22 ms·

Pebble CEO explains why he sold to Fitbit

264 points by steven 10y ago

lowglow 10y ago
Hey word on the street is Fitbit didn't take many of the hardware people from Pebble. (Not sure why?) But if you're a hardware person from pebble reading this then reach out to me, I'd love to take you out for coffee and have a chat! :)
- revelation 10y ago
  There is only so many hardware people you need, FitBit already has a bunch of different watch models that all seem to do the same thing. They could do with less. Meanwhile all of the smartwatch companies are desperately looking to move from a commodity hardware model to services with recurring revenue, i.e. software.
  - taneq 10y ago
    > Meanwhile all of the smartwatch companies are desperately looking to move from a commodity hardware model to services with recurring revenue, i.e. software. Which is funny, because turning my watch into a subscription service that won't work without an always-on internet connection is precisely what I don't want. This industry-wide trend from products to everything-as-a-subscription-service may be nice for developers craving job security but it's awful for end users.
- Kipters 10y ago
  IMHO they were mostly interested in the OS and the development platform
- mratzloff 10y ago
  Perhaps they should; Fitbit's hardware is terrible. I bought two Fitbit watches, one after the other, and after they both fell apart within 6 months I forswore them altogether. Their software is bad, too, but the hardware was the killer.
  - staticelf 10y ago
    And I bought my fitbit when it came out and it still looks brand new. I wear it everyday. What sucks is not the hardware, it's their software. Thousands of people have had syncing issues for a long time, seems like they've fixed most of it now but I guess there is reason to believe it could happen again.
    - mratzloff 10y ago
      The glue on the Charge and Charge HR kept breaking down and the thing would gradually peel away from the plastic until it literally fell apart.
basseq 10y ago
TLDR: Because it was either that or shutting down (either completely, or with such a massive downsize that it would have been effectively the same thing). I'd be interested to know what he did get out of the deal. Sold for "south of $40M" and with the statement, "He’s not leaving Pebble as a wealthy man."
- blunte 10y ago
  Wealthy relative to startups, or relative to the real world?
  - cbo100 10y ago
    relative to how much debt he had to pay off? $40MM wouldn't be much buffer for a product that was about to go into manufacturing and distribution I would have thought? I.e. all the costs of design, development and planning are sunk. And they didn't get to the stage of selling them to recoup any of that.
    - the_duke 10y ago
      My guess is most/all of that money went into paying off suppliers and debt.
    - derekp7 10y ago
      But he isn't personally responsible for that debt. As CEO, he could have drawn enough salary to build a decent sized nest egg, where he isn't immediately looking for a job.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Also mentioned in the article is that Pebble is still responsible for their own debts.
FussyZeus 10y ago
The Smartwatch as a concept is a good one, however the current offerings have one of two problems: Pebble's problem is the lack of features, and specific to users of iOS like myself, relative instability and weirdness when it comes to important things like notifications. The monochrome screen is also less attractive though IMO bearable. Apple Watch's problem is battery life. It's absolutely unattractive to me to have yet another thing I need to charge once a day. It wins on pretty much everything else but such a low battery life is crippling to this sort of device. I feel like between the two you have a rough approximation of the laptop offerings of the early 80's. Yes, they did exist and some people used them, but by and large they were terrible for the functions they were built for. I have a feeling in not even that much time, we'll have proper smart watches with good integration across platforms that will have a screen like Apple's and the life of a Pebble, but for now, laying out $250 for what's basically a bleeding edge prototype is unattractive to the mainstream consumer. Edit: Question for HN: Would you all consider a Fitbit to be a smartwatch? I mean it's a watch-esque device that does more intelligent things than just a regular watch but I feel like that's more of a wearable monitoring device.
- tedajax 10y ago
  Honestly the Pebble is perfect because it's so stripped down. It does exactly what I want it to do which is show me notifications, the time, track my sleep, let me set timers and press next in spotify without pulling my phone out of my pocket. It does all of this with a battery that I charge once a week. I'm very sad Pebble is gone.
  - sundvor 10y ago
    I'm a 100% with you. If I need advanced features my phone is right in my pocket. Timers, notifications, Spotify is perfectly handler with the always on display, week long battery life. I got the Pebble 2 from Kickstarter, having also ordered the Time 2, and was blown away by how sharp the P2 screen is -monochrome and all. Very sad I won't get the new Time 2, as I felt the Pebble Time Steel display was a step backwards from the OG Steel in terms of readability. My first reaction to the news was to locate a white P2 on Amazon to replace my wife's Pebble Time. Hope to get it just in time for Christmas. I'm still very sad about how it all panned out, for the team and all the loyal fans, and selfishly so mostly because I won't see the Time 2 - not only would the display be a massive improvement, but CPU and memory also.
vvanders 10y ago
>... was the company’s willingness to keep Pebble’s developers and users in the game. You mean like dropping warranty support and a vague statement about cloud based features degrading over an undisclosed amount of time?
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  As a Fitbit user I'm so very happy to hear that Pebble's developers are going to Fitbit! Fitbit's software ecosystem is bad. I have many Fitbits (Fitbites?) and I've stopped using them because the app and website are "meh" at best.
  - bruxis 10y ago
    Perhaps you have enough for a Fitnibble or a Fitbyte
  - saghm 10y ago
    > I have many Fitbits (Fitbites?) and I've stopped using them because the app and website are "meh" at best. I'm curious about this. If the app and website are bad enough to stop using them, why do you have multiple? I would have expected the issues would be noticeable with just the first device.
    - Raphmedia 10y ago
      The products themselves work great. They track everything with great accuracy. ... The problem came when it was time to analyse that data. I was tempted to use their developer tools to extract my data as .csv and build my own app but simply gave up using them.
- modeless 10y ago
  You would prefer that they not provide a warning at all, or lie and say cloud services are supported forever when they'll almost certainly be cut in a year or two? That seems to be the typical playbook for acquisitions and I much prefer the way Pebble is doing it.
edejong 10y ago
> Netherlands city of Delft, known more for pottery than technology Perhaps this is true, but hopefully not any longer among HN readers: - Antonie van Leeuwenhoek: world first microbiologist, huge improvements in the microscope - Martinus Beijerinck: discoverer of the virus - Produces the Nuna, which won the world solar challenge in Australia 5 times
- steven 10y ago
  Touche
- edgarvaldes 10y ago
  I know about the city because Delft University of Technology has some courses on edX.
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    Erik Meijer is the first name that came to mind when I heard Delft.
- peller 10y ago
  Pretty sure NixOS came out of TU Delft too (and that they're still involved)
- GFischer 10y ago
  Definitely knew Delft from Van Leeuwenhoek :) . I didn't know Beijerinck, and I had no idea the Nuna was from there.
- vacri 10y ago
  - Sounds like it would be one of Terry Pratchett's characters
- MrQuincle 10y ago
  - List for what it's worth, 17th in Europe, 59th world-wide: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/best-universities-europe https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universiti... - Inventor of Bluetooth (Jaap Haartsen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_Haartsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_Haartsen - M.C. Escher
zem 10y ago
> Apple’s emphasis on fashion and Pebble’s on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours—the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. that's depressing :( i was hoping that they had just misexecuted, and someone else would step in and fill the niche of "e-ink watch with long battery life that is geared towards displaying things your phone sends it"; i have no use for fitness tracking and biometrics, and pebble's featureset and reasonably open ecosystem was ideal for me. the saddest thing is that even buying used pebbles on ebay won't help me much with their servers going offline :(
- mafuyu 10y ago
  Yeah, it's been a bit vague on whether Fitbit is going to keep the servers alive, although the article hints towards it. People on /r/Pebble have been working on an open source community store to keep the ecosystem alive. I thought Pebble really nailed balancing the engineering tradeoffs that go into a smartwatch, but I guess it didn't translate into mass market appeal. It's surprising how quickly things turned after the modest success of the Pebble Time.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  "even buying used pebbles on ebay won't help me much with their servers going offline" ...and this is the failure of the IoT in a nutshell.
  - edejong 10y ago
    So true. When I first read about IoT, about a decade ago, I thought of it as a miniaturized and decentralized, semi-autonomous client and server systems design. The fundamental problem of the current take on IoT is a misunderstanding of the internet part. Our systems should be decentralized and find routes to nearby systems that are available. So, to be an active actor within the arena of pico-net, local net, internet. Currently, most IoT systems mostly connect to some central, unprotected server hosted in <insert-cheap-labor-country-youve-never-heard-of>.
    - RyJones 10y ago
paulcole 10y ago
"seller of over two million smartwatches"..."Pebble was losing money, with no profit in sight" I honestly don't understand this line of thinking. Why not, you know, sell something for more than it costs?
- twiceaday 10y ago
  You lose money on every unit but make it up in volume!
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    You still lose money that way. The volume gain is often not enough to offset lackluster sales. (Chinese can outcompete you on price, always.)
- noja 10y ago
  like uber does?
  - paulcole 10y ago
    I can understand uber, where there are network effects at play as well as ongoing lifetime value from a customer. But this doesn't seem to apply to a watch where you'll maybe buy 1 every 2 years?
- scott_s 10y ago
  That's the idea. But the "cost" of an item will depend on the number sold. Let's assume that a company's yearly costs are $1 million. They will sell one widget a year. That widget will now "cost" more than $1 million if they want to be in the black. But if they will sell 1 million widgets, now one widget will "cost" more than $1. (There's a lot of slop here, as the marginal costs will have gone up since you greatly increased production.) Basically, you have fixed costs, and when you sell many of a thing, you build in the fixed costs, along with the marginal unit cost, into the final price the consumer pays. The problem comes when the size of your market is such that the cost you would need to stay in the black is well more than any reasonable consumer would pay. In Pebble's situation, there surely would be a one-watch cost that would keep them in the black, but that number could be in the thousands or tens-of-thousands. That's when you, as the CEO, start to think about shutting down the business, because that unit cost would be absurd. I think you may be thinking of the "cost" of the watch as the marginal cost it takes to pump out one more from a production line. But you also have to take into account all of the fixed costs (software developers, administrators, server infrastructure, getting the production line ready, etc).
fudged71 10y ago
Pebble crowdfunded as an alternative to venture capital. Their huge success on the platform was an inspiration to so many other hardware startups that it sparked an entire generation of products (in my opinion). Kudos to that. I still wear my original Pebble. It's reliable with very long battery life, and is one of the very few wearables that works well while wearing gloves.
- jpm_sd 10y ago
  I'm intrigued, can you list any successful members of this generation of products inspired by Pebble? I think in some ways this should be a wake up call for Kickstarter, Pebble was their biggest success story until now.
  - double0jimb0 10y ago
    There are thousands, maybe 10s of thousands. My product company is one of them, www.therooststand.com. In my sphere, I know 10+ KS creators running healthy businesses, most bootstrapped, that started with Kickstarter. TC article on my story and Eric's influence: https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/05/roost-laptop-stand/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/05/roost-laptop-stand/ I also know a few creators that didn't find profitable distribution models and/or demand post Kickstarter. I also know a few creators that failed to execute production and folded before delivering rewards. ^^^^^ These sound like fates of business of all types started from many different sources of capital. I do know the path Eric and Pebble carved was inspiration to all the above. And many feel indebted. It's very sad news on Pebble, tho 'shock' is not the right word for it, as many of us physical product KS creators know too well the risks of development, tooling up, cash flow, and managing delivery expectations. It is a high stakes game.
  - fudged71 10y ago
    We had a crowdfunding success that was largely inspired by the marketing strategy of the Pebble campaign. I'm sure thousands of others were too. How about the Coolest Cooler? You don't think they were inspired by Pebble? Or the Ubuntu phone?
- maneesh 10y ago
logicallee 10y ago
can someone summarize this for me? (I imagine the obvious actual answer to the headline is, "I'm passionate about having a place to live, eating, travelling and otherwise enjoying the results of 300 years of capitalism and industrialization.") --- EDIT: Thanks for the downvote. Can I have the summary, please?
- soared 10y ago
  From someone else's comment: > TLDR: Because it was either that or shutting down (either completely, or with such a massive downsize that it would have been effectively the same thing).
  - logicallee 10y ago
    thanks.
rebelde 10y ago
> [He considered] bringing the company down to 10 people and just seeing what would be next. Other than the fact that he would need to fire everybody, what is wrong with reducing costs to make it profitable like this? The problem seems like there wasn't enough profit to support a staff of 120 people. I can't imagine the VCs would object. They already lost their money.
- rabidrat 10y ago
  They'd rather it shut down completely so they don't have to give it any more attention.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  I'm going to assume he didn't want to continue with it anymore otherwise he certainly would have done that.
- pbiggar 10y ago
  There's a bunch of problems here. For a start, laying off the team is probably the worst thing a startup founder wants to do - he likely wants to protect them and so sending them as a unit to FitBit is better. But if we was to go down to 10 people, then if he sent the rest to FitBit they'd be competing against the current team! So he's given the choice of the company succeeding or the employees finding a new home with little disruption. Secondly, the cap table is probably fucked. It's hard to go down to a 10 person company without fixing the cap table. It's probably something like VCs own 55%, founders 25%, employees 20%. So for it to "behave" like a 10 person company, you want to recap it and make it more like a Series A company (investors 35%, founders 50%, remaining employees 15%). If you don't it's shitty for the founders and remaining employees. If you do, it's shitty for investors. Who wants stock in a Series A company at Series C prices? They wouldn't even have product market fit. And given they have the option to get their money back instead, I'd wager they'd all vote to sell. A final reason is that the culture of a company changes as it grows. They'll currently have a "big company" mentality. They'd have to switch to a "small startup" mentality, which might be tough: they might not even have "small startup" employees left (it's not uncommon to see early employees leave when the company gets too big for them to enjoy). Whereas if he starts a new company, he'll find it really easy to raise money, he can probably pull away the employees that he needs from FitBit, and he'll own almost all of it.
sanj 10y ago
Only 30, Migicovsky has plenty of time for future glories. And plenty of leftover watches to keep that time. Ouch!
dstaley 10y ago
There's only three things I want in a smartwatch: 1. Resemble an actual, reasonably sized watch. 2. Display notifications from my phone along with their actions (such as marking an email as "Done" in Inbox, or liking a Tweet). 3. Allow me to respond with my voice for notifications that support quick replies. The Pebble Time Round was great at all three, and (as far as I know) was the only watch to have the features that I wanted in a form factor that resembled a reasonably-sized watch. The only other alternatives currently are Android Wear watches, all of which don't look like the kinds of watches I like to wear (they're thick, with large bezels and superfluous embellishments). If I knew for sure that a Pebble Time Round would continue to be useable for the next six months, I'd buy one in a heartbeat, but the uncertainty makes me hesitant to spend the $100+ on one.
- guelo 10y ago
  You mustn't have looked at Android watches in a while because they have some gorgeous round watches with much less bezel than the Pebble Time Round. I own a round Huwawei watch with a metal band and get compliments on it all the time. https://www.android.com/wear/ https://www.android.com/wear/ Pebble bezel: http://i.imgur.com/xllAVAu.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xllAVAu.jpg
  - dstaley 10y ago
    That's awesome! I'm so glad you like the watch you have. However, in the future please keep in mind that just because someone has a different opinion than you doesn't mean that they're less up-to-date than you are. I've had hands-on time with just about every Android Wear watch released (including the Huawei Watch), and none come close to matching the Pebble Time Round's svelte 7.4mm thickness (save for the original ZenWatch which I also owned, but sadly that had a rectangular display).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    OP may not have, but I have. Near universal size for Android watches seems to be 42mm (and 12mm thick). Roughly that used to be a common size of pocket watch. I don't want a pocket watch on my wrist. Apart from anything else I'll be forever bashing it. I'd rather have a smart fob watch! :p Pebble Time Round was around 36mm and 7.5mm thick. It actually looks like a normal watch on your wrist. With 3 times the battery of Android.
hyperpallium 10y ago
> Apple’s emphasis on fashion and Pebble’s on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours—the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. Over the last few years, I noticed store catalogs giving much space to fitbit, and little to pebble (or apple watch). Perhaps this is a crude exoscope, for viewing outside the bubble/RDF? Like Buffett observing people still actually using American Express, outside Wall Street's gloom. Those catalogs now include iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxy S5 alongside the flagships, suggesting "good enough" and flagships have overshot... Where will the tech, talent and investment go, if smart phones and watches are good enough, and VR/AR is a wash?
- saghm 10y ago
  > Where will the tech, talent and investment go, if smart phones and watches are good enough, and VR/AR is a wash? Cloud services, I guess? They seem to be doing well enough to last until the next "big thing" comes along.
outworlder 10y ago
I own a Pebble Time Steel. It is wonderful. People really underestimate the impact battery life has. I get annoyed when I finally have to take it out to charge (about once a week). Heck, right now it's at 10% and I don't really care. It didn't even tell me yet when it's expected to run out. The screen may not be as gorgeous as a phone screen, but it is on all the time. It's also very developer friendly. Heck, you can even create watchfaces in Javascript. Before the acquisition, I would not trade it for the first generation Apple Watch. Maybe the second one, just maybe, if the community does not find a way to keep the current Pebble devices running.
- IanCal 10y ago
  > I own a Pebble Time Steel. It is wonderful. People really underestimate the impact battery life has. I get annoyed when I finally have to take it out to charge (about once a week). Heck, right now it's at 10% and I don't really care. It didn't even tell me yet when it's expected to run out. And I don't know if it still has this feature, but the OS had something that when it was really close to dying it'd switch off all the bluetooth and smarter bits and display a basic watchface, so it'd keep working as a watch for a few more days. That was awesome. > It's also very developer friendly. Heck, you can even create watchfaces in Javascript. Something that really attracted me to pebble was just how easily I could make a simple app and get it loaded on my watch.
jessaustin 10y ago
ISTM the many screen-on-wrist testimonials on this page confirm a longstanding prediction of mine: the "smartphone" is not the ultimate device form that our children will be using as adults. Instead, every personal item will become part of a personal constellation of devices. Phones will gradually disappear as better (i.e. ubiquitous, low-power, and basically free) wireless networks emerge, and our eyeglasses will talk to our hats which will talk to our shoes which will talk to our wrist devices...
bunderbunder 10y ago
I've never owned or used a Pebble, but for me it's poignant that this coincides with my decision to stop wearing a Withings Activite and dusted off my trusty old Seiko 5. This shift was primarily motivated by two factors: 1. I lost interest in the activity tracking features. 2. Even worrying about the battery once every 6 months was too much. And supplemented by a third, which is that the fancy watch wasn't very readable and lacked a second hand. That made it less capable at the main thing I use it for: keeping track of the time. I looked hard at a Pebble at one point before deciding that, since my phone is almost always in my pocket or on the table in front of me, getting it into position for viewing information would take only nominally more effort and probably gets me to a place where I can act on whatever information the device is telling me much more efficiently. Also, having a non-user-replaceable battery means that the device will only live for so long, and I'm really trying to limit my consumption of disposable technology. I think that, for now, my most optimistic case for smartwatches is that they're at about the same phase as handheld computing was 15 or so years ago. The technology is really interesting, but there needs to be more technology development and ironing out of subtle details before the idea is quite ready to take over the consumer market.
rilut 10y ago
But Citizen had offered them a better deal, didn't they? $740m rather than $40m. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/fitbit-pebble/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/fitbit-pebble/
- kensai 10y ago
  This exactly. And he turned it down. This is nowhere mentioned in his interview and it's an important point of his own failure as a CEO. He thought he could make a better deal back in the good days, overestimating the value of his company and NOT selling when the time is right. I don't buy it that he sold to Fitbit because Fitbit promised to keep the employees, this is exactly the bullshit I expect him to say to an interview to paint his story a courageous one. Pebble was an amazing startup with a lot of potential and good ideas (I find their short developer manual in C as one of the best introductions to C programming with practical examples ever written), but the CEO overestimated his company's maturity and value. Which is a shame. Let's hope Fitbit keeps alive some of the legacy.
- broahmed 10y ago
  You know what they say about hindsight and perfect vision. Sounds like Eric thought the company could have survived. I give him props for sticking with it as long as possible.
  - lonelyw0lf 10y ago
    He must be feeling like killing himself now! wow! $740M!!! and instead now he heads back to YC as yet another partner. I'd really be curious to see YCs cap table :) Sam must have that locked up somewhere :)
- uiri 10y ago
  I haven't been able to find any substantiated source for the $740M figure. All the other news sites cite an article on The Information[1] about the FitBit deal which is paywalled. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/fitbit-to-buy-pebble https://www.theinformation.com/fitbit-to-buy-pebble
teekert 10y ago
Am the only one around here that doesn't care one single bit about the fitness aspects? My Pebble Time Steel broke (actually just the band), just before these announcements and I got a refund (spendable only at the company I bought the Pebble, but that's ok.) But I miss it! I miss the the notifications, I had gotten completely used to putting my Phone somewhere, anywhere withing BT range for the duration of the day. 99% of notifications do not require immediate attention (I also strictly filter what was allowed through to the watch) but some do and the ability to see that on your wrist is gold to me. For now, sadly, there is no replacement that even comes close. I really want an always one screen and at least 5 days of battery life.
- ThePawnBreak 10y ago
  > For now, sadly, there is no replacement that even comes close. I really want an always one screen and at least 5 days of battery life. Did you take a look at Vector Watch?
  - teekert 10y ago
    I did indeed, they look nice but a different price class (was going to get a Pebble 2 to replace the PTS1). For now they are also not sold in my country. they do tick the display and the battery (up to 30 days!) and water-resistant boxes. There are no apps but I don't care that much (though the ski and mtb apps I used on Pebble were nice). I also read somewhere there were some BT stability issues but I'd have to check again and there are always updates. I'd really like to play with one, see what the OS feels like. I'll keep an eye on them, for now them may make it somewhat cheaper and somewhat smaller (half the battery life is still very nice) but definitely Vector comes closest to the Pebble indeed. For those interested: http://vectorwatch.com/ http://vectorwatch.com/
- pluma 10y ago
  I absolutely agree. I backed Pebble the first and second time they were on Kickstarter but passed on round three because my Pebble Time Steel was still going strong and all the new features seemed to be focused on the fitness aspects to the point the "one more thing" reveal turned out to be a small headless device that is only really useful to runners. Pebble was everything I wanted from a smartwatch: * a water-resistant Android-compatible wrist-mounted bluetooth watch * that shows me real-time notifications from my smartphone (but lets me filter notifications to kill the noise) * that allows me to pause/resume smartphone audio * that has an always-on display I can read in broad daylight * and that can go a number of days without charging Now that Pebble is gone, I'm regretting not having bought the Pebble 2 because I'm worried there's nothing I can replace my Pebble Time Steel with when the time comes. I don't need nor want a fitness tracker -- I'm only interested in sleep tracking and I prefer charging my watch while I sleep. A heartrate monitor would be fun but just a gimmick. Ironically I never had any use for wrist watches before I bought my first Pebble and now I feel naked without it. But I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for something I really just want to tell me the time and buzz and show me notifications without having to pull my smartphone out.
bambax 10y ago
I have to ask: were 160, then 120 people really necessary? Judging by their Kickstarters' successes, Pebble had made "something people want", and they had made it repeatedly. Couldn't they have waited out the bad times with a lighter team, while tweaking the products and remaining profitable or at least just above zero? 120 people sounds enormous to me -- esp. given that all manufacturing was outsourced...?
- hobo_mark 10y ago
  Wow I had no idea they were so "bloated" (for lack of a better word), and it looks like most were in Palo Alto! That's just insane.
- VLM 10y ago
  Interfacing with retailer buyers is labor intensive and they were trying to sell pebbles everywhere. So you have like one employee-equivalent (across multiple departments) per major client (amazon, target, walmart) and maybe half an employee per minor retailer and you can easily use maybe 30 employees just keeping the retailers entertained. Even if you only sell one unit to walmart it still costs you like one employee-equivalent just to keep the monster fed with paperwork and contracts. Also hardware has very expensive customer support costs, lets say they had 1e6 sales and fifty customer support (to keep the math easy) and lets say a typical customer support dude burns an hour per ticket total (including training and everything back office) and works 2000 hours per year, thats 100000 or 1e5 customer service interactions per year. Thats only a 10% support rate. Of course the annual rate was probably much lower than 10%, and they probably had a lot less than 50 customer service employees, but you can see how selling consumer hardware can be incredibly expensive. Its very difficult to have a million units out there with fewer than say five people baby sitting them. There's also the SV stereotype that it takes about Y folks in SV to do what 1 person in Chicago would do, where the value of Y is extremely debatable but certainly larger than 1. The nicest way to put it is if it takes six months to soak in the culture and we intend to double in size and sales every six months then need a team twice as big as it "needs" to be today to be ready in six months, and of course six months from now the team will have doubled again to keep up with the onramp to the next doubling 12 months out, etc. Of course when the growth rate doesn't achieve or flatlines or goes negative for a couple quarters then you have like ten people to do a one person job, so all sad company stories end this way, with why do you have 10M units worth of employees with only 1M sales, no wonder, blah blah.
pluma 10y ago
> Apple’s emphasis on fashion and Pebble’s on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours—the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. I'm not sure this is accurate. Pebble sold relatively well. They just couldn't get more customers beyond a certain point. It's a niche market. Fitness trackers become obsolete quickly. They tend to be relatively cheap and there are a lot of sensors and software that can be iterated on to justify selling newer versions of the same product every year to the same people. When the Pebble Steel came out, I gave my original Pebble away. The only reason I switched was that I liked the design of the new one better, the original still worked just as well as the new one. When the Pebble Time Steel came out, I switched again and again the one I had at the time worked fine. The Pebble Time Steel had some new features but mostly it did much of the same. I passed when the Pebble 2 came out because I couldn't justify paying again for a replacement to something that still worked as good as on the first day. The Pebble 2 brought some fitness features but was otherwise no different from what I already had. Fitness trackers have planned obsolescence. The tech becomes outdated very quickly and the conditions in which they are used lend themselves to natural wear and tear. Utilitarian smartwatches on the other hand are expected to last. Pebble sold me three smartwatches in almost as many years. They actually marketed four[0] more in that time. They oversaturated the market and grossly overestimated the demand. Their first Kickstarter generated $10MM, their second in early 2015 generated $20MM, their third generated $12MM. Considering they were falling in the red in 2015 and their 2016 campaign was doubling down on the fitness aspect and bombed in comparison to 2015, I don't buy the narrative that fitness tracking would have been a better focus. [0]: To recap: Pebble, Pebble Steel, Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, Pebble Time Round, Pebble 2, Time 2 and Pebble Core (which is not a smartwatch). The 2016 Kickstarter also saw the edition of silver/gold editions of the Pebble Round but those seem otherwise identical to the original.
- Mvandenbergh 10y ago
  Yeah I don't know if it's right to say that the market is "rooted" in that segment it seems like it's easier to make money there for a variety of reasons. Something like 80% of the market is special purpose wearables like Fitbits vs. 20% smart watches like Pebble and Apple. One of the only companies in the segment that had good results in 2016 was Garmin which focuses on activity watches. The fitness and activity tracker segment has several advantages: -there's an obvious benefit to being wearable, so they're not competing directly with smartphones. -they're selling into a rapidly growing market for "lifestyle" accessories. -precisely that obsolescence that you mentioned means they can keep selling to existing customers. -many people who use them get addicted to the gamification aspect of fitness tracking and will immediately replace broken items. -sports equipment is expected to wear out in a way that premium watches are not, so watches that break after a year or two do not leave as much of a negative perception with customers.

264 points by steven 10y ago

Hey word on the street is Fitbit didn't take many of the hardware people from Pebble. (Not sure why?) But if you're a hardware person from pebble reading this then reach out to me, I'd love to take you out for coffee and have a chat! :)

revelation 10y ago
There is only so many hardware people you need, FitBit already has a bunch of different watch models that all seem to do the same thing. They could do with less. Meanwhile all of the smartwatch companies are desperately looking to move from a commodity hardware model to services with recurring revenue, i.e. software.
- taneq 10y ago
  > Meanwhile all of the smartwatch companies are desperately looking to move from a commodity hardware model to services with recurring revenue, i.e. software. Which is funny, because turning my watch into a subscription service that won't work without an always-on internet connection is precisely what I don't want. This industry-wide trend from products to everything-as-a-subscription-service may be nice for developers craving job security but it's awful for end users.
Kipters 10y ago
IMHO they were mostly interested in the OS and the development platform
mratzloff 10y ago
Perhaps they should; Fitbit's hardware is terrible. I bought two Fitbit watches, one after the other, and after they both fell apart within 6 months I forswore them altogether. Their software is bad, too, but the hardware was the killer.
- staticelf 10y ago
  And I bought my fitbit when it came out and it still looks brand new. I wear it everyday. What sucks is not the hardware, it's their software. Thousands of people have had syncing issues for a long time, seems like they've fixed most of it now but I guess there is reason to believe it could happen again.
  - mratzloff 10y ago
    The glue on the Charge and Charge HR kept breaking down and the thing would gradually peel away from the plastic until it literally fell apart.

basseq 10y ago

TLDR: Because it was either that or shutting down (either completely, or with such a massive downsize that it would have been effectively the same thing). I'd be interested to know what he did get out of the deal. Sold for "south of $40M" and with the statement, "He’s not leaving Pebble as a wealthy man."

blunte 10y ago
Wealthy relative to startups, or relative to the real world?
- cbo100 10y ago
  relative to how much debt he had to pay off? $40MM wouldn't be much buffer for a product that was about to go into manufacturing and distribution I would have thought? I.e. all the costs of design, development and planning are sunk. And they didn't get to the stage of selling them to recoup any of that.
  - the_duke 10y ago
    My guess is most/all of that money went into paying off suppliers and debt.
  - derekp7 10y ago
    But he isn't personally responsible for that debt. As CEO, he could have drawn enough salary to build a decent sized nest egg, where he isn't immediately looking for a job.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
Also mentioned in the article is that Pebble is still responsible for their own debts.

FussyZeus 10y ago

The Smartwatch as a concept is a good one, however the current offerings have one of two problems: Pebble's problem is the lack of features, and specific to users of iOS like myself, relative instability and weirdness when it comes to important things like notifications. The monochrome screen is also less attractive though IMO bearable. Apple Watch's problem is battery life. It's absolutely unattractive to me to have yet another thing I need to charge once a day. It wins on pretty much everything else but such a low battery life is crippling to this sort of device. I feel like between the two you have a rough approximation of the laptop offerings of the early 80's. Yes, they did exist and some people used them, but by and large they were terrible for the functions they were built for. I have a feeling in not even that much time, we'll have proper smart watches with good integration across platforms that will have a screen like Apple's and the life of a Pebble, but for now, laying out $250 for what's basically a bleeding edge prototype is unattractive to the mainstream consumer. Edit: Question for HN: Would you all consider a Fitbit to be a smartwatch? I mean it's a watch-esque device that does more intelligent things than just a regular watch but I feel like that's more of a wearable monitoring device.

tedajax 10y ago
Honestly the Pebble is perfect because it's so stripped down. It does exactly what I want it to do which is show me notifications, the time, track my sleep, let me set timers and press next in spotify without pulling my phone out of my pocket. It does all of this with a battery that I charge once a week. I'm very sad Pebble is gone.
- sundvor 10y ago
  I'm a 100% with you. If I need advanced features my phone is right in my pocket. Timers, notifications, Spotify is perfectly handler with the always on display, week long battery life. I got the Pebble 2 from Kickstarter, having also ordered the Time 2, and was blown away by how sharp the P2 screen is -monochrome and all. Very sad I won't get the new Time 2, as I felt the Pebble Time Steel display was a step backwards from the OG Steel in terms of readability. My first reaction to the news was to locate a white P2 on Amazon to replace my wife's Pebble Time. Hope to get it just in time for Christmas. I'm still very sad about how it all panned out, for the team and all the loyal fans, and selfishly so mostly because I won't see the Time 2 - not only would the display be a massive improvement, but CPU and memory also.

vvanders 10y ago

>... was the company’s willingness to keep Pebble’s developers and users in the game. You mean like dropping warranty support and a vague statement about cloud based features degrading over an undisclosed amount of time?

Raphmedia 10y ago
As a Fitbit user I'm so very happy to hear that Pebble's developers are going to Fitbit! Fitbit's software ecosystem is bad. I have many Fitbits (Fitbites?) and I've stopped using them because the app and website are "meh" at best.
- bruxis 10y ago
  Perhaps you have enough for a Fitnibble or a Fitbyte
- saghm 10y ago
  > I have many Fitbits (Fitbites?) and I've stopped using them because the app and website are "meh" at best. I'm curious about this. If the app and website are bad enough to stop using them, why do you have multiple? I would have expected the issues would be noticeable with just the first device.
  - Raphmedia 10y ago
    The products themselves work great. They track everything with great accuracy. ... The problem came when it was time to analyse that data. I was tempted to use their developer tools to extract my data as .csv and build my own app but simply gave up using them.
modeless 10y ago
You would prefer that they not provide a warning at all, or lie and say cloud services are supported forever when they'll almost certainly be cut in a year or two? That seems to be the typical playbook for acquisitions and I much prefer the way Pebble is doing it.

edejong 10y ago

> Netherlands city of Delft, known more for pottery than technology Perhaps this is true, but hopefully not any longer among HN readers: - Antonie van Leeuwenhoek: world first microbiologist, huge improvements in the microscope - Martinus Beijerinck: discoverer of the virus - Produces the Nuna, which won the world solar challenge in Australia 5 times

steven 10y ago
Touche
edgarvaldes 10y ago
I know about the city because Delft University of Technology has some courses on edX.
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  Erik Meijer is the first name that came to mind when I heard Delft.
peller 10y ago
Pretty sure NixOS came out of TU Delft too (and that they're still involved)
GFischer 10y ago
Definitely knew Delft from Van Leeuwenhoek :) . I didn't know Beijerinck, and I had no idea the Nuna was from there.
vacri 10y ago
- Sounds like it would be one of Terry Pratchett's characters
MrQuincle 10y ago
- List for what it's worth, 17th in Europe, 59th world-wide: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/best-universities-europe https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universiti... - Inventor of Bluetooth (Jaap Haartsen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_Haartsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_Haartsen - M.C. Escher

zem 10y ago

> Apple’s emphasis on fashion and Pebble’s on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours—the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. that's depressing :( i was hoping that they had just misexecuted, and someone else would step in and fill the niche of "e-ink watch with long battery life that is geared towards displaying things your phone sends it"; i have no use for fitness tracking and biometrics, and pebble's featureset and reasonably open ecosystem was ideal for me. the saddest thing is that even buying used pebbles on ebay won't help me much with their servers going offline :(

mafuyu 10y ago
Yeah, it's been a bit vague on whether Fitbit is going to keep the servers alive, although the article hints towards it. People on /r/Pebble have been working on an open source community store to keep the ecosystem alive. I thought Pebble really nailed balancing the engineering tradeoffs that go into a smartwatch, but I guess it didn't translate into mass market appeal. It's surprising how quickly things turned after the modest success of the Pebble Time.
marssaxman 10y ago
"even buying used pebbles on ebay won't help me much with their servers going offline" ...and this is the failure of the IoT in a nutshell.
- edejong 10y ago
  So true. When I first read about IoT, about a decade ago, I thought of it as a miniaturized and decentralized, semi-autonomous client and server systems design. The fundamental problem of the current take on IoT is a misunderstanding of the internet part. Our systems should be decentralized and find routes to nearby systems that are available. So, to be an active actor within the arena of pico-net, local net, internet. Currently, most IoT systems mostly connect to some central, unprotected server hosted in <insert-cheap-labor-country-youve-never-heard-of>.
  - RyJones 10y ago

paulcole 10y ago

"seller of over two million smartwatches"..."Pebble was losing money, with no profit in sight" I honestly don't understand this line of thinking. Why not, you know, sell something for more than it costs?

twiceaday 10y ago
You lose money on every unit but make it up in volume!
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  You still lose money that way. The volume gain is often not enough to offset lackluster sales. (Chinese can outcompete you on price, always.)
noja 10y ago
like uber does?
- paulcole 10y ago
  I can understand uber, where there are network effects at play as well as ongoing lifetime value from a customer. But this doesn't seem to apply to a watch where you'll maybe buy 1 every 2 years?
scott_s 10y ago
That's the idea. But the "cost" of an item will depend on the number sold. Let's assume that a company's yearly costs are $1 million. They will sell one widget a year. That widget will now "cost" more than $1 million if they want to be in the black. But if they will sell 1 million widgets, now one widget will "cost" more than $1. (There's a lot of slop here, as the marginal costs will have gone up since you greatly increased production.) Basically, you have fixed costs, and when you sell many of a thing, you build in the fixed costs, along with the marginal unit cost, into the final price the consumer pays. The problem comes when the size of your market is such that the cost you would need to stay in the black is well more than any reasonable consumer would pay. In Pebble's situation, there surely would be a one-watch cost that would keep them in the black, but that number could be in the thousands or tens-of-thousands. That's when you, as the CEO, start to think about shutting down the business, because that unit cost would be absurd. I think you may be thinking of the "cost" of the watch as the marginal cost it takes to pump out one more from a production line. But you also have to take into account all of the fixed costs (software developers, administrators, server infrastructure, getting the production line ready, etc).

fudged71 10y ago

Pebble crowdfunded as an alternative to venture capital. Their huge success on the platform was an inspiration to so many other hardware startups that it sparked an entire generation of products (in my opinion). Kudos to that. I still wear my original Pebble. It's reliable with very long battery life, and is one of the very few wearables that works well while wearing gloves.

jpm_sd 10y ago
I'm intrigued, can you list any successful members of this generation of products inspired by Pebble? I think in some ways this should be a wake up call for Kickstarter, Pebble was their biggest success story until now.
- double0jimb0 10y ago
  There are thousands, maybe 10s of thousands. My product company is one of them, www.therooststand.com. In my sphere, I know 10+ KS creators running healthy businesses, most bootstrapped, that started with Kickstarter. TC article on my story and Eric's influence: https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/05/roost-laptop-stand/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/05/roost-laptop-stand/ I also know a few creators that didn't find profitable distribution models and/or demand post Kickstarter. I also know a few creators that failed to execute production and folded before delivering rewards. ^^^^^ These sound like fates of business of all types started from many different sources of capital. I do know the path Eric and Pebble carved was inspiration to all the above. And many feel indebted. It's very sad news on Pebble, tho 'shock' is not the right word for it, as many of us physical product KS creators know too well the risks of development, tooling up, cash flow, and managing delivery expectations. It is a high stakes game.
- fudged71 10y ago
  We had a crowdfunding success that was largely inspired by the marketing strategy of the Pebble campaign. I'm sure thousands of others were too. How about the Coolest Cooler? You don't think they were inspired by Pebble? Or the Ubuntu phone?
maneesh 10y ago

logicallee 10y ago

can someone summarize this for me? (I imagine the obvious actual answer to the headline is, "I'm passionate about having a place to live, eating, travelling and otherwise enjoying the results of 300 years of capitalism and industrialization.") --- EDIT: Thanks for the downvote. Can I have the summary, please?

soared 10y ago
From someone else's comment: > TLDR: Because it was either that or shutting down (either completely, or with such a massive downsize that it would have been effectively the same thing).
- logicallee 10y ago
  thanks.

rebelde 10y ago

> [He considered] bringing the company down to 10 people and just seeing what would be next. Other than the fact that he would need to fire everybody, what is wrong with reducing costs to make it profitable like this? The problem seems like there wasn't enough profit to support a staff of 120 people. I can't imagine the VCs would object. They already lost their money.

rabidrat 10y ago
They'd rather it shut down completely so they don't have to give it any more attention.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
I'm going to assume he didn't want to continue with it anymore otherwise he certainly would have done that.
pbiggar 10y ago
There's a bunch of problems here. For a start, laying off the team is probably the worst thing a startup founder wants to do - he likely wants to protect them and so sending them as a unit to FitBit is better. But if we was to go down to 10 people, then if he sent the rest to FitBit they'd be competing against the current team! So he's given the choice of the company succeeding or the employees finding a new home with little disruption. Secondly, the cap table is probably fucked. It's hard to go down to a 10 person company without fixing the cap table. It's probably something like VCs own 55%, founders 25%, employees 20%. So for it to "behave" like a 10 person company, you want to recap it and make it more like a Series A company (investors 35%, founders 50%, remaining employees 15%). If you don't it's shitty for the founders and remaining employees. If you do, it's shitty for investors. Who wants stock in a Series A company at Series C prices? They wouldn't even have product market fit. And given they have the option to get their money back instead, I'd wager they'd all vote to sell. A final reason is that the culture of a company changes as it grows. They'll currently have a "big company" mentality. They'd have to switch to a "small startup" mentality, which might be tough: they might not even have "small startup" employees left (it's not uncommon to see early employees leave when the company gets too big for them to enjoy). Whereas if he starts a new company, he'll find it really easy to raise money, he can probably pull away the employees that he needs from FitBit, and he'll own almost all of it.

sanj 10y ago

Only 30, Migicovsky has plenty of time for future glories. And plenty of leftover watches to keep that time. Ouch!

dstaley 10y ago

There's only three things I want in a smartwatch: 1. Resemble an actual, reasonably sized watch. 2. Display notifications from my phone along with their actions (such as marking an email as "Done" in Inbox, or liking a Tweet). 3. Allow me to respond with my voice for notifications that support quick replies. The Pebble Time Round was great at all three, and (as far as I know) was the only watch to have the features that I wanted in a form factor that resembled a reasonably-sized watch. The only other alternatives currently are Android Wear watches, all of which don't look like the kinds of watches I like to wear (they're thick, with large bezels and superfluous embellishments). If I knew for sure that a Pebble Time Round would continue to be useable for the next six months, I'd buy one in a heartbeat, but the uncertainty makes me hesitant to spend the $100+ on one.

guelo 10y ago
You mustn't have looked at Android watches in a while because they have some gorgeous round watches with much less bezel than the Pebble Time Round. I own a round Huwawei watch with a metal band and get compliments on it all the time. https://www.android.com/wear/ https://www.android.com/wear/ Pebble bezel: http://i.imgur.com/xllAVAu.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xllAVAu.jpg
- dstaley 10y ago
  That's awesome! I'm so glad you like the watch you have. However, in the future please keep in mind that just because someone has a different opinion than you doesn't mean that they're less up-to-date than you are. I've had hands-on time with just about every Android Wear watch released (including the Huawei Watch), and none come close to matching the Pebble Time Round's svelte 7.4mm thickness (save for the original ZenWatch which I also owned, but sadly that had a rectangular display).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  OP may not have, but I have. Near universal size for Android watches seems to be 42mm (and 12mm thick). Roughly that used to be a common size of pocket watch. I don't want a pocket watch on my wrist. Apart from anything else I'll be forever bashing it. I'd rather have a smart fob watch! :p Pebble Time Round was around 36mm and 7.5mm thick. It actually looks like a normal watch on your wrist. With 3 times the battery of Android.

hyperpallium 10y ago

> Apple’s emphasis on fashion and Pebble’s on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours—the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. Over the last few years, I noticed store catalogs giving much space to fitbit, and little to pebble (or apple watch). Perhaps this is a crude exoscope, for viewing outside the bubble/RDF? Like Buffett observing people still actually using American Express, outside Wall Street's gloom. Those catalogs now include iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxy S5 alongside the flagships, suggesting "good enough" and flagships have overshot... Where will the tech, talent and investment go, if smart phones and watches are good enough, and VR/AR is a wash?

saghm 10y ago
> Where will the tech, talent and investment go, if smart phones and watches are good enough, and VR/AR is a wash? Cloud services, I guess? They seem to be doing well enough to last until the next "big thing" comes along.

outworlder 10y ago

I own a Pebble Time Steel. It is wonderful. People really underestimate the impact battery life has. I get annoyed when I finally have to take it out to charge (about once a week). Heck, right now it's at 10% and I don't really care. It didn't even tell me yet when it's expected to run out. The screen may not be as gorgeous as a phone screen, but it is on all the time. It's also very developer friendly. Heck, you can even create watchfaces in Javascript. Before the acquisition, I would not trade it for the first generation Apple Watch. Maybe the second one, just maybe, if the community does not find a way to keep the current Pebble devices running.

IanCal 10y ago
> I own a Pebble Time Steel. It is wonderful. People really underestimate the impact battery life has. I get annoyed when I finally have to take it out to charge (about once a week). Heck, right now it's at 10% and I don't really care. It didn't even tell me yet when it's expected to run out. And I don't know if it still has this feature, but the OS had something that when it was really close to dying it'd switch off all the bluetooth and smarter bits and display a basic watchface, so it'd keep working as a watch for a few more days. That was awesome. > It's also very developer friendly. Heck, you can even create watchfaces in Javascript. Something that really attracted me to pebble was just how easily I could make a simple app and get it loaded on my watch.

jessaustin 10y ago

ISTM the many screen-on-wrist testimonials on this page confirm a longstanding prediction of mine: the "smartphone" is not the ultimate device form that our children will be using as adults. Instead, every personal item will become part of a personal constellation of devices. Phones will gradually disappear as better (i.e. ubiquitous, low-power, and basically free) wireless networks emerge, and our eyeglasses will talk to our hats which will talk to our shoes which will talk to our wrist devices...

bunderbunder 10y ago

I've never owned or used a Pebble, but for me it's poignant that this coincides with my decision to stop wearing a Withings Activite and dusted off my trusty old Seiko 5. This shift was primarily motivated by two factors: 1. I lost interest in the activity tracking features. 2. Even worrying about the battery once every 6 months was too much. And supplemented by a third, which is that the fancy watch wasn't very readable and lacked a second hand. That made it less capable at the main thing I use it for: keeping track of the time. I looked hard at a Pebble at one point before deciding that, since my phone is almost always in my pocket or on the table in front of me, getting it into position for viewing information would take only nominally more effort and probably gets me to a place where I can act on whatever information the device is telling me much more efficiently. Also, having a non-user-replaceable battery means that the device will only live for so long, and I'm really trying to limit my consumption of disposable technology. I think that, for now, my most optimistic case for smartwatches is that they're at about the same phase as handheld computing was 15 or so years ago. The technology is really interesting, but there needs to be more technology development and ironing out of subtle details before the idea is quite ready to take over the consumer market.

rilut 10y ago

But Citizen had offered them a better deal, didn't they? $740m rather than $40m. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/fitbit-pebble/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/fitbit-pebble/

kensai 10y ago
This exactly. And he turned it down. This is nowhere mentioned in his interview and it's an important point of his own failure as a CEO. He thought he could make a better deal back in the good days, overestimating the value of his company and NOT selling when the time is right. I don't buy it that he sold to Fitbit because Fitbit promised to keep the employees, this is exactly the bullshit I expect him to say to an interview to paint his story a courageous one. Pebble was an amazing startup with a lot of potential and good ideas (I find their short developer manual in C as one of the best introductions to C programming with practical examples ever written), but the CEO overestimated his company's maturity and value. Which is a shame. Let's hope Fitbit keeps alive some of the legacy.
broahmed 10y ago
You know what they say about hindsight and perfect vision. Sounds like Eric thought the company could have survived. I give him props for sticking with it as long as possible.
- lonelyw0lf 10y ago
  He must be feeling like killing himself now! wow! $740M!!! and instead now he heads back to YC as yet another partner. I'd really be curious to see YCs cap table :) Sam must have that locked up somewhere :)
uiri 10y ago
I haven't been able to find any substantiated source for the $740M figure. All the other news sites cite an article on The Information[1] about the FitBit deal which is paywalled. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/fitbit-to-buy-pebble https://www.theinformation.com/fitbit-to-buy-pebble

teekert 10y ago

Am the only one around here that doesn't care one single bit about the fitness aspects? My Pebble Time Steel broke (actually just the band), just before these announcements and I got a refund (spendable only at the company I bought the Pebble, but that's ok.) But I miss it! I miss the the notifications, I had gotten completely used to putting my Phone somewhere, anywhere withing BT range for the duration of the day. 99% of notifications do not require immediate attention (I also strictly filter what was allowed through to the watch) but some do and the ability to see that on your wrist is gold to me. For now, sadly, there is no replacement that even comes close. I really want an always one screen and at least 5 days of battery life.

ThePawnBreak 10y ago
> For now, sadly, there is no replacement that even comes close. I really want an always one screen and at least 5 days of battery life. Did you take a look at Vector Watch?
- teekert 10y ago
  I did indeed, they look nice but a different price class (was going to get a Pebble 2 to replace the PTS1). For now they are also not sold in my country. they do tick the display and the battery (up to 30 days!) and water-resistant boxes. There are no apps but I don't care that much (though the ski and mtb apps I used on Pebble were nice). I also read somewhere there were some BT stability issues but I'd have to check again and there are always updates. I'd really like to play with one, see what the OS feels like. I'll keep an eye on them, for now them may make it somewhat cheaper and somewhat smaller (half the battery life is still very nice) but definitely Vector comes closest to the Pebble indeed. For those interested: http://vectorwatch.com/ http://vectorwatch.com/
pluma 10y ago
I absolutely agree. I backed Pebble the first and second time they were on Kickstarter but passed on round three because my Pebble Time Steel was still going strong and all the new features seemed to be focused on the fitness aspects to the point the "one more thing" reveal turned out to be a small headless device that is only really useful to runners. Pebble was everything I wanted from a smartwatch: * a water-resistant Android-compatible wrist-mounted bluetooth watch * that shows me real-time notifications from my smartphone (but lets me filter notifications to kill the noise) * that allows me to pause/resume smartphone audio * that has an always-on display I can read in broad daylight * and that can go a number of days without charging Now that Pebble is gone, I'm regretting not having bought the Pebble 2 because I'm worried there's nothing I can replace my Pebble Time Steel with when the time comes. I don't need nor want a fitness tracker -- I'm only interested in sleep tracking and I prefer charging my watch while I sleep. A heartrate monitor would be fun but just a gimmick. Ironically I never had any use for wrist watches before I bought my first Pebble and now I feel naked without it. But I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for something I really just want to tell me the time and buzz and show me notifications without having to pull my smartphone out.

bambax 10y ago

I have to ask: were 160, then 120 people really necessary? Judging by their Kickstarters' successes, Pebble had made "something people want", and they had made it repeatedly. Couldn't they have waited out the bad times with a lighter team, while tweaking the products and remaining profitable or at least just above zero? 120 people sounds enormous to me -- esp. given that all manufacturing was outsourced...?

hobo_mark 10y ago
Wow I had no idea they were so "bloated" (for lack of a better word), and it looks like most were in Palo Alto! That's just insane.
VLM 10y ago
Interfacing with retailer buyers is labor intensive and they were trying to sell pebbles everywhere. So you have like one employee-equivalent (across multiple departments) per major client (amazon, target, walmart) and maybe half an employee per minor retailer and you can easily use maybe 30 employees just keeping the retailers entertained. Even if you only sell one unit to walmart it still costs you like one employee-equivalent just to keep the monster fed with paperwork and contracts. Also hardware has very expensive customer support costs, lets say they had 1e6 sales and fifty customer support (to keep the math easy) and lets say a typical customer support dude burns an hour per ticket total (including training and everything back office) and works 2000 hours per year, thats 100000 or 1e5 customer service interactions per year. Thats only a 10% support rate. Of course the annual rate was probably much lower than 10%, and they probably had a lot less than 50 customer service employees, but you can see how selling consumer hardware can be incredibly expensive. Its very difficult to have a million units out there with fewer than say five people baby sitting them. There's also the SV stereotype that it takes about Y folks in SV to do what 1 person in Chicago would do, where the value of Y is extremely debatable but certainly larger than 1. The nicest way to put it is if it takes six months to soak in the culture and we intend to double in size and sales every six months then need a team twice as big as it "needs" to be today to be ready in six months, and of course six months from now the team will have doubled again to keep up with the onramp to the next doubling 12 months out, etc. Of course when the growth rate doesn't achieve or flatlines or goes negative for a couple quarters then you have like ten people to do a one person job, so all sad company stories end this way, with why do you have 10M units worth of employees with only 1M sales, no wonder, blah blah.

pluma 10y ago

> Apple’s emphasis on fashion and Pebble’s on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours—the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. I'm not sure this is accurate. Pebble sold relatively well. They just couldn't get more customers beyond a certain point. It's a niche market. Fitness trackers become obsolete quickly. They tend to be relatively cheap and there are a lot of sensors and software that can be iterated on to justify selling newer versions of the same product every year to the same people. When the Pebble Steel came out, I gave my original Pebble away. The only reason I switched was that I liked the design of the new one better, the original still worked just as well as the new one. When the Pebble Time Steel came out, I switched again and again the one I had at the time worked fine. The Pebble Time Steel had some new features but mostly it did much of the same. I passed when the Pebble 2 came out because I couldn't justify paying again for a replacement to something that still worked as good as on the first day. The Pebble 2 brought some fitness features but was otherwise no different from what I already had. Fitness trackers have planned obsolescence. The tech becomes outdated very quickly and the conditions in which they are used lend themselves to natural wear and tear. Utilitarian smartwatches on the other hand are expected to last. Pebble sold me three smartwatches in almost as many years. They actually marketed four[0] more in that time. They oversaturated the market and grossly overestimated the demand. Their first Kickstarter generated $10MM, their second in early 2015 generated $20MM, their third generated $12MM. Considering they were falling in the red in 2015 and their 2016 campaign was doubling down on the fitness aspect and bombed in comparison to 2015, I don't buy the narrative that fitness tracking would have been a better focus. [0]: To recap: Pebble, Pebble Steel, Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, Pebble Time Round, Pebble 2, Time 2 and Pebble Core (which is not a smartwatch). The 2016 Kickstarter also saw the edition of silver/gold editions of the Pebble Round but those seem otherwise identical to the original.

Mvandenbergh 10y ago
Yeah I don't know if it's right to say that the market is "rooted" in that segment it seems like it's easier to make money there for a variety of reasons. Something like 80% of the market is special purpose wearables like Fitbits vs. 20% smart watches like Pebble and Apple. One of the only companies in the segment that had good results in 2016 was Garmin which focuses on activity watches. The fitness and activity tracker segment has several advantages: -there's an obvious benefit to being wearable, so they're not competing directly with smartphones. -they're selling into a rapidly growing market for "lifestyle" accessories. -precisely that obsolescence that you mentioned means they can keep selling to existing customers. -many people who use them get addicted to the gamification aspect of fitness tracking and will immediately replace broken items. -sports equipment is expected to wear out in a way that premium watches are not, so watches that break after a year or two do not leave as much of a negative perception with customers.