Four years after launching the most profitable crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter history, the Pebble campaign has abruptly ended. The device startup ended 2016 by filing for bankruptcy, before being sold to Fitbit. The fitness tracking company built much of the Ionic smartwatch with the help of former Pebblers, along with the company’s leading software suite.
The first Apple Watch launched in mid-2015, and it proceeded to suck a lot of oxygen out of the room. However, it would be oversimplifying the situation to suggest that it was just another case of Sherlocking. After all, Apple sparked public interest, eventually paving the way for countless other smartwatches.
It could be said that Pebble was cursed with foresight and was simply too early to get into space. Founder and CEO Eric Migicowski would argue that the company’s rapid growth and feature expansion caused Pebble to lose sight of its initial vision. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a hardware startup has suffered such a fate.
Eight years after selling the company to Fitbit, Migicowski is ready for a second round. “We’re rebooting Pebble,” he told TechCrunch with a wide smile on a Zoom call Monday. But this is also an oversimplification. After all, five years after buying the startup, Fitbit was sold to Google. While the Pebble brand eventually faded with the company’s first absorption, the software giant still owns the technology and all of its intellectual property rights.
Migicowski’s planned company is still in the idea stage and needs a new name, something the Beeper co-founder and former Y-Combinator partner didn’t recognize. His decision to announce Pebble 2.0 in its infancy is the result of a momentous decision announced by Google on Monday.
Although it apparently has no plans to abandon Pebble as a brand, Google is bringing back its roots with the open source smartwatch brand’s software suite. While former Pebble employees have remained on board at Google as the company pours more resources into its smartwatch operating system, WearOS, it’s not clear how much — if any — of Pebble’s technology is in products like the Pixel Watch.
However, by open source access to PebbleOS, Google is opening the door to new third-party hardware. Migicovsky’s unnamed smartwatch startup is first on that list. The founder told TechCrunch that he has been involved in the project full-time and will be able to speed things up as access to PebbleOS opens up. However, he is currently the only employee, although there are plans to hire another around March.
The startup’s goals are appropriately modest. Migicowski says he simply wanted to make the watch he wanted, given that the pebble he wears to this day is now a decade old. “I’ve tried everything else,” he says. “I have very high standards.”
Here it is, according to a new blog post on Migicovsky’s personal website:
- Always-on e-paper display (It’s reflective, not emissive. It can be read in sunlight. It can be glanced at. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
- Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
- A simple, beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling the time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
- buttons! (To play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
- Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watch faces for the Apple Watch? That’s weird. There were over 16,000 watch faces in the Pebble App Store!)
During its relatively short lifespan, Pebble has sold 2 million smartwatches. It’s an impressive feat in the world of hardware startups, but ultimately not enough to maintain the momentum needed.
Despite his time at YC, Migicovsky has no plan to raise venture capital money. He also doesn’t plan to return to the Kickstarter model that gave birth to the Pebble the first time. He is currently self-financing the project and says he plans to build it modestly, based on consumer interest.
As for whether there will still be an audience for Pebble in a post-Apple Watch world, he jokes: “There are at least dozens of us.” It indicates that the brand still has control over its brand Active Subreddit locationEight years after closing its doors. A small resale market has built up around vintage appliances, although as anyone who has bought a piece of consumer electronics in the past two decades can tell you, appliances don’t last forever.
Migicowski plans the company to meet the specific needs of those who want exactly what he put in his blog post. It’s hard to say how many people yearn for the discontinued product in a world where Apple has dramatically changed user expectations, but he’s betting he’s not alone in his desires.
“This is a passion project. I have a vested interest in making the watch,” Mijekowski says of building a startup to create a product he wants to wear. “We will make this happen.”
Although the project is still in its early stages, Migicowski visited Shenzhen in an attempt to learn about the current state of manufacturing. “It turns out that making devices is much easier than it was 10 years ago,” he says. “There were no smartwatch factories. We had to tell the factories what to do.
He also says he feels confident about the small startup’s ability to build a new Pebble for the current era. “The hard part is the software.”
By unlocking PebbleOS, Google has made this considerably easier.
