The Pebble Time wasn’t as big of a hit as the company hoped it would be
When we think of smartwatches today, we go right to devices like the Apple Watch or the Galaxy Watch4 — wrist-mounted companions to our smartphones that let us see and reply to messages, make calls, track our fitness and health, and even use some apps. But the concept of smartwatches wasn’t born at Apple, nor Samsung, and some of you might recall another big player in the segment that used to be pretty popular a few years back: Pebble. It helped push smartwatches into the public eye with the first Pebble watch in 2013, but the company met its untimely end just a few years later. Now on the tenth anniversary of its initial crowfunding effort, founder Eric Migicovsky is giving us some insight into what went wrong.
Migicovsky paints the picture of starting Pebble in 2008 with some college classmates, and launching the Kickstarter for its initial Pebble device in 2012, before shipping in 2013. But by 2016, the company was shutting down, with its assets purchased by now-Google-owned Fitbit before the end of the year. According to Migicovsky, the collapse was the result of a series of bad decisions, many of them tied to the release of the ill-fated Pebble Time, which tried (and failed) to broaden the company’s market scope. Basically, it wasn’t nearly as successful as the Pebble was betting on.
While the Time represented a big improvement over the regular Pebble, it failed to stay relevant in the face of increasingly capable wearables released around the same time, like the Moto 360. And of course, we can’t ignore the debut of the most popular wearable around, the Apple Watch.
Compared to those devices, the Time’s e-paper display and huge bezels weren’t as appealing to the broader user base it tried to reach. Sales in 2015 didn’t hit the forecasts expected by the company, and supply vastly exceeded demand. Combined with the doubling of Pebble’s operating expenses in anticipation of future growth (that didn’t come as fast as hoped), that caused a major cash crunch that ultimately culminated in Pebble closing up shop in 2016.
So, lesson learned — if you want to start your very own tech startup, define your long-term strategy in a detailed and realistic way.
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