds me of Pebble's.
Thanks for that sweet period of watches. Still waiting for something to do better.
I'm still sad about the Gen 2 Pebble Time not being released. It solved the (few!) issues I have with the V1 Time. And I use the word have - present tense - purposely because I still wear my Time daily and have 3 in reserve in case it dies. The Rebble project and battery replacements have kept these devices relevant and for what I want out of a smart watch I still haven't found a better device.
The tech community likes to imagine that Pebble would still be going strong if they stuck to their early product vision, but I'm not so sure that would have helped:
> Sales for our version 2.0 (Pebble Time) in 2015 didn’t hit forecasts and the oversupply in inventory put us into a major cash crunch (targeted ~$100m in sales, we did $82m).
That $82m in sales is still 8X higher than their 1st kickstarter sales and 4X higher than the 2nd kickstarter. They actually did ramp up sales and sell a lot, but they built and spent as if they were going to sell even more than they actually did.
The unclear half-pivot into different spaces didn't help, but I don't see how they would have done better if they had ignored the fitness space altogether. The market for people who want lo-fidelity hackable wristwatches is going to saturate quickly.
We started Wit.ai from Pebble's offices in 2013 in Palo Alto. We didn't know anyone in the Valley, but Eric had read our "Show HN" and kindly offered us to hang out there.
We grew to a 6-people team and stayed there for 6 months -- Eric never asked us to pay $1. He helped us a lot and he also pushed us to join YC (W14). We wouldn't have made Wit.ai without him and I'll be thankful forever.
I had the pleasure of meeting the CRO of Bento[1] last year, and one thing she said has really stuck with me. She said that guilt is an attribute she looks for in team members. It shows that you care, learn from your mistakes, and want to do better. As I've grown as a manager, I have a lot of guilt over how I (mis)managed teams in the early days, but I had never thought of the guilt itself as a positive thing before.
Anyway, good on Eric for fully owning what went wrong here, and vowing to do better.
ALL they had to do was continue with the original idea and not get greedy.
I was a high(ish)-tier backer of the original, still got my 2 sitting in a drawer, and wore them until they wore out. I absolutely loved the idea of a MINIMAL e-paper watch with easily customisable faces and basic notifications. I’m still a fan of the idea, and would love to see more use of e-ink in smart watches. All the fans wanted was that, iterated and improved upon. Better development tools for faces, some other styles of physical watch, etc. Instead the entire brand got hand-grenaded and now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste.
But in the end, with so many users that still loved the product, it's not completely clear why they had to sell the remaining assets instead of scaling waaay down and make watches for geeks again?
Was it financially impossible, or were they simply exhausted? It seems the market was still there (and probably still exists today).
Counterpoint: you were always going to fail in the long run without full platform integration that you cannot have. The Apple Watch is a seamless experience and you can't replicate it. Although Google hasn't managed to produce an Android ripoff with any staying power, so maybe there's a market there.
> Over the next few years, we sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales.
According to Wikipedia: The Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device: 4.2 million were sold in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.
In a single quarter, Apple sold twice as many watches as Pebble did in total. Pebble was doomed once Apple entered the market to be anything but a niche product.
1. They supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My apple watch is nowhere near this functionality.
2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.
Interesting. I just came across an old email from Eric this morning, looking for something else in my inbox, telling me I was the first official customer. This was before the kickstarter I think, when it was announced on HN. It was a fun thing to tinker around with at the time.
Have a Pebble 2SE on my wrist right now. Have more in storage as spares, unfortunately the buttons on these start to disintegrate after a few years.
I was hoping something better would come along and dethrone it by the time I ran through them all or decide to replace the buttons completely, but nothing has. PineTime might do it, should order one and help move it along.
Pebble has always done exactly what I wanted out of a smartwatch with a terrific community hitting all the hackery and FOSS things.
> Around this time Apple came out with the Apple Watch and we thought the smartwatch market was about to explode. So in a quest for big sales growth, we figured our 2015 strategy would need to shift focus to a broader market, away from our core early adopter market positioning.
> In 2015, we had the option to narrow our focus to a smaller but more distinct market positioning. Looking back, this is one of my biggest regrets. We could have been the smartwatch for hackers but we tried to grow our volumes and market share (and failed).
I think that this is the big take here. You can define your mission to make a hacker-friendly device (or different from the status quo), and when you see Apple, Samsung, Google or whatever big brand try to get a similar product, you double down on that hacker-friendliness. They will sure get more appeal to mainstream users, but nerdy "I want a gizmo I can deal with" won't want that. The problem is surveying the real size of that nerdy market, and if it is enough to help you earn a living.
[+] [-] ericd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|3 years ago|reply
Each app had both a on-watch component and an on-phone component and you could install these apps from their own app store and same app worked on both iOS and Android. They got around both the app install limitations on iOS and the cross-platform compatibility issues by making the on-phone portion run in the platform's JavaScript engine.
You could, for example, create a weather application that fetched the weather from the Internet and displayed it on the watch. The on-phone app would fetch the weather from the Internet using JavaScript code and then transmit that data to the corresponding C-based watch app. Watch apps could even have settings that were just HTML pages.
I always impressed by the cleverness and simplicity of that design.
[+] [-] freeopinion|3 years ago|reply
So from 0 to 2 million in 4 years?
I was just explaining to my child that many "failures" are only failures from a strange but important angle. They might have been profitable at the time they were canceled, but they were perceived by their maker as less profitable than some other potential product. A venture might net $1m/year and be deemed a wild success. Or it might be deemed a failure if the maker thinks they could net $5m/year on a different venture using the same resources.
[+] [-] nomel|3 years ago|reply
How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky".
For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
Does anyone have some insight?
[+] [-] Permit|3 years ago|reply
One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.
This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!
Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.
[+] [-] erohead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drBonkers|3 years ago|reply
I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
[+] [-] who_cares|3 years ago|reply
Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.
[+] [-] djbusby|3 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...
[+] [-] redmen|3 years ago|reply
Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously.
If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution.
Just an example.
[+] [-] evanfarrell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ngngngng|3 years ago|reply
That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.
[+] [-] mpalczewski|3 years ago|reply
It also would have been nice to have the better screen.
The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.
[+] [-] fomine3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ?
If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird.
It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lostgame|3 years ago|reply
People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.
They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.
The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.
[+] [-] girvo|3 years ago|reply
I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jldugger|3 years ago|reply
I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
[+] [-] marcellus23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrexroad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pensatoio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdrianB1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeopinion|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakecopp|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.beeper.com/
[+] [-] topher200|3 years ago|reply
Three ex-Pebblers went on to found Memfault(YC W19, https://memfault.com), taking what they learned about managing a fleet of IOT devices and building a suite of monitoring and OTA tools to support other hardware companies.
Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices. Memfault is all about making it easier to create the next Pebble.
We're hiring! https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/memfault
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
It is sad that there is so much innovation being left on the table in that space because the market simply doesn't allow it.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
The problem with mainstream tech is that it's a race to the bottom. Consumers have extremely high expectations for both the product and the ongoing support. Only the biggest companies can afford to amortize the R&D costs across enough units to compete.
Step into niche hardware and hobbyist domains and there are small companies everywhere. The smaller markets are too small for big companies to play in and the users are savvy enough that they're willing to pay for high margin products instead of picking whatever is cheapest at Best Buy.
[+] [-] nrp|3 years ago|reply
Some other companies that are tracking towards sustainable success that we look at are:
* Oura
* Wyze
* Peloton (though they made some growth mis-steps)
All three of those follow a subscription model to get off of the "‘consumer electronics’ release cycle" that Eric calls out in his post. That's not the model that we're following, but we do have an alternate strategy to avoid falling into that same trap.
[+] [-] mbesto|3 years ago|reply
- Thermostats (nest, ecobee)
- Home wi-fi (eero)
- Sonos
- I think Whoop and Oura will get there
- Beats headphones
Problem is, there are plenty that don't get headlines because a single-product category company isn't going to generate profits like a conglomerate like P&G. You also can't simply just throw tech into every product category.
[+] [-] luisfmh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krasin|3 years ago|reply
Epiphan Video ([1], [2])? They are fairly successful at selling their hardware to video streamers (both, b2c and b2b). They didn't do IPO as there was no pressure to do so - they primarily bootstrapped themselves. It's not a well-known story, but the market did allow them to exist & succeed.
1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video
2. https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-...
[+] [-] subroutine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
Thinking about it a lot of third wave coffee products fit the bill. The Decent espresso machine is another and makes the “should buy an Italian machine” argument no longer apply.
There are also successful coffee scales. Lots of new stuff!
Fully automatic machines that are better than a great barista are probably coming. Maybe an upstart could do it.
Of course the sales volumes might be too low to be consider a success on HN or even shark tank for that matter. But i would be happy to have that much success in a new product.
[+] [-] otachack|3 years ago|reply
The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk. As a hacker I loved your tooling as well.
I'm happy I was part of your space by creating and submitting a watchface. I see tooling like Playdates latest effort and it reminds me of Pebble's.
Thanks for that sweet period of watches. Still waiting for something to do better.
[+] [-] 51Cards|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
> Sales for our version 2.0 (Pebble Time) in 2015 didn’t hit forecasts and the oversupply in inventory put us into a major cash crunch (targeted ~$100m in sales, we did $82m).
That $82m in sales is still 8X higher than their 1st kickstarter sales and 4X higher than the 2nd kickstarter. They actually did ramp up sales and sell a lot, but they built and spent as if they were going to sell even more than they actually did.
The unclear half-pivot into different spaces didn't help, but I don't see how they would have done better if they had ignored the fitness space altogether. The market for people who want lo-fidelity hackable wristwatches is going to saturate quickly.
[+] [-] ar7hur|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wanderr|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.trybento.co/
[+] [-] sen|3 years ago|reply
I was a high(ish)-tier backer of the original, still got my 2 sitting in a drawer, and wore them until they wore out. I absolutely loved the idea of a MINIMAL e-paper watch with easily customisable faces and basic notifications. I’m still a fan of the idea, and would love to see more use of e-ink in smart watches. All the fans wanted was that, iterated and improved upon. Better development tools for faces, some other styles of physical watch, etc. Instead the entire brand got hand-grenaded and now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste.
[+] [-] bambax|3 years ago|reply
But in the end, with so many users that still loved the product, it's not completely clear why they had to sell the remaining assets instead of scaling waaay down and make watches for geeks again?
Was it financially impossible, or were they simply exhausted? It seems the market was still there (and probably still exists today).
[+] [-] KerrAvon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|3 years ago|reply
According to Wikipedia: The Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device: 4.2 million were sold in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.
In a single quarter, Apple sold twice as many watches as Pebble did in total. Pebble was doomed once Apple entered the market to be anything but a niche product.
[+] [-] Xavdidtheshadow|3 years ago|reply
1. They supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My apple watch is nowhere near this functionality.
2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.
[+] [-] brk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h4waii|3 years ago|reply
I was hoping something better would come along and dethrone it by the time I ran through them all or decide to replace the buttons completely, but nothing has. PineTime might do it, should order one and help move it along.
Pebble has always done exactly what I wanted out of a smartwatch with a terrific community hitting all the hackery and FOSS things.
[+] [-] ajot|3 years ago|reply
> In 2015, we had the option to narrow our focus to a smaller but more distinct market positioning. Looking back, this is one of my biggest regrets. We could have been the smartwatch for hackers but we tried to grow our volumes and market share (and failed).
I think that this is the big take here. You can define your mission to make a hacker-friendly device (or different from the status quo), and when you see Apple, Samsung, Google or whatever big brand try to get a similar product, you double down on that hacker-friendliness. They will sure get more appeal to mainstream users, but nerdy "I want a gizmo I can deal with" won't want that. The problem is surveying the real size of that nerdy market, and if it is enough to help you earn a living.