48 ms·

Success and Failure at Pebble

557 points by zsid 4y ago

silveira 4y ago
I had Pebble and then Pebble Time. So many great memories. To this day there are things I could do in my Pebble that I can't find how to do in modern watches. Amazing community, SDK, development environment, watch faces, apps. Revolutionary product. But then Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, Pebble Core (!?). Why Pebble Core?
psychomugs 4y ago
My Pebble Time Round was one of my favorite gadgets, and its slow descent into a very light paperweight, due to not being able to hold a charge, broke my heart. I'm now a happy owner of an Apple Watch, but it's definitely much closer to small-computer-on-your-wrist than the watch-first design of the Time Round.
m1gu3l 4y ago
Ha I had one of these and used it for like a day before it went in to the junk drawer. Cool idea though.
nomel 4y ago
> 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. Does anyone have some insight?
- hinkley 4y ago
  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.
  - mulderc 4y ago
    I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.
- erohead 4y ago
  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.
  - girvo 4y ago
    Thank you for making the Pebble Time Round. It's still the single best smartwatch I have ever used. I miss it every day.
    - erohead 4y ago
      Could buy one on ebay for $50! Apps still work on iPhone and Android ;)
      - girvo 4y ago
        I'm honestly super tempted to -- though my Apple Watch Series 7 gets somewhat close to being a good replacement. Somewhat, but not quite!
    - esel2k 4y ago
      I am a proud user of the pebble time round since a year (60$) and proudly wear it every day - especially on business trips were all have their bulky apple watch.
- drBonkers 4y ago
  > 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.
  - _jal 4y ago
    Are we talking about the SE? If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.
    - boulos 4y ago
      No, I think they mean the iPhone 12 Mini: https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        In that case, the reason I know people who didn't get the 12 Mini was it competed with the new SE, and they didn't want to upgrade during the pandemic when they were trapped at home. They're thinking about the 13 mini or the new SEs now that they are available.
  - yumraj 4y ago
    > Now you know at least one person. The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.
    - d3nj4l 4y ago
      Not really. Apple plans their phone line ups well in advance, and given that it's hardware it might be very difficult to change it on short notice. The mini significantly undersold expectations, leading to Apple even cutting production [1]. If you want further proof that the mini bombed, consider that every rumour has it gone from this year's lineup. 1: https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reportedly-well-below-expectations/ https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reported...
- evanfarrell 4y ago
  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!
  - eli 4y ago
    That’s also how you have a market oversaturated with products competing for the same upper middle class 20-somethings.
    - drc500free 4y ago
      "I want the benefits of people serving me, but it's awkward to actually interact with them"
- redmen 4y ago
  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. Just an example.
- djbusby 4y ago
  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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-development https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...
- Permit 4y ago
  > 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?”.
  - maxwelldone 4y ago
    Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though? For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money. Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
    - Destiner 4y ago
      Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it. Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner. [1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
- pensatoio 4y ago
  I was one of those people, and I didn't buy it because of battery life. Unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but that's the reason.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- marcellus23 4y ago
  I and my entire family are buying minis. Just goes to show anecdotal evidence is utterly meaningless.
  - nomel 4y ago
    And, that's my point! But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-production-to-be-discontinued-due-to-poor-sales-71612621547776.html https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...
    - marcellus23 4y ago
      But then they did come back with a 13 mini, which suggests the demand is there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- who_cares 4y ago
  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…
- freeopinion 4y ago
  Faster horses.
- girvo 4y ago
  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.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > 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.
- jldugger 4y ago
  > 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.
  - jmoak3 4y ago
    Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it. I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!
- mpalczewski 4y ago
  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. The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.
- fomine3 4y ago
  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.
- mrexroad 4y ago
  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.
  - mulderc 4y ago
    13 mini already solved the battery and I believe has improved camera
    - Daneel_ 4y ago
      Can confirm on both fronts.
- ngngngng 4y ago
  > bought an iPhone mini. 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.
- lostgame 4y ago
  >> 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.
dawnerd 4y ago
Oh man I loved my Pebble! I still have it but lost the charger. Had no idea there was a project to bring them back to life.
- 51Cards 4y ago
  Google Rebble, they have full guides and software updates to keep your devices going. It's not a huge community but it's pretty dedicated.
  - will0 4y ago
    Check out rebble.io/howto to get started. If you have any questions we're on Discord[0] [0]: https://rebble.io/discord https://rebble.io/discord
kevinwang 4y ago
The Pebble Time was great!
sen 4y ago
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.
- slabity 4y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by "the entire brand got hand-grenaded" and "not get greedy"? Is this in reference to them selling to Fitbit? Or something before that? I purchased a Pebble Time Steel fairly late in the company's lifetime, so I was surprised and kind of confused about the whole situation.
- erohead 4y ago
  Meh, I know that we did not get greedy. Greedy implies we were driven by a selfish goal of making more money for ourselves. As the founder, I can truly state that it was not our intention. We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people and started scaling up. As I outlined in the post, we (poorly) tried to target a larger market segment and also scaled up our team. We were mostly right - smartwatches are objectively a major industry right now, but our strategy to do so was pretty bad. I don't think I would have changed anything, but looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    If it makes you feel any better amazfit carry’s the torch now for long battery e-ink smartwatches, I still think the pebble did it better but at least there’s something out there.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    > We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people I think you were right. I remember when my Time2 Kickstarter refund came, I was seriously considering using that money to buy an Apple Watch. But I didn't like the plasticy look/feel of the base models, and wasn't prepared to spend twice as much to get one with the nice metal mesh strap. I then spent about half that money on three 2nd hand Russian mechanical watches on eBay, and that was the start of a small but very enjoyable collection and hobby. Now I'd guess 70% of my friends have a modern smart watch on their wrist, while I'm usually rocking my (poorly faked) Yuri Gagarin Sturmanskie replica, or my Raketa Big Zero, or my Amphibia. And I've got half a dozen eBay alerts waiting for a few interesting mechanical watches I want to add to my collection...
wycy 4y ago
I loved my OG Pebble. It really was revolutionary in the wearables market.
bllguo 4y ago
shame what happened to pebble. article is on point for my personal experience; I had both the original and a Time and preferred the original. the new capabilities were not compelling and the aesthetic was worse imo.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I loved the pebble time steel and wore it for years. But then when I compared it to the Apple Watch I got later, the pebble looked like a child's toy watch.
InsaneOstrich 4y ago
RIP Pebble. I still wear my Pebble Time Steel every day
51Cards 4y ago
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.
zozbot234 4y ago
There are lots of smallish e-paper displays intended for use as dynamic price tags. It's one of the main formats for the medium. Could you use them to make a largeish wrist computer device that might be more useful than the Pebble?
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  You're going to have lots of issues with the very slow refresh rates. Especially since for a wrist computer, touchscreen input would actually become better than a row of buttons).
rvz 4y ago
What a shame. Could have been an alternative to watches running WearOS and watchOS, but it wasn't meant to be, other than a hackers toy that was killed by being squeezed out of the market with high operating costs and we are now left with the same old Apple and Google duoploy once again. It's time to stop with this 'world's first' marketing. Apple entered the market late and were around the corner, came in and changed everything (Again). Not acting and moving quickly enough to when a giant enters the market and brushing it off as nothing also contributed to this failure as well. I had high hopes for Pebble to go further than their current market, but it seems that it just became another Amiga-like product. Forgotten in the graveyard of many other failed products only to be used by hackers and hobbyists.
ohyoutravel 4y ago
This is a cool story. I loved my Pebble and still have my Kickstarter Edition. I bought it because it was a geeky thing and I could write code and deploy that code to the Pebble.
paxys 4y ago
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.
- mr-ron 4y ago
  Gopro? Roomba?
  - paxys 4y ago
    Gopro has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for many years now. Its stock fell from $87 in 2014 to $2 in 2020 (has recovered somewhat to $8 now). They started looking for buyers for the company in 2018 but still haven't found one. Hardly what I'd consider a major success. iRobot has a somewhat better story, but is overall not worth too much more than Gopro (~$1.5B). It is also not a recent startup but has its roots in DARPA grants and defense contracts from the 90s.
    - karmanyaahm 4y ago
      Gopro is the default pop-name for what I can only describe as a Gopro form factor camera (tiny, hi res, easy to mount). While their company might not be successful, their brand very much is.
- krasin 4y ago
  > 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. 1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video 2. https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-revenues-surge-40-cent-fiscal-2020 https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-...
ericd 4y ago
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.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  You can always still run you Pebble Time with Rebble [0] :) I still use mine to this day! [0] https://rebble.io/ https://rebble.io/
  - jimmux 4y ago
    I pulled mine out of storage a few weeks ago to resurrect it as a display for my EUC, and was surprised by it yet again. The fast refresh and good visibility is just so pleasant to use. Rebble was much easier to set up than I had assumed it would be, and isn't missing anything as far as I can tell.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Thanks for the link! I actually stopped wearing it at the end of the M&A process, because of how stressful the the M&A process was. As much as I liked the device, I started getting a bit of a negative Pavlovian reaction to the wrist buzzes, because the contents of the emails tended to be pretty stressful. I intended it to be a short digital detox, but since then, I've only worn the dumbest of dumbwatches. But maybe it's time to give it another go, it'd be great to have it help kill off my phone checking habit again. It's truly awesome that the fact that it was so open has allowed it to live past its parent company.
    - WesternWind 4y ago
      Yeah I turned of email notifications on my pebble (and quite a few other apps), but I still use it for a quick check if someone texts or whatever.
workerdrone451 4y ago
Had to laugh that he jumped into a paid chat service, I get combining all these services into one app is a way to "solve" this problem, but no one is going to pay $10 a month for it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I know I'm probably a rare user here but I pay monthly for the hosted element account which I hardly use. I consider it more like a donation to FOSS and I check back every few weeks to see how the project is going.
sn41 4y ago
I am not necessarily sure I agree with this analysis. Will fleshing out the long term vision necessarily win you more customers? I just think that this was a sad case of a very good company that made a wrong guess - efficiency tools instead of sport/fitness. It does not even sound like a mistake. Maybe the size of the bet on a risky guess was too big, and that is what caused the failure.
jakecopp 4y ago
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. [1]: https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/
- wallawe 4y ago
  I'm pumped for Beeper but have been on the wait list 6 months now, and am wondering if they're having implementation issues.
  - erohead 4y ago
    We're working through our waitlist, talking to customers, getting feedback and iterating: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta?s=w https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta?s=w
    - bsimpson 4y ago
      Surprised the FAQ doesn't say anything about encryption/privacy. The big selling point for Signal et. al. is knowing that corps/govs/etc can't spy on my conversations. If I was going to give another app permission to use my Signal, I'd need assurances I'm not sacrificing my security.
      - shp0ngle 4y ago
        You are, by design. Beeper gets around the e2e encryption by just running WA themselves on their side; there is no other way for them to be doing what they say they are doing…
        jfkimmes 4y ago
        I run several bridges from my home. With End-to-Bridge Encryption enabled this gives you about the same security guarantees as E2EE with a second device added (Signal Desktop, etc). With Beeper you can do the same, IIRC. Their value proposition then hinges on how good their clients can aggregate conversations and different chat networks, I guess.
KerrAvon 4y ago
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.
- taeric 4y ago
  I'm guessing that Google will seem to do everything they can to not have a coherent story here. :( I can only guess what messenger platform they will push on their next phone.
- runlevel1 4y ago
  2015-04-24: Apple Watch release 2015-05-24: Pebble 2.0 (Pebble Time) release One month to the day. That's some truly unfortunate timing.
- erohead 4y ago
  Agreed. It was impossible for us to deliver an amazing notification and call experience for iOS users because Apple did not (and still doesn't) expose APIs for sending iMessage, starting calls or talking to Siri.
- diego_moita 4y ago
  Counter counterpoint: Samsung, Fitbit, Garmin and dozens of other players are still selling smartwatches. The majority of phones in the world do not run iOS, so you can't pair a Apple watch with them. There is a still active market for 2nd hand Pebbles. There are things you can do with a Pebble that you can't do with an Apple Watch (e.g.: use it in a barcode reader, make your own watchface, etc). At this right moment I have a Pebble in my left hand. I don't want to use an iPhone or Apple Watch.
modeless 4y ago
Still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day. The form factor is unmatched by any other smartwatch before or since. I don't think anyone else is even trying to make a watch this thin and it's a damn shame.
gigel82 4y ago
I liked my Microsoft Band 2 much better than my Apple Watch (it's been gathering dust for the past ~2 years, but even before than I rarely used it). Wonder why they killed that one...
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
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.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  That's what I noticed as well. If they had targeted 50M in sales, would they still be around today? I'm not sure what to take away from this except hardware startups are hard - you can make a wildly successful product and get bankrupted because you failed at supply chain management.
  - bsder 4y ago
    The problem is that $50M in sales is only about 500K units. That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume. Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died. It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.
    - erohead 4y ago
      naw that's not true. The valley of death is >1k units but <10k. Not enough money to pay back your hw tooling. There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics. Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
js2 4y ago
> 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.
- COGlory 4y ago
  What's wrong with being a niche product?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    In the electronics field, a niche project means less economies of scale, a much high COGS and a higher final pricepoint.
  - js2 4y ago
    Nothing, but I don't think that was the company's aspirations.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    Nothing. People just expect things to be magically cheap, fast and high quality or it's somehow unviable, unless Apple (or other massive brand) do it. I think the same people maybe don't even understand why someone might want a high quality product, and be willing to pay for it.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    You can't be a small player with hardware when big players exist in the same category. Customers start to ask why the watch costs as much as an Apple Watch but contains an 8th of the features.
- xmaayy 4y ago
  "Apple sells millions of iPhones, therefore Android phones (samsung, Xiaomi, etc) are doomed" I have a Garmin watch, an apple watch, whoop, etc (not all on at the same time of course). Different people want different things, ex: apple watches should be charged daily, but the pebble could be charged weekly. That in itself is a big selling point. I'm sure there were many such differences that could make for a successful product.
brk 4y ago
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.
glenstein 4y ago
>Our goal is to build the best damn chat app. In the process, it’s likely that Beeper will become the underlying communication system for everyone on earth. That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."
otachack 4y ago
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.
- erohead 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind note! I think there are a few Pebblers working on the playdate ;)
- robinsoh 4y ago
  > The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk. Pebble didn't use eInk. It used a Sharp transflective display.
Lamad123 4y ago
7-day charge!!! WTF, how come I never heard of this!!!
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I had the pebble time steel which had a 10 day battery, and interestingly I felt like it was always going flat on me mid day because I'd get the charge warning away from home and forget about it causing it to go flat. While my current 1.5 day watch has never gone flat on me because I put it on the charger every night. I have a feeling this is a big part of why phones and accessories have not moved past the daily charge schedule.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  Amazfit Bip and Bip Lite (the latter is preferable unless you need standalone GPS) consistently does 22-23 days of battery life (8-10 days if you use a watch face with seconds).
leros 4y ago
So many $10m-100m companies kill themselves in the quest to become a $1b company.
wanderr 4y ago
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. [1] https://www.trybento.co/ https://www.trybento.co/
shmoe 4y ago
Loved my original pebble -- then the Apple Watch came along.
freeopinion 4y ago
"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.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Pebble was absolutely a success in the first few years. They failed to sustain the success. Apple and Samsung had entered the markets and invested orders of magnitude more funding than Pebble had. Pebble probably could have limped on for another 5 years but ultimately their fate had been sealed and it was best to sell and leave on a high note than to go in to decline.
  - 02020202 4y ago
    this is the modern world of monopolies and big money. they either buy you out or crush you. this is why progress is stalled these days so much in hw and sw world. it's just not worth it and requires way too much backing to succeed and be able to compete with these monopolies.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Has progress stalled? The latest generation smart watches are massively better than the last pebble. The hardware that consumers have today is borderline magic. Just because they don't throw in crazy gimmicks in to each years release doesn't mean there was no progress.
    - supportlocal4h 4y ago
      Pebble didn't get crushed by a big money monopoly. Some people are willing to be "niche" and some people aren't. A company that produces 100 laptops per month for $100 profit each is not Apple. But that still means there is $10,000 per month left over after all salaries and other expenses. It's not a path to fame and glory, so few are interested. But it could sustain a very small company for a long time outside the world of monpolies and big money. But if you've figured out how to produce 5 laptops per day, 20 days every month, you're in a strange space. That's not a garage operation. So why not 50 per day? Then the eternal quest for growth leads you back into the world of monopolies and big money.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
"*But our main issue was that I did a terrible job at defining our long-term vision*... My personal vision was that Pebble would become a brain-computer interface company, with the smartwatch as the first always-on, always-worn gateway between computers and our bodies. But I rarely discussed this with the team, or even the exec team... I never invested time in building out a structured plan to actually make the brain-computer interface our company’s vision." [emphasis was in article] So he thinks somehow Pebble would have been better off if they focused on brain-interface technology? No one has done anything with that.
- ianai 4y ago
  No, he wanted some wearable that people could get so much use out of that they’d use it basically 24/7. Personally, not a bad idea. I could see this being how AR glasses “done right” eventually take off (say with tech not yet generally available at scale). Maybe if the display were retina scale in the glasses and able to be transparent or opaque as needed. It’s not a crazy idea for that to start with a watch.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    It's also tackling a lot of the right adjacent problems, both in terms of electromechanical constraints (miniaturization, heat, battery life), and also the usability piece, which is earning your place as their 24/7 device by being overwhelmingly useful rather than an annoyance, distraction, or addiction. When you see how Pebble fans talk about their devices, it's not hard to imagine that enthusiasm translating into a willingness to try a BCI. Certainly there was far more trust built up there than companies like Google or Apple have ever been able to earn.
bambax 4y ago
Great, clear and honest write-up. 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).
h4waii 4y ago
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.
- jazzabeanie 4y ago
  How does the PineTime stack up against the Pebble? My Pebble died years ago and I miss it a lot.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Sadly, it's not really in the same category, since it has a touchscreen and an emissive liquid crystal screen that has good visibility inside, but bad outside. But looks like that's what we have to settle with, unless someone tries to copy Pebble and also makes an open ecosystem that doesn't consider the "Linux Phones" developers as 2nd class citizens.
fomine3 4y ago
Recent smart watches too much focused on healthcare/fitness, but it seems that it's the only way to upselling (with sacrificing battery life).
- ianai 4y ago
  Wish they had a glucose monitor built into it somehow. Somehow that didn’t feel like a permanent needle into my wrist, of course…
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Agree, quick harmless glucose monitor is what I'd like to try. Current metrics like heartbeat, SpO2, ECG aren't much interesting. For health monitoring device, I'd like to have on my ankle.
    - ianai 4y ago
      Also I totally agree on fitness being slightly overly emphasized on the Apple Watch. It’s cool, but also not the only reason to have a watch.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I'm new to the scene (got a FitBit Luxe for Christmas) and it's been pretty positive for me, but I really hate how closed off the ecosystem is. Not having more access to the data, much less the live data, is such a bummer.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  What else would you want? Notifications and calling were pretty much solved on day one. Things like NFC payments were a nice post pebble addition but after that, extra fitness tracking is the only feature consumers desire which isn't fully being met.
tbranyen 4y ago
Wearing a Pebble Time right now. Works and looks great, but not 100% even with Rebble. Shame the company failed, the product was perfect for Android users.
bluSCALE4 4y ago
I loved my Pebble Time too. I was going to give it to my dad but when I went to fetch it, the battery had bubbled. Anyone know of a place that sells reputable battery replacement?
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Ifixit has some guides. [1] Others commenters in past threads have said it's not quite as easy as it looks, so I haven't pulled the trigger yet. But I'll probably give it a try when the battery life is down to 3 days. Right now I'm at 4-5, depending on if I remember to enable Airplane Mode at night. My fallback option right now is the Fossil hybrid smartwatch, which has the same basic functions and better battery life (10+ days), but is much harder to read. The screens also apparently get messed up by sun exposure...so I'm not anxious to jump on that bandwagon. If anyone else has tips on replacing the battery, please share with the rest of us! 1: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Pebble+Steel+Battery+Replacement/53227 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Pebble+Steel+Battery+Replacemen...
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    I've been using a Fossil HR since it came out and I love it. Battery life is indeed 10+ days, probably depends on how often it has to show notifications. I live in northern europe so the sun exposure does not compare to places like SF but so far so good. I never even heard of the sun exposure thing before now. App support has progressed so I really have no complaints about it anymore. If anything I think it's better than my old Pebble Time because it looks more like a classy watch. Oh and because it has actual hands instead of a screen to show time. I've replaced the strap though, it broke after a while. The app from Fossil is a hot mess but I rarely go into it. My use case is mainly show time, show notifications, control music. I bike everywhere so it makes things more safe to have a watch and not have to fiddle with my phone. But at the same time I think charging a smartwatch every day is ludicrous.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      For me, the biggest downsides were text readability and UX for scrolling through notifications (center button then lower button, unintuitively). Triggering the backlight was also surprisingly tricky. I did like the look though!
jshier 4y ago
Pebble story heard second hand. A major client executive, who was a huge Pebble fan, essentially forced us to connect the mobile apps we were doing for them (iOS, Android, and even Windows Mobile) to the Pebble. The Pebble SDK was C based, so it was rough finding experience from anyone on the existing mobile platforms. Eventually we got it bridged from the Pebble mobile app. Along the way we learned a bizarre fact about the C compiler used by the SDK: it didn't support conditional short circuiting, so there were a variety of bizarre bugs that we had to go back and find once we figured it out.
- wvenable 4y ago
  The C compiler for the Pebble was GCC for ARM.
gnicholas 4y ago
Why didn't they go back to their backers and ask if they'd be willing to pay a higher price? I would have been happy to pay 2x what I had pledged. When the Kickstarter launched I anticipated (based on how much I'd paid at Target for my Time Steel 1) that the price for the much more capable Time Steel 2 would have been significantly higher, like $350-$400. I'd have been willing to pledge that much, and if it meant keeping the company alive I might have paid even more.
greesil 4y ago
Hardware is hard, if only because the revenue model is problematic unless your margins are really, really good
ellen44 4y ago
Thanks, it's useful!
wvenable 4y ago
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.
mixedCase 4y ago
You merely built the best smartwatch anyone has produced to date. Programmable, week-long battery, e-ink, ecosystem, microphone with speech to text incorporated, and pretty much defined the category... I can only hope to see another one like it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The pebble was not epaper. It just had one of those old style reflective LCDs like the gameboy. Low power usage but they look unacceptably bad to the average consumer who would rather a vibrant display with daily charging.
Xavdidtheshadow 4y ago
I loved my pebble(s). 2 great stories: 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.
nunez 4y ago
Fuck I love how raw and unpolished this was. I also LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVED my Pebble, both the original and the Time Steel. I was so sad to see them get acquihired, though happy to see some of its guts make it into the Versa line. Also, stupid excited for Beeper. I hope they can figure out the cohesion problem without getting sued into the next millennium :D
ar7hur 4y ago
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.
m-p-3 4y ago
I miss my Pebble Time Steel, the concept of a Timeline on the watch for upcoming events and weather is IMO superior to anything else out there. I somewhat found a spiritual replacement for it with the Bangle JS 2, but the experience isn't as polished and it feels a bit slow.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  There’s also watchy which is more like the original. I haven’t seen it in the flesh but maybe others have experience. https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
  - m-p-3 4y ago
    That thing looks T H I C C
topher200 4y ago
shameless self-promotion Three ex-Pebblers went on to found Memfault(YC W19, https://memfault.com 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 https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/memfault
- RandallBrown 4y ago
  > Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices. To me that only seems like a question you could answer by managing thousands of devices. Not that it would be easy, just that you couldn't really answer that very accurately with only a handful of devices.
  - tyhoff 4y ago
    It’s primarily about the number of hours. At Pebble, we’d be able to get a pretty good gauge on battery life with about 10-20 devices and about 24 hours worth of data. We recorded the battery’s percentage drop over the course of each hour, averaged all samples together, and then used that to estimate how long the battery charge would last. This strategy is covered here: https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-heartbeat-metrics#battery-life-trends https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-heartbeat-metrics... Of course it’s better with thousands of devices, but we were always surprised how accurate it was (as long as we had a few Android users in the office - it reliably got worse battery life due to worse Bluetooth performance)
aboodman 4y ago
I was obsessed with the idea of smartwatches in 2011-2012 and was involved in a few early efforts that, while exciting, were more complex than what I was really dreaming of. When the pebble kickstarter launched it was so close to what I had in mind, it was pretty disheartening. It's possible I even reached out on the website to seeing about joining the team :). I can't remember. Anyway, what an inspiring product and team. Thanks for sharing the story, and for the honesty.
teekert 4y ago
I cried a little when Pebble went away, never got a smartwatch again that felt as nice from a company I felt I could trust.
yobbo 4y ago
His conclusions seem correct, but this is how I see the general anti-pattern: - Envision a product that seems great in fantasy and on paper, and the product category is still undefined - Invest into realizing this product before sufficient technology is available to meet expectations Arguably, Apple Watch is also not "good enough" to fulfil the fantasy of what a smartwatch could be, but their brand is strong enough to define the market. People want to wear something that fulfils the image of "Apple Watch", and that is enough. A product without brand power built from cheap and premature technology will be niche, and not enough to "define the category". The valuable question is "what do people expect from our brand", rather than "what fantasy products can we imagine". Until it's realistic to build something that fulfils the expectation of an Apple product, they will not attempt it. The iPod vs mp3 players is a similar story. Thinking that Pebble "defined a product category" is a misunderstanding of the mechanisms. The fantasy of what a smartwatch can be is obvious. The question is how to realize to the standard required to meet expectations. Understanding these expectations is the valuable insight.
Dave3of5 4y ago
Pebble failed because the big players seen this massive market, came in and made much better products. End of story.
pjmlp 4y ago
> We were the first company to work on smartwatches. A bit of history rewriting going on there... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
simonbarker87 4y ago
I just released an episode of a podcast in which I was trying to remember the name of Pebble, talking about a company that was "making smart watches in like 2011/12". Such a shame they didn't make it as it was a very cool device and company. Jonny and Simon's Reel Tech Talk: https://share.transistor.fm/s/39e1935b https://share.transistor.fm/s/39e1935b Around 15m20s for those interested (we watch a film and the talk about the tech in that film and have some fun)
odiroot 4y ago
Pebble Time is still my favourite smart watch ever. And mine is working without problems 7 years now. The battery life went down from ~10 days to 5-6 but still much better than any other I tried using. Built-in compass, always-on display and physical buttons are just great.
enjikaka 4y ago
I really wanted a Pebble but they ceased production just as I was able to buy one back in the days. Still want one badly. All other watches suck.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I really wonder why there hasn't been a reboot or kickstarter campaigns for a successor to Pebble, especially since there has been years of development in smartphone-sized components (CPU's, batteries, displays) since then. There IS a market; the two million that bought a Pebble when it was still around, and millions more that missed out on the Pebble but would still pay money to have one now.
- diego_moita 4y ago
  You'll find some on eBay and even Aliexpress.
fennecfoxy 4y ago
I still have my beloved Pebble Time Round sitting in a drawer, somewhere. I blame the Apple Watch for the downfall/unpopularity of smartwatches like Pebble. People for some reason would rather have a $500 or more watch packed with over the top features and one day's battery life.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Apple Watch isn't really a competition - AFAIK Pebble never worked that well with iOS anyway (because of the usual iOS issues with third party hardware and software).
samlu 4y ago
I loved my Pebble. Had the first edition in Black with a watchface that you could only read if you knew how, used it until it broke years down the line. (The little plastic on the sides revealed the electronics, closed it with bluetac, but at some point water got in and ruined the internals) Got the Garmin Instinct Solar Tactical now, and am very happy with it. 1 month of battery life is just mindblowing to me. It also looks sleek as hell (I've got a techwearish style irl)
- wngr 4y ago
  +1 for current Garmin models. They finally fulfill the requirements my former Pebble models set.
hemmert 4y ago
Bring it back :-)
ajot 4y ago
> 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.
diego_moita 4y ago
I have a Pebble Time in my pulse now. Have one more in a box for the day this one fails and a Pebble original in a drawer. I also keep spare batteries to fix them. I make my own watchfaces and customized some apps to my needs: authenticator (for 2 factor authentications), skunk (with bar codes to use in place of physical cards), ... Pebble was a brilliant product that didn't succeed. When so many horrible products succeed in this industry it is sad that being good is not enough.
refracture 4y ago
I loved my Time. Always on screen, awesome 8 bit color watch face, wonderful battery life.. I was pretty disappointed when fitbit decided to void all the warranties however, mine failed before the one year mark but after fitbit purchased them and shut it all down.
fudged71 4y ago
‪Watches need buttons. Pebble was the only watch that was easy to use while wearing gloves.‬
esel2k 4y ago
After reading through 500 comments and myself only liking the pebble time (maybe steel for bat life) and the pebble time round, I wonder why pebble didn’t stop at two models. One for the formfactor and slim design fans and one for the general users. With that money spend all effort developing that long awaited pebble time 2 and double the price.
tikiman163 4y ago
I was super disappointed when pebble failed, it had so much potential and I loved where they were going with it.

557 points by zsid 4y ago

I had Pebble and then Pebble Time. So many great memories. To this day there are things I could do in my Pebble that I can't find how to do in modern watches. Amazing community, SDK, development environment, watch faces, apps. Revolutionary product. But then Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, Pebble Core (!?). Why Pebble Core?

psychomugs 4y ago

My Pebble Time Round was one of my favorite gadgets, and its slow descent into a very light paperweight, due to not being able to hold a charge, broke my heart. I'm now a happy owner of an Apple Watch, but it's definitely much closer to small-computer-on-your-wrist than the watch-first design of the Time Round.

m1gu3l 4y ago

Ha I had one of these and used it for like a day before it went in to the junk drawer. Cool idea though.

nomel 4y ago

> 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. Does anyone have some insight?

hinkley 4y ago
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.
- mulderc 4y ago
  I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.
erohead 4y ago
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.
- girvo 4y ago
  Thank you for making the Pebble Time Round. It's still the single best smartwatch I have ever used. I miss it every day.
  - erohead 4y ago
    Could buy one on ebay for $50! Apps still work on iPhone and Android ;)
    - girvo 4y ago
      I'm honestly super tempted to -- though my Apple Watch Series 7 gets somewhat close to being a good replacement. Somewhat, but not quite!
  - esel2k 4y ago
    I am a proud user of the pebble time round since a year (60$) and proudly wear it every day - especially on business trips were all have their bulky apple watch.
drBonkers 4y ago
> 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.
- _jal 4y ago
  Are we talking about the SE? If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.
  - boulos 4y ago
    No, I think they mean the iPhone 12 Mini: https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      In that case, the reason I know people who didn't get the 12 Mini was it competed with the new SE, and they didn't want to upgrade during the pandemic when they were trapped at home. They're thinking about the 13 mini or the new SEs now that they are available.
- yumraj 4y ago
  > Now you know at least one person. The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.
  - d3nj4l 4y ago
    Not really. Apple plans their phone line ups well in advance, and given that it's hardware it might be very difficult to change it on short notice. The mini significantly undersold expectations, leading to Apple even cutting production [1]. If you want further proof that the mini bombed, consider that every rumour has it gone from this year's lineup. 1: https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reportedly-well-below-expectations/ https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reported...
evanfarrell 4y ago
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!
- eli 4y ago
  That’s also how you have a market oversaturated with products competing for the same upper middle class 20-somethings.
  - drc500free 4y ago
    "I want the benefits of people serving me, but it's awkward to actually interact with them"
redmen 4y ago
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. Just an example.
djbusby 4y ago
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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-development https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...
Permit 4y ago
> 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?”.
- maxwelldone 4y ago
  Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though? For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money. Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
  - Destiner 4y ago
    Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it. Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner. [1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
pensatoio 4y ago
I was one of those people, and I didn't buy it because of battery life. Unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but that's the reason.
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marcellus23 4y ago
I and my entire family are buying minis. Just goes to show anecdotal evidence is utterly meaningless.
- nomel 4y ago
  And, that's my point! But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-production-to-be-discontinued-due-to-poor-sales-71612621547776.html https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...
  - marcellus23 4y ago
    But then they did come back with a 13 mini, which suggests the demand is there.
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AdrianB1 4y ago
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.
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who_cares 4y ago
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…
freeopinion 4y ago
Faster horses.
girvo 4y ago
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.
makeitdouble 4y ago
> 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.
jldugger 4y ago
> 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.
- jmoak3 4y ago
  Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it. I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!
mpalczewski 4y ago
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. The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.
fomine3 4y ago
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.
mrexroad 4y ago
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.
- mulderc 4y ago
  13 mini already solved the battery and I believe has improved camera
  - Daneel_ 4y ago
    Can confirm on both fronts.
ngngngng 4y ago
> bought an iPhone mini. 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.
lostgame 4y ago
>> 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.

dawnerd 4y ago

Oh man I loved my Pebble! I still have it but lost the charger. Had no idea there was a project to bring them back to life.

51Cards 4y ago
Google Rebble, they have full guides and software updates to keep your devices going. It's not a huge community but it's pretty dedicated.
- will0 4y ago
  Check out rebble.io/howto to get started. If you have any questions we're on Discord[0] [0]: https://rebble.io/discord https://rebble.io/discord

kevinwang 4y ago

The Pebble Time was great!

sen 4y ago

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.

slabity 4y ago
Can you explain what you mean by "the entire brand got hand-grenaded" and "not get greedy"? Is this in reference to them selling to Fitbit? Or something before that? I purchased a Pebble Time Steel fairly late in the company's lifetime, so I was surprised and kind of confused about the whole situation.
erohead 4y ago
Meh, I know that we did not get greedy. Greedy implies we were driven by a selfish goal of making more money for ourselves. As the founder, I can truly state that it was not our intention. We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people and started scaling up. As I outlined in the post, we (poorly) tried to target a larger market segment and also scaled up our team. We were mostly right - smartwatches are objectively a major industry right now, but our strategy to do so was pretty bad. I don't think I would have changed anything, but looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  If it makes you feel any better amazfit carry’s the torch now for long battery e-ink smartwatches, I still think the pebble did it better but at least there’s something out there.
- bigiain 4y ago
  > We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people I think you were right. I remember when my Time2 Kickstarter refund came, I was seriously considering using that money to buy an Apple Watch. But I didn't like the plasticy look/feel of the base models, and wasn't prepared to spend twice as much to get one with the nice metal mesh strap. I then spent about half that money on three 2nd hand Russian mechanical watches on eBay, and that was the start of a small but very enjoyable collection and hobby. Now I'd guess 70% of my friends have a modern smart watch on their wrist, while I'm usually rocking my (poorly faked) Yuri Gagarin Sturmanskie replica, or my Raketa Big Zero, or my Amphibia. And I've got half a dozen eBay alerts waiting for a few interesting mechanical watches I want to add to my collection...

wycy 4y ago

I loved my OG Pebble. It really was revolutionary in the wearables market.

bllguo 4y ago

shame what happened to pebble. article is on point for my personal experience; I had both the original and a Time and preferred the original. the new capabilities were not compelling and the aesthetic was worse imo.

Gigachad 4y ago
I loved the pebble time steel and wore it for years. But then when I compared it to the Apple Watch I got later, the pebble looked like a child's toy watch.

InsaneOstrich 4y ago

RIP Pebble. I still wear my Pebble Time Steel every day

51Cards 4y ago

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.

zozbot234 4y ago

There are lots of smallish e-paper displays intended for use as dynamic price tags. It's one of the main formats for the medium. Could you use them to make a largeish wrist computer device that might be more useful than the Pebble?

BlueTemplar 4y ago
You're going to have lots of issues with the very slow refresh rates. Especially since for a wrist computer, touchscreen input would actually become better than a row of buttons).

rvz 4y ago

What a shame. Could have been an alternative to watches running WearOS and watchOS, but it wasn't meant to be, other than a hackers toy that was killed by being squeezed out of the market with high operating costs and we are now left with the same old Apple and Google duoploy once again. It's time to stop with this 'world's first' marketing. Apple entered the market late and were around the corner, came in and changed everything (Again). Not acting and moving quickly enough to when a giant enters the market and brushing it off as nothing also contributed to this failure as well. I had high hopes for Pebble to go further than their current market, but it seems that it just became another Amiga-like product. Forgotten in the graveyard of many other failed products only to be used by hackers and hobbyists.

ohyoutravel 4y ago

This is a cool story. I loved my Pebble and still have my Kickstarter Edition. I bought it because it was a geeky thing and I could write code and deploy that code to the Pebble.

paxys 4y ago

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.

mr-ron 4y ago
Gopro? Roomba?
- paxys 4y ago
  Gopro has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for many years now. Its stock fell from $87 in 2014 to $2 in 2020 (has recovered somewhat to $8 now). They started looking for buyers for the company in 2018 but still haven't found one. Hardly what I'd consider a major success. iRobot has a somewhat better story, but is overall not worth too much more than Gopro (~$1.5B). It is also not a recent startup but has its roots in DARPA grants and defense contracts from the 90s.
  - karmanyaahm 4y ago
    Gopro is the default pop-name for what I can only describe as a Gopro form factor camera (tiny, hi res, easy to mount). While their company might not be successful, their brand very much is.
krasin 4y ago
> 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. 1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video 2. https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-revenues-surge-40-cent-fiscal-2020 https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-...

ericd 4y ago

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.

jszymborski 4y ago
You can always still run you Pebble Time with Rebble [0] :) I still use mine to this day! [0] https://rebble.io/ https://rebble.io/
- jimmux 4y ago
  I pulled mine out of storage a few weeks ago to resurrect it as a display for my EUC, and was surprised by it yet again. The fast refresh and good visibility is just so pleasant to use. Rebble was much easier to set up than I had assumed it would be, and isn't missing anything as far as I can tell.
- ericd 4y ago
  Thanks for the link! I actually stopped wearing it at the end of the M&A process, because of how stressful the the M&A process was. As much as I liked the device, I started getting a bit of a negative Pavlovian reaction to the wrist buzzes, because the contents of the emails tended to be pretty stressful. I intended it to be a short digital detox, but since then, I've only worn the dumbest of dumbwatches. But maybe it's time to give it another go, it'd be great to have it help kill off my phone checking habit again. It's truly awesome that the fact that it was so open has allowed it to live past its parent company.
  - WesternWind 4y ago
    Yeah I turned of email notifications on my pebble (and quite a few other apps), but I still use it for a quick check if someone texts or whatever.

workerdrone451 4y ago

Had to laugh that he jumped into a paid chat service, I get combining all these services into one app is a way to "solve" this problem, but no one is going to pay $10 a month for it.

Gigachad 4y ago
I know I'm probably a rare user here but I pay monthly for the hosted element account which I hardly use. I consider it more like a donation to FOSS and I check back every few weeks to see how the project is going.

sn41 4y ago

I am not necessarily sure I agree with this analysis. Will fleshing out the long term vision necessarily win you more customers? I just think that this was a sad case of a very good company that made a wrong guess - efficiency tools instead of sport/fitness. It does not even sound like a mistake. Maybe the size of the bet on a risky guess was too big, and that is what caused the failure.

jakecopp 4y ago

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. [1]: https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/

wallawe 4y ago
I'm pumped for Beeper but have been on the wait list 6 months now, and am wondering if they're having implementation issues.
- erohead 4y ago
  We're working through our waitlist, talking to customers, getting feedback and iterating: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta?s=w https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta?s=w
  - bsimpson 4y ago
    Surprised the FAQ doesn't say anything about encryption/privacy. The big selling point for Signal et. al. is knowing that corps/govs/etc can't spy on my conversations. If I was going to give another app permission to use my Signal, I'd need assurances I'm not sacrificing my security.
    - shp0ngle 4y ago
      You are, by design. Beeper gets around the e2e encryption by just running WA themselves on their side; there is no other way for them to be doing what they say they are doing…
      - jfkimmes 4y ago
        I run several bridges from my home. With End-to-Bridge Encryption enabled this gives you about the same security guarantees as E2EE with a second device added (Signal Desktop, etc). With Beeper you can do the same, IIRC. Their value proposition then hinges on how good their clients can aggregate conversations and different chat networks, I guess.

KerrAvon 4y ago

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.

taeric 4y ago
I'm guessing that Google will seem to do everything they can to not have a coherent story here. :( I can only guess what messenger platform they will push on their next phone.
runlevel1 4y ago
2015-04-24: Apple Watch release 2015-05-24: Pebble 2.0 (Pebble Time) release One month to the day. That's some truly unfortunate timing.
erohead 4y ago
Agreed. It was impossible for us to deliver an amazing notification and call experience for iOS users because Apple did not (and still doesn't) expose APIs for sending iMessage, starting calls or talking to Siri.
diego_moita 4y ago
Counter counterpoint: Samsung, Fitbit, Garmin and dozens of other players are still selling smartwatches. The majority of phones in the world do not run iOS, so you can't pair a Apple watch with them. There is a still active market for 2nd hand Pebbles. There are things you can do with a Pebble that you can't do with an Apple Watch (e.g.: use it in a barcode reader, make your own watchface, etc). At this right moment I have a Pebble in my left hand. I don't want to use an iPhone or Apple Watch.

modeless 4y ago

Still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day. The form factor is unmatched by any other smartwatch before or since. I don't think anyone else is even trying to make a watch this thin and it's a damn shame.

gigel82 4y ago

I liked my Microsoft Band 2 much better than my Apple Watch (it's been gathering dust for the past ~2 years, but even before than I rarely used it). Wonder why they killed that one...

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

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.

nemothekid 4y ago
That's what I noticed as well. If they had targeted 50M in sales, would they still be around today? I'm not sure what to take away from this except hardware startups are hard - you can make a wildly successful product and get bankrupted because you failed at supply chain management.
- bsder 4y ago
  The problem is that $50M in sales is only about 500K units. That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume. Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died. It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.
  - erohead 4y ago
    naw that's not true. The valley of death is >1k units but <10k. Not enough money to pay back your hw tooling. There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics. Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.

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js2 4y ago

> 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.

COGlory 4y ago
What's wrong with being a niche product?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  In the electronics field, a niche project means less economies of scale, a much high COGS and a higher final pricepoint.
- js2 4y ago
  Nothing, but I don't think that was the company's aspirations.
- headsoup 4y ago
  Nothing. People just expect things to be magically cheap, fast and high quality or it's somehow unviable, unless Apple (or other massive brand) do it. I think the same people maybe don't even understand why someone might want a high quality product, and be willing to pay for it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  You can't be a small player with hardware when big players exist in the same category. Customers start to ask why the watch costs as much as an Apple Watch but contains an 8th of the features.
xmaayy 4y ago
"Apple sells millions of iPhones, therefore Android phones (samsung, Xiaomi, etc) are doomed" I have a Garmin watch, an apple watch, whoop, etc (not all on at the same time of course). Different people want different things, ex: apple watches should be charged daily, but the pebble could be charged weekly. That in itself is a big selling point. I'm sure there were many such differences that could make for a successful product.

brk 4y ago

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.

glenstein 4y ago

>Our goal is to build the best damn chat app. In the process, it’s likely that Beeper will become the underlying communication system for everyone on earth. That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."

otachack 4y ago

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.

erohead 4y ago
Thanks for the kind note! I think there are a few Pebblers working on the playdate ;)
robinsoh 4y ago
> The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk. Pebble didn't use eInk. It used a Sharp transflective display.

Lamad123 4y ago

7-day charge!!! WTF, how come I never heard of this!!!

Gigachad 4y ago
I had the pebble time steel which had a 10 day battery, and interestingly I felt like it was always going flat on me mid day because I'd get the charge warning away from home and forget about it causing it to go flat. While my current 1.5 day watch has never gone flat on me because I put it on the charger every night. I have a feeling this is a big part of why phones and accessories have not moved past the daily charge schedule.
TMWNN 4y ago
Amazfit Bip and Bip Lite (the latter is preferable unless you need standalone GPS) consistently does 22-23 days of battery life (8-10 days if you use a watch face with seconds).

leros 4y ago

So many $10m-100m companies kill themselves in the quest to become a $1b company.

wanderr 4y ago

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. [1] https://www.trybento.co/ https://www.trybento.co/

shmoe 4y ago

Loved my original pebble -- then the Apple Watch came along.

freeopinion 4y ago

"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.

Gigachad 4y ago
Pebble was absolutely a success in the first few years. They failed to sustain the success. Apple and Samsung had entered the markets and invested orders of magnitude more funding than Pebble had. Pebble probably could have limped on for another 5 years but ultimately their fate had been sealed and it was best to sell and leave on a high note than to go in to decline.
- 02020202 4y ago
  this is the modern world of monopolies and big money. they either buy you out or crush you. this is why progress is stalled these days so much in hw and sw world. it's just not worth it and requires way too much backing to succeed and be able to compete with these monopolies.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Has progress stalled? The latest generation smart watches are massively better than the last pebble. The hardware that consumers have today is borderline magic. Just because they don't throw in crazy gimmicks in to each years release doesn't mean there was no progress.
  - supportlocal4h 4y ago
    Pebble didn't get crushed by a big money monopoly. Some people are willing to be "niche" and some people aren't. A company that produces 100 laptops per month for $100 profit each is not Apple. But that still means there is $10,000 per month left over after all salaries and other expenses. It's not a path to fame and glory, so few are interested. But it could sustain a very small company for a long time outside the world of monpolies and big money. But if you've figured out how to produce 5 laptops per day, 20 days every month, you're in a strange space. That's not a garage operation. So why not 50 per day? Then the eternal quest for growth leads you back into the world of monopolies and big money.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

"*But our main issue was that I did a terrible job at defining our long-term vision*... My personal vision was that Pebble would become a brain-computer interface company, with the smartwatch as the first always-on, always-worn gateway between computers and our bodies. But I rarely discussed this with the team, or even the exec team... I never invested time in building out a structured plan to actually make the brain-computer interface our company’s vision." [emphasis was in article] So he thinks somehow Pebble would have been better off if they focused on brain-interface technology? No one has done anything with that.

ianai 4y ago
No, he wanted some wearable that people could get so much use out of that they’d use it basically 24/7. Personally, not a bad idea. I could see this being how AR glasses “done right” eventually take off (say with tech not yet generally available at scale). Maybe if the display were retina scale in the glasses and able to be transparent or opaque as needed. It’s not a crazy idea for that to start with a watch.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  It's also tackling a lot of the right adjacent problems, both in terms of electromechanical constraints (miniaturization, heat, battery life), and also the usability piece, which is earning your place as their 24/7 device by being overwhelmingly useful rather than an annoyance, distraction, or addiction. When you see how Pebble fans talk about their devices, it's not hard to imagine that enthusiasm translating into a willingness to try a BCI. Certainly there was far more trust built up there than companies like Google or Apple have ever been able to earn.

bambax 4y ago

Great, clear and honest write-up. 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).

h4waii 4y ago

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.

jazzabeanie 4y ago
How does the PineTime stack up against the Pebble? My Pebble died years ago and I miss it a lot.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Sadly, it's not really in the same category, since it has a touchscreen and an emissive liquid crystal screen that has good visibility inside, but bad outside. But looks like that's what we have to settle with, unless someone tries to copy Pebble and also makes an open ecosystem that doesn't consider the "Linux Phones" developers as 2nd class citizens.

fomine3 4y ago

Recent smart watches too much focused on healthcare/fitness, but it seems that it's the only way to upselling (with sacrificing battery life).

ianai 4y ago
Wish they had a glucose monitor built into it somehow. Somehow that didn’t feel like a permanent needle into my wrist, of course…
- fomine3 4y ago
  Agree, quick harmless glucose monitor is what I'd like to try. Current metrics like heartbeat, SpO2, ECG aren't much interesting. For health monitoring device, I'd like to have on my ankle.
  - ianai 4y ago
    Also I totally agree on fitness being slightly overly emphasized on the Apple Watch. It’s cool, but also not the only reason to have a watch.
mikepurvis 4y ago
I'm new to the scene (got a FitBit Luxe for Christmas) and it's been pretty positive for me, but I really hate how closed off the ecosystem is. Not having more access to the data, much less the live data, is such a bummer.
Gigachad 4y ago
What else would you want? Notifications and calling were pretty much solved on day one. Things like NFC payments were a nice post pebble addition but after that, extra fitness tracking is the only feature consumers desire which isn't fully being met.

tbranyen 4y ago

Wearing a Pebble Time right now. Works and looks great, but not 100% even with Rebble. Shame the company failed, the product was perfect for Android users.

bluSCALE4 4y ago

I loved my Pebble Time too. I was going to give it to my dad but when I went to fetch it, the battery had bubbled. Anyone know of a place that sells reputable battery replacement?

gnicholas 4y ago
Ifixit has some guides. [1] Others commenters in past threads have said it's not quite as easy as it looks, so I haven't pulled the trigger yet. But I'll probably give it a try when the battery life is down to 3 days. Right now I'm at 4-5, depending on if I remember to enable Airplane Mode at night. My fallback option right now is the Fossil hybrid smartwatch, which has the same basic functions and better battery life (10+ days), but is much harder to read. The screens also apparently get messed up by sun exposure...so I'm not anxious to jump on that bandwagon. If anyone else has tips on replacing the battery, please share with the rest of us! 1: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Pebble+Steel+Battery+Replacement/53227 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Pebble+Steel+Battery+Replacemen...
- INTPenis 4y ago
  I've been using a Fossil HR since it came out and I love it. Battery life is indeed 10+ days, probably depends on how often it has to show notifications. I live in northern europe so the sun exposure does not compare to places like SF but so far so good. I never even heard of the sun exposure thing before now. App support has progressed so I really have no complaints about it anymore. If anything I think it's better than my old Pebble Time because it looks more like a classy watch. Oh and because it has actual hands instead of a screen to show time. I've replaced the strap though, it broke after a while. The app from Fossil is a hot mess but I rarely go into it. My use case is mainly show time, show notifications, control music. I bike everywhere so it makes things more safe to have a watch and not have to fiddle with my phone. But at the same time I think charging a smartwatch every day is ludicrous.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    For me, the biggest downsides were text readability and UX for scrolling through notifications (center button then lower button, unintuitively). Triggering the backlight was also surprisingly tricky. I did like the look though!

jshier 4y ago

Pebble story heard second hand. A major client executive, who was a huge Pebble fan, essentially forced us to connect the mobile apps we were doing for them (iOS, Android, and even Windows Mobile) to the Pebble. The Pebble SDK was C based, so it was rough finding experience from anyone on the existing mobile platforms. Eventually we got it bridged from the Pebble mobile app. Along the way we learned a bizarre fact about the C compiler used by the SDK: it didn't support conditional short circuiting, so there were a variety of bizarre bugs that we had to go back and find once we figured it out.

wvenable 4y ago
The C compiler for the Pebble was GCC for ARM.

gnicholas 4y ago

Why didn't they go back to their backers and ask if they'd be willing to pay a higher price? I would have been happy to pay 2x what I had pledged. When the Kickstarter launched I anticipated (based on how much I'd paid at Target for my Time Steel 1) that the price for the much more capable Time Steel 2 would have been significantly higher, like $350-$400. I'd have been willing to pledge that much, and if it meant keeping the company alive I might have paid even more.

greesil 4y ago

Hardware is hard, if only because the revenue model is problematic unless your margins are really, really good

ellen44 4y ago

Thanks, it's useful!

wvenable 4y ago

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.

mixedCase 4y ago

You merely built the best smartwatch anyone has produced to date. Programmable, week-long battery, e-ink, ecosystem, microphone with speech to text incorporated, and pretty much defined the category... I can only hope to see another one like it.

Gigachad 4y ago
The pebble was not epaper. It just had one of those old style reflective LCDs like the gameboy. Low power usage but they look unacceptably bad to the average consumer who would rather a vibrant display with daily charging.

Xavdidtheshadow 4y ago

I loved my pebble(s). 2 great stories: 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.

nunez 4y ago

Fuck I love how raw and unpolished this was. I also LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVED my Pebble, both the original and the Time Steel. I was so sad to see them get acquihired, though happy to see some of its guts make it into the Versa line. Also, stupid excited for Beeper. I hope they can figure out the cohesion problem without getting sued into the next millennium :D

ar7hur 4y ago

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.

m-p-3 4y ago

I miss my Pebble Time Steel, the concept of a Timeline on the watch for upcoming events and weather is IMO superior to anything else out there. I somewhat found a spiritual replacement for it with the Bangle JS 2, but the experience isn't as polished and it feels a bit slow.

twobitshifter 4y ago
There’s also watchy which is more like the original. I haven’t seen it in the flesh but maybe others have experience. https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
- m-p-3 4y ago
  That thing looks T H I C C

topher200 4y ago

shameless self-promotion Three ex-Pebblers went on to found Memfault(YC W19, https://memfault.com 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 https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/memfault

RandallBrown 4y ago
> Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices. To me that only seems like a question you could answer by managing thousands of devices. Not that it would be easy, just that you couldn't really answer that very accurately with only a handful of devices.
- tyhoff 4y ago
  It’s primarily about the number of hours. At Pebble, we’d be able to get a pretty good gauge on battery life with about 10-20 devices and about 24 hours worth of data. We recorded the battery’s percentage drop over the course of each hour, averaged all samples together, and then used that to estimate how long the battery charge would last. This strategy is covered here: https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-heartbeat-metrics#battery-life-trends https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-heartbeat-metrics... Of course it’s better with thousands of devices, but we were always surprised how accurate it was (as long as we had a few Android users in the office - it reliably got worse battery life due to worse Bluetooth performance)

aboodman 4y ago

I was obsessed with the idea of smartwatches in 2011-2012 and was involved in a few early efforts that, while exciting, were more complex than what I was really dreaming of. When the pebble kickstarter launched it was so close to what I had in mind, it was pretty disheartening. It's possible I even reached out on the website to seeing about joining the team :). I can't remember. Anyway, what an inspiring product and team. Thanks for sharing the story, and for the honesty.

teekert 4y ago

I cried a little when Pebble went away, never got a smartwatch again that felt as nice from a company I felt I could trust.

yobbo 4y ago

His conclusions seem correct, but this is how I see the general anti-pattern: - Envision a product that seems great in fantasy and on paper, and the product category is still undefined - Invest into realizing this product before sufficient technology is available to meet expectations Arguably, Apple Watch is also not "good enough" to fulfil the fantasy of what a smartwatch could be, but their brand is strong enough to define the market. People want to wear something that fulfils the image of "Apple Watch", and that is enough. A product without brand power built from cheap and premature technology will be niche, and not enough to "define the category". The valuable question is "what do people expect from our brand", rather than "what fantasy products can we imagine". Until it's realistic to build something that fulfils the expectation of an Apple product, they will not attempt it. The iPod vs mp3 players is a similar story. Thinking that Pebble "defined a product category" is a misunderstanding of the mechanisms. The fantasy of what a smartwatch can be is obvious. The question is how to realize to the standard required to meet expectations. Understanding these expectations is the valuable insight.

Dave3of5 4y ago

Pebble failed because the big players seen this massive market, came in and made much better products. End of story.

pjmlp 4y ago

> We were the first company to work on smartwatches. A bit of history rewriting going on there... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

simonbarker87 4y ago

I just released an episode of a podcast in which I was trying to remember the name of Pebble, talking about a company that was "making smart watches in like 2011/12". Such a shame they didn't make it as it was a very cool device and company. Jonny and Simon's Reel Tech Talk: https://share.transistor.fm/s/39e1935b https://share.transistor.fm/s/39e1935b Around 15m20s for those interested (we watch a film and the talk about the tech in that film and have some fun)

odiroot 4y ago

Pebble Time is still my favourite smart watch ever. And mine is working without problems 7 years now. The battery life went down from ~10 days to 5-6 but still much better than any other I tried using. Built-in compass, always-on display and physical buttons are just great.

enjikaka 4y ago

I really wanted a Pebble but they ceased production just as I was able to buy one back in the days. Still want one badly. All other watches suck.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I really wonder why there hasn't been a reboot or kickstarter campaigns for a successor to Pebble, especially since there has been years of development in smartphone-sized components (CPU's, batteries, displays) since then. There IS a market; the two million that bought a Pebble when it was still around, and millions more that missed out on the Pebble but would still pay money to have one now.
diego_moita 4y ago
You'll find some on eBay and even Aliexpress.

fennecfoxy 4y ago

I still have my beloved Pebble Time Round sitting in a drawer, somewhere. I blame the Apple Watch for the downfall/unpopularity of smartwatches like Pebble. People for some reason would rather have a $500 or more watch packed with over the top features and one day's battery life.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Apple Watch isn't really a competition - AFAIK Pebble never worked that well with iOS anyway (because of the usual iOS issues with third party hardware and software).

samlu 4y ago

I loved my Pebble. Had the first edition in Black with a watchface that you could only read if you knew how, used it until it broke years down the line. (The little plastic on the sides revealed the electronics, closed it with bluetac, but at some point water got in and ruined the internals) Got the Garmin Instinct Solar Tactical now, and am very happy with it. 1 month of battery life is just mindblowing to me. It also looks sleek as hell (I've got a techwearish style irl)

wngr 4y ago
+1 for current Garmin models. They finally fulfill the requirements my former Pebble models set.

hemmert 4y ago

Bring it back :-)

ajot 4y ago

> 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.

diego_moita 4y ago

I have a Pebble Time in my pulse now. Have one more in a box for the day this one fails and a Pebble original in a drawer. I also keep spare batteries to fix them. I make my own watchfaces and customized some apps to my needs: authenticator (for 2 factor authentications), skunk (with bar codes to use in place of physical cards), ... Pebble was a brilliant product that didn't succeed. When so many horrible products succeed in this industry it is sad that being good is not enough.

refracture 4y ago

I loved my Time. Always on screen, awesome 8 bit color watch face, wonderful battery life.. I was pretty disappointed when fitbit decided to void all the warranties however, mine failed before the one year mark but after fitbit purchased them and shut it all down.

fudged71 4y ago

‪Watches need buttons. Pebble was the only watch that was easy to use while wearing gloves.‬

esel2k 4y ago

After reading through 500 comments and myself only liking the pebble time (maybe steel for bat life) and the pebble time round, I wonder why pebble didn’t stop at two models. One for the formfactor and slim design fans and one for the general users. With that money spend all effort developing that long awaited pebble time 2 and double the price.

tikiman163 4y ago

I was super disappointed when pebble failed, it had so much potential and I loved where they were going with it.