Eric Migicovsky at Startup School SV 2014 by Eric Migicovsky Lyrics
This transcript is annotated! Click on the highlights to read what others are saying. If you'd like to add your own insights, comments, or questions to a specific line, highlight the relevant text and click on the button that pops up.Hi guys, its an honor to be here. I really appreciate you guys taking time out of your day to come listen to me. I know that many of you may have heard about us when we launched on Kickstarter about two years ago. I am here to tell you a little bit about that, but also take you four years back, to 2008 when I started working on this originally.
So this is me, in a YouTube video that I posted in 2008, showing off the very first prototype for what would become Pebble. I was an engineering student at the University of Waterloo. I was studying abroad in Europe, actually at TU Delft studying industrial design. In industrial design, unlike engineering, everyone is always sketching, everyone is always drawing things. As an engineer I did not have those same drawing skills at the time. So I started sketching things, and the first thing that I sketched was a bicycle computer that would talk to your phone.
I had this weird problem. Everyone in Holland bikes basically every single minute of their life, and I wasn't born with the gene that would let me type on my phone while I was biking. So I had this brand new phone in my pocket and I wanted to see what was happening when my phone was vibrating. Who was calling me, who was texting me, who was emailing me? While I technically could have pulled my phone out of my pocket while biking, it probably would have ended up in the canal. So I thought of this bike computer that would show you text messages. I started prototyping it. One of my friends came along and said, hey that bike computer that you are building would probably be a little more useful as a watch since some people don’t bike every single minute of their life.
I took apart a cell phone, a Nokia 3310 which is one of the most popular phone in the world. Ripped that apart and combined it with an Arduino, and made this super early version, you can actually see where I cracked the screen of the phone. And made this first prototype by myself. It wasn't beautiful, it certainly didn't work perfectly, but it showed me at least that this was something that on a daily basis. I went back to Waterloo to finish up my final year of engineering, and did what I am sure a lot of you do, which is pitch. Pitch your heart out. This is a slide from our early deck. The company at the time was inPulse, which stood for Information Pulse. It aimed to do one thing, which was show you text messages, emails, and calls right on your wrist.
I did these pitch competitions where you stand up and talk for forty-five seconds, like elevator pitch competitions, and that is actually how we funded the early stages of the company. I would win these gigantic checks. Comically large checks, which are very difficult to cash at ATM’s, you have to fold them up. The first prototypes we built were funded from these pitch competitions. I borrowed some money from my parents, who were extremely generous at that time. I think was the argument was, well it's cheaper than grad school. Me and a couple friends built the very first actually working prototype, and you notice that my prototype is the first one. This is the much better prototype that was built by some talented electrical engineers and computer engineers.
Being in Waterloo, I am sure there is a couple people in the crowd, being in Waterloo in 2008 meant one thing: Blackberry. How many of you guys remember what Blackberry is? Now this really popular phone, it had keyboards. You see here the first prototype actually worked with Blackberry. It wasn't that it worked with Blackberry, it only worked with Blackberry. So you can see, there is still some wires coming out of it, but generally it did the job. This is a real text message that someone sent to my Blackberry at the time. And it worked! It didn't look great, again, but it finally worked. We could show it off and began talking about it in the community. People would say, hey this is an interesting little project but you know it could actually become a company, if you wanted.
The first step was actually trying to make it look a little better than what a couple engineers hacked together in their spare time. Worked with an industrial designer who, again remember this is 2008-2009, took a lot of inspiration from the smartphone at the time to build what would become our first watch inPulse. This is pen and ink drawings, kind of the first stage of ideation, but you can see it's starting to look a little bit less like a circuit board with bent aluminum around it and more like an actual watch.
This is mid 2009-2010, its a 3-D printed prototype with actual electronics running inside. This is actually the first stage where we were able to show it to people and they could immediately imagine what it would be like to put this product on their wrist. That was really important, because up until that time we just had our circuit board that we were shopping around to people. It's kind of hard for people to imagine wearing a circuit board on their wrist.
3D printing was still pretty early at that time. In 2009, Makerbot had just launched, this was our first, somewhat 3-D printed and hand painted as well. It did a little bit of a better job showing off what a smart watch could be. So naturally, the next step in 2009, the end of 2009, was to launch it. Just like any other good software company in the world, you have to launch early and often. I think we took that lesson to heart, from a hardware perspective as well. So in the end of 2009 we decided to announce this product publicly to the world. I'm sure many of you read Engadget and Verge, that kind of stuff and you see these, occasionally posts have people with leaked photographs, where blurry photos of new products, and the secret is, sometimes those are actually devices that fall off the back of the truck at the factory. Other times it is actually the company themselves leaking information, just to see what people think.
I can't remember exactly where I heard this piece of advice, but we decided to do it. About a week before we were actually planning on actually launching the product to the world, you know, there’s tips lines at various blogs like tips@engadget or tips@whatever, so I emailed a couple of these blogs with a render of what our product could look like. I emailed it to Crackberry, which is one of the most popular Blackberry blogs at the time, and I said. There is this company working on this interesting BlackBerry watch, would you be interested in getting a little bit more information? And within thirty minutes the guy emailed me back with, phoned me actually he said, I got to have more information, what is this? I saw a render, can I run a post? I want to blog about it right this second. I had to explain to him, no I am not leaking any information, it's really our company, we are a little startup in Waterloo. He was still I don't care, I don't care. I want to share this with the world. I was, sure. If you want to do it, let's do it.
So on October 19th, 2009 Crackberry ran this and you can see it has got that vibe, like I am not sure exactly where I got this image, its a 3D render. But you notice the title? First Images: Blackberry Watch is For Real. So this began an interesting little game of broken telephone, on the internet. Crackberry ran this piece, Engadget ran that piece. All of a sudden everyone thought that Blackberry was coming out with a watch. And the news spread. The culmination of the first week was really exciting. It was like a reporter from NBC, or something like that, shoving a microphone in the face of the Blackberry CEO. Saying, what do you think about the Blackberry watch? And he is like, I got no comment, no comment.
It was amazing for us because we saw this massive adoption bit, but we still didn't know how to parlay that into actual people knowing it was our product. But a week later, we followed up with all these blogs. We posted our page online and then followed up with every blog saying, Hey, you know that watch that you ran last week? It's actually a start up. It's actually us, and we were worried. Would they think we were cheating them? Or screwing with the system? Or not even post about us a week later? We were worried, but we forgot the cardinal rule which is, everyone loves pageviews and every single person ran it again. That launched us into the next stage.
We had about a thousand people who were interested in the product, who would sign up for a mailing list. We did not take anyone's money at the time, but it was great because we got validation. At least from the early Blackberry set of customers that this was something that they at least wanted. So we continued building prototypes, this is our first metal CNC metal prototype. It was another little fun press thing. At CES, instead of signing up for media briefings or getting a booth, we just kind of wandered around. This was us walking into the Engadget studio and just showing it to people. Naturally, they ran a story about that as well. So if you are looking for press, there’s absolutely no wrong way of doing it. But you can pretty much get press any way if you try really hard.
We got to the point where we could actually make these devices. We were based in our garage in Waterloo, behind the house that I lived at. The garage was somewhat dusty, so it didn't lend itself perfectly to the assembly of miniature consumer electronics. We still had the key codes to the University, even though we were graduated, on Sundays we just broke into the University and set up our assembly line in the lab. It was great, we built the first 500 watches with our own hands. Just sitting there assembling each part of it, it gave us immense appreciation for what goes into these little consumer devices. And then we started shipping them. We didn't really promise our customers that it was anything other than an alpha grade unit. In fact, the first twenty that we shipped, the backs broke off during the shipping process. So it was a really damn good thing that we didn't decide to build five thousand of them all at the same time. We just built ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred units then shipped them out. It was about this time that we applied to Y Combinator.
Up to this point, YC had only accepted up to, I think, three hardware companies in the entire lifespan of YC, so it was a bit of a long shot. But we felt like we had finally latched onto something. Our first product that people were actually starting to use, had amazing engagement. Eighty percent of all the people who used purchased inPulse, were using it every single day. And it wasn't just from the analytics but people actually told us, they sent us emails. I have, in my email inbox personal threads of every single person who actually owned one of these first watches, about what is good, what is bad, what needs improvement. That was an immensely close relationship that we had with our customers at the time.
When we got down to YC, we set up shop in another living room this time in Mountain View. Which after spending seven years in Ontario was amazing. I still have not changed out of shorts and t-shirts since I got down here, but after seven years in either a crazy hot or crazy cold climate, I've got to say that Mountain View is pretty perfect. The one major insight that we realized, this is now 2011, was after we launched our software development kit, up until this point we were making a watch that showed text messages, emails, calls. At the beginning it didn't even show time. Our first version of software didn't even show the time on a SmartWatch.
Naturally, the bug reports came fast and furious. Our first customer, my dad, emailed me and said, Eric you've got to be able to show the time on a SmartWatch. So we launched a firmware upgrade a week later and that began a cycle of continuous integration of features and suggestions. One thing we always thought was going to be too big and we are always pushing off to the future was launching an SDK. So in 2011, we published an SDK. We invited developers to write apps for the watch, but keep in mind there were only a thousand inPulse watches in the field. So we had no idea what would happen, we spent about two weeks working on SDK. And we were amazed. Within two or three months of launching the SDK, there were over a hundred apps available for inPulse. That is one app for every ten watches in existence. So obviously people were not building it because they would get rich, or they thought they would be able to start a company. Developers that owned those early inPulse watches were building apps because they wanted to create something that they could wear on their body. And that was a new thing at the time, there were no SDK’s for devices. And this is an example of being able to customize your watch face just by tapping some buttons on your Android phone at this point. So we took all of these things that we learned from our customers.
The first watch had a full color OLED screen, which was great, very colorful. But the battery life wasn't great, it was about twenty-four hours. The watch also had a screen that wasn't great outside. It would kind of get washed out when you took it outside to go for a run, and it wasn't waterproof. The biggest problem of all is it didn't work with iPhone. So we got down to the Valley, we did YC, showed people our cool SmartWatch, and they said great, but does it work with iPhone? We had to say no. So mid-2011, iOS 5 came out which finally gave us the capability to run an application in the background when it was talking to a bluetooth accessory. So we designed Pebble.
We took all the feedback from inPulse and funneled it into this new product, Pebble. We did the next logical thing, shop it around Sand Hill Road, talked to the VCs, angel investors. We had this new product, we had an idea of how we could actually build something that people really wanted, people were telling us that they wanted. We spent about a month talking to twenty to thirty investors, and we couldn't get even one interested. We couldn't get one single investor to actually sign on the dotted line. We went back to YC, had a twenty minute session with Paul Graham, explained our problems. And he said, no you are not going to be able to raise the money. Is there anything else you could do? Could you sell some software? This is often a common question that entrepreneurs get asked at some point.
I had to explain, you know I don't think we are going to be able to turn it into a software company. He asked, is there anything else you can do? And I said, yeah we are thinking about going on this website called Kickstarter. And he says, what is Kickstarter? So we explained and he said that sounds like an amazing idea, you should just do it. So we spent a month and built our Kickstarter page. We filmed the video ourselves, starring us, our friends, and our interns. And I don't know how many of you can pinpoint the exact moment when your life changes but I can. And it's, it's pressing this button. It was 11pm on the night before we launched, and I clicked this button. I distinctly remember wondering what would be next. Obviously I would never have been able to predict what happened. We were trying to raise one hundred thousand dollars to be able to sell one thousand Pebble watches. We blew through that milestone in two hours, we got to our first million in twenty-eight hours, and after thirty days we had raised ten million dollars from seventy-thousand people around the world. It was pretty ridiculous, to say the least. Why did that work?
How did we do it? We are able to rationalize it now looking back. I think it was because of three main things. The first being some advice we got from Paul Buchheit. Paul Buchheit is a partner at YC and is also an investor in Pebble. He wrote an amazing blog post several years ago that talks about a startups product has to do three things really, really well. And not only does it have to three things, and preferably not more, you also have to be able to explain what those three things are. And so the reason I think we hit product market fit on Kickstarter was because we talked about notifications and calls, being able to see those on your watch. Sports and fitness, we offered users the ability to run the fitness app that they loved on their phone RunKeeper, or Strava, Endomondo and just be able to see an instantaneous update of speed, location, distance on their wrist without having to buy a Garmin watch. And the third thing we talked about was customization, being able to see, being able to download and install different choices. It had never been done before and we offered our users that ability.
Where we went from there was kind of crazy. We were five people when we launched on Kickstarter. None of us had ever made a consumer electronics product before. So we did what the only natural thing a normal person would do working on hardware, fly to Asia. I personally spent, and the three people working in the hardware team, spent six months off and on living near the factory in Shenzhen, helping build the first prototypes of Pebble and getting the production line up and running. This is probably around 7pm on a Friday night, figuring out how to the glue to work so the top of the lens would actually be glued into the bottom, and still be waterproof. It was amazing. My mom would phone me up and say, are you sure you are okay? Shouldn't you be a little more stressed? You do have to ship eighty-five thousand watches to people all around world. And I would say, no I think we’ve got it. It was a bit of blind faith, a bit of naivety, but I think we were dedication and we knew we had built something that people really really wanted so we poured all of our effort into it, and it paid off. This is the first red watch Pebble that popped off the assembly line.
This is December 28, 2012, I wore that watch, that same watch that I pulled off the assembly line for about a year until I replaced it with a nice new Pebble Steel. But it was the moment that I realized all of our effort finally paid off, we had built something that was almost exactly what we set out to build. It was a fantastic feeling.
The team grew a lot. We only had around ten to eleven people, by the time we actually started shipping the watch we had now grown immensely. At first it was people who didn't exactly know what we were doing, we still don't exactly know what we are doing, but we feel a lot better about doing it. We have hundreds of thousands of watches out in the world, and some people may think that I started the company solely so I could use puns in advertising, I think they wouldn't be incorrect, but I think there’s a little more to that. I started working on wearables now about six and a half years ago, at the beginning I saw the other watches that were on the market-- there were actually other SmartWatches back in 2008, there was a Sony Ericson watch that cost $399.
I was a twenty, twenty-two year old I didn't really want to spend four hundred bucks on this brand new SmartWatch. So I wanted to make something that was cheaper, something that was more affordable. So instead of buying the four hundred dollar watch, I started a whole entire company to make a more affordable watch for myself. But it's interesting that the same trends are coming back now. You see Apple moving into the space. They have built an amazingly, beautiful, aesthetically, awesome metal sapphire expensive watch. They definitely have their perspective of where they see wearables going. You see Google coming into the space taking a whole smartphone and trying to cram it onto your wrist. And then us, we are going off in this slightly different but very important direction for building something that meshes into your life. We build a product that works with your phone that you already have, as long as you don't have a Windows phone.
It has a long battery life, it works as a sports watch, it's lightweight, it's inexpensive, it's completely open, hackable. In fact the part that I am most excited about for the future, is the community that's supporting it. There's hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have Pebble, who are hacking on it, who are building interesting things. Just last week, one of our partners Jawbone, Hosain is going to be on stage a little later on, Jawbone launched an activity app on Pebble that allows you to do step tracking and all this other good activity tracking. But it works with the Pebble that came out two years ago.
We’re really committed to making sure that Pebble can be a growing platform, that other people can hack on, and that will become more and more important as time goes on. It's not something that is revolutionary, it's not going to change your life the moment that you put it on. But it becomes part of your habit, a part of your routine, and over time it adds more and more value. Some of the other amazing stories from our community, a website, a website called hard to watch face generator which is this guy named Paul, he lives in Germany, he built this app, this website that lets anyone create their own watch face for Pebble. You just upload a bitmap, or an image, you move the little hands around on the screen, and you can create your own watch face. Over two hundred and fifty thousand people have done this. I believe, I don't know for certain, but I believe that there’s more different types of watch faces for Pebble than there are different types of watches available in the entire world. That kind of thing is just mind boggling when you think about the fact that we started six and a half years ago to make a watch just for ourselves, and now there are people all over the world hacking on it, building on it really cool things. And it leaves me pretty damn excited for the future.
I appreciate your time and that is a little bit about the Pebble story.
So this is me, in a YouTube video that I posted in 2008, showing off the very first prototype for what would become Pebble. I was an engineering student at the University of Waterloo. I was studying abroad in Europe, actually at TU Delft studying industrial design. In industrial design, unlike engineering, everyone is always sketching, everyone is always drawing things. As an engineer I did not have those same drawing skills at the time. So I started sketching things, and the first thing that I sketched was a bicycle computer that would talk to your phone.
I had this weird problem. Everyone in Holland bikes basically every single minute of their life, and I wasn't born with the gene that would let me type on my phone while I was biking. So I had this brand new phone in my pocket and I wanted to see what was happening when my phone was vibrating. Who was calling me, who was texting me, who was emailing me? While I technically could have pulled my phone out of my pocket while biking, it probably would have ended up in the canal. So I thought of this bike computer that would show you text messages. I started prototyping it. One of my friends came along and said, hey that bike computer that you are building would probably be a little more useful as a watch since some people don’t bike every single minute of their life.
I took apart a cell phone, a Nokia 3310 which is one of the most popular phone in the world. Ripped that apart and combined it with an Arduino, and made this super early version, you can actually see where I cracked the screen of the phone. And made this first prototype by myself. It wasn't beautiful, it certainly didn't work perfectly, but it showed me at least that this was something that on a daily basis. I went back to Waterloo to finish up my final year of engineering, and did what I am sure a lot of you do, which is pitch. Pitch your heart out. This is a slide from our early deck. The company at the time was inPulse, which stood for Information Pulse. It aimed to do one thing, which was show you text messages, emails, and calls right on your wrist.
I did these pitch competitions where you stand up and talk for forty-five seconds, like elevator pitch competitions, and that is actually how we funded the early stages of the company. I would win these gigantic checks. Comically large checks, which are very difficult to cash at ATM’s, you have to fold them up. The first prototypes we built were funded from these pitch competitions. I borrowed some money from my parents, who were extremely generous at that time. I think was the argument was, well it's cheaper than grad school. Me and a couple friends built the very first actually working prototype, and you notice that my prototype is the first one. This is the much better prototype that was built by some talented electrical engineers and computer engineers.
Being in Waterloo, I am sure there is a couple people in the crowd, being in Waterloo in 2008 meant one thing: Blackberry. How many of you guys remember what Blackberry is? Now this really popular phone, it had keyboards. You see here the first prototype actually worked with Blackberry. It wasn't that it worked with Blackberry, it only worked with Blackberry. So you can see, there is still some wires coming out of it, but generally it did the job. This is a real text message that someone sent to my Blackberry at the time. And it worked! It didn't look great, again, but it finally worked. We could show it off and began talking about it in the community. People would say, hey this is an interesting little project but you know it could actually become a company, if you wanted.
The first step was actually trying to make it look a little better than what a couple engineers hacked together in their spare time. Worked with an industrial designer who, again remember this is 2008-2009, took a lot of inspiration from the smartphone at the time to build what would become our first watch inPulse. This is pen and ink drawings, kind of the first stage of ideation, but you can see it's starting to look a little bit less like a circuit board with bent aluminum around it and more like an actual watch.
This is mid 2009-2010, its a 3-D printed prototype with actual electronics running inside. This is actually the first stage where we were able to show it to people and they could immediately imagine what it would be like to put this product on their wrist. That was really important, because up until that time we just had our circuit board that we were shopping around to people. It's kind of hard for people to imagine wearing a circuit board on their wrist.
3D printing was still pretty early at that time. In 2009, Makerbot had just launched, this was our first, somewhat 3-D printed and hand painted as well. It did a little bit of a better job showing off what a smart watch could be. So naturally, the next step in 2009, the end of 2009, was to launch it. Just like any other good software company in the world, you have to launch early and often. I think we took that lesson to heart, from a hardware perspective as well. So in the end of 2009 we decided to announce this product publicly to the world. I'm sure many of you read Engadget and Verge, that kind of stuff and you see these, occasionally posts have people with leaked photographs, where blurry photos of new products, and the secret is, sometimes those are actually devices that fall off the back of the truck at the factory. Other times it is actually the company themselves leaking information, just to see what people think.
I can't remember exactly where I heard this piece of advice, but we decided to do it. About a week before we were actually planning on actually launching the product to the world, you know, there’s tips lines at various blogs like tips@engadget or tips@whatever, so I emailed a couple of these blogs with a render of what our product could look like. I emailed it to Crackberry, which is one of the most popular Blackberry blogs at the time, and I said. There is this company working on this interesting BlackBerry watch, would you be interested in getting a little bit more information? And within thirty minutes the guy emailed me back with, phoned me actually he said, I got to have more information, what is this? I saw a render, can I run a post? I want to blog about it right this second. I had to explain to him, no I am not leaking any information, it's really our company, we are a little startup in Waterloo. He was still I don't care, I don't care. I want to share this with the world. I was, sure. If you want to do it, let's do it.
So on October 19th, 2009 Crackberry ran this and you can see it has got that vibe, like I am not sure exactly where I got this image, its a 3D render. But you notice the title? First Images: Blackberry Watch is For Real. So this began an interesting little game of broken telephone, on the internet. Crackberry ran this piece, Engadget ran that piece. All of a sudden everyone thought that Blackberry was coming out with a watch. And the news spread. The culmination of the first week was really exciting. It was like a reporter from NBC, or something like that, shoving a microphone in the face of the Blackberry CEO. Saying, what do you think about the Blackberry watch? And he is like, I got no comment, no comment.
It was amazing for us because we saw this massive adoption bit, but we still didn't know how to parlay that into actual people knowing it was our product. But a week later, we followed up with all these blogs. We posted our page online and then followed up with every blog saying, Hey, you know that watch that you ran last week? It's actually a start up. It's actually us, and we were worried. Would they think we were cheating them? Or screwing with the system? Or not even post about us a week later? We were worried, but we forgot the cardinal rule which is, everyone loves pageviews and every single person ran it again. That launched us into the next stage.
We had about a thousand people who were interested in the product, who would sign up for a mailing list. We did not take anyone's money at the time, but it was great because we got validation. At least from the early Blackberry set of customers that this was something that they at least wanted. So we continued building prototypes, this is our first metal CNC metal prototype. It was another little fun press thing. At CES, instead of signing up for media briefings or getting a booth, we just kind of wandered around. This was us walking into the Engadget studio and just showing it to people. Naturally, they ran a story about that as well. So if you are looking for press, there’s absolutely no wrong way of doing it. But you can pretty much get press any way if you try really hard.
We got to the point where we could actually make these devices. We were based in our garage in Waterloo, behind the house that I lived at. The garage was somewhat dusty, so it didn't lend itself perfectly to the assembly of miniature consumer electronics. We still had the key codes to the University, even though we were graduated, on Sundays we just broke into the University and set up our assembly line in the lab. It was great, we built the first 500 watches with our own hands. Just sitting there assembling each part of it, it gave us immense appreciation for what goes into these little consumer devices. And then we started shipping them. We didn't really promise our customers that it was anything other than an alpha grade unit. In fact, the first twenty that we shipped, the backs broke off during the shipping process. So it was a really damn good thing that we didn't decide to build five thousand of them all at the same time. We just built ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred units then shipped them out. It was about this time that we applied to Y Combinator.
Up to this point, YC had only accepted up to, I think, three hardware companies in the entire lifespan of YC, so it was a bit of a long shot. But we felt like we had finally latched onto something. Our first product that people were actually starting to use, had amazing engagement. Eighty percent of all the people who used purchased inPulse, were using it every single day. And it wasn't just from the analytics but people actually told us, they sent us emails. I have, in my email inbox personal threads of every single person who actually owned one of these first watches, about what is good, what is bad, what needs improvement. That was an immensely close relationship that we had with our customers at the time.
When we got down to YC, we set up shop in another living room this time in Mountain View. Which after spending seven years in Ontario was amazing. I still have not changed out of shorts and t-shirts since I got down here, but after seven years in either a crazy hot or crazy cold climate, I've got to say that Mountain View is pretty perfect. The one major insight that we realized, this is now 2011, was after we launched our software development kit, up until this point we were making a watch that showed text messages, emails, calls. At the beginning it didn't even show time. Our first version of software didn't even show the time on a SmartWatch.
Naturally, the bug reports came fast and furious. Our first customer, my dad, emailed me and said, Eric you've got to be able to show the time on a SmartWatch. So we launched a firmware upgrade a week later and that began a cycle of continuous integration of features and suggestions. One thing we always thought was going to be too big and we are always pushing off to the future was launching an SDK. So in 2011, we published an SDK. We invited developers to write apps for the watch, but keep in mind there were only a thousand inPulse watches in the field. So we had no idea what would happen, we spent about two weeks working on SDK. And we were amazed. Within two or three months of launching the SDK, there were over a hundred apps available for inPulse. That is one app for every ten watches in existence. So obviously people were not building it because they would get rich, or they thought they would be able to start a company. Developers that owned those early inPulse watches were building apps because they wanted to create something that they could wear on their body. And that was a new thing at the time, there were no SDK’s for devices. And this is an example of being able to customize your watch face just by tapping some buttons on your Android phone at this point. So we took all of these things that we learned from our customers.
The first watch had a full color OLED screen, which was great, very colorful. But the battery life wasn't great, it was about twenty-four hours. The watch also had a screen that wasn't great outside. It would kind of get washed out when you took it outside to go for a run, and it wasn't waterproof. The biggest problem of all is it didn't work with iPhone. So we got down to the Valley, we did YC, showed people our cool SmartWatch, and they said great, but does it work with iPhone? We had to say no. So mid-2011, iOS 5 came out which finally gave us the capability to run an application in the background when it was talking to a bluetooth accessory. So we designed Pebble.
We took all the feedback from inPulse and funneled it into this new product, Pebble. We did the next logical thing, shop it around Sand Hill Road, talked to the VCs, angel investors. We had this new product, we had an idea of how we could actually build something that people really wanted, people were telling us that they wanted. We spent about a month talking to twenty to thirty investors, and we couldn't get even one interested. We couldn't get one single investor to actually sign on the dotted line. We went back to YC, had a twenty minute session with Paul Graham, explained our problems. And he said, no you are not going to be able to raise the money. Is there anything else you could do? Could you sell some software? This is often a common question that entrepreneurs get asked at some point.
I had to explain, you know I don't think we are going to be able to turn it into a software company. He asked, is there anything else you can do? And I said, yeah we are thinking about going on this website called Kickstarter. And he says, what is Kickstarter? So we explained and he said that sounds like an amazing idea, you should just do it. So we spent a month and built our Kickstarter page. We filmed the video ourselves, starring us, our friends, and our interns. And I don't know how many of you can pinpoint the exact moment when your life changes but I can. And it's, it's pressing this button. It was 11pm on the night before we launched, and I clicked this button. I distinctly remember wondering what would be next. Obviously I would never have been able to predict what happened. We were trying to raise one hundred thousand dollars to be able to sell one thousand Pebble watches. We blew through that milestone in two hours, we got to our first million in twenty-eight hours, and after thirty days we had raised ten million dollars from seventy-thousand people around the world. It was pretty ridiculous, to say the least. Why did that work?
How did we do it? We are able to rationalize it now looking back. I think it was because of three main things. The first being some advice we got from Paul Buchheit. Paul Buchheit is a partner at YC and is also an investor in Pebble. He wrote an amazing blog post several years ago that talks about a startups product has to do three things really, really well. And not only does it have to three things, and preferably not more, you also have to be able to explain what those three things are. And so the reason I think we hit product market fit on Kickstarter was because we talked about notifications and calls, being able to see those on your watch. Sports and fitness, we offered users the ability to run the fitness app that they loved on their phone RunKeeper, or Strava, Endomondo and just be able to see an instantaneous update of speed, location, distance on their wrist without having to buy a Garmin watch. And the third thing we talked about was customization, being able to see, being able to download and install different choices. It had never been done before and we offered our users that ability.
Where we went from there was kind of crazy. We were five people when we launched on Kickstarter. None of us had ever made a consumer electronics product before. So we did what the only natural thing a normal person would do working on hardware, fly to Asia. I personally spent, and the three people working in the hardware team, spent six months off and on living near the factory in Shenzhen, helping build the first prototypes of Pebble and getting the production line up and running. This is probably around 7pm on a Friday night, figuring out how to the glue to work so the top of the lens would actually be glued into the bottom, and still be waterproof. It was amazing. My mom would phone me up and say, are you sure you are okay? Shouldn't you be a little more stressed? You do have to ship eighty-five thousand watches to people all around world. And I would say, no I think we’ve got it. It was a bit of blind faith, a bit of naivety, but I think we were dedication and we knew we had built something that people really really wanted so we poured all of our effort into it, and it paid off. This is the first red watch Pebble that popped off the assembly line.
This is December 28, 2012, I wore that watch, that same watch that I pulled off the assembly line for about a year until I replaced it with a nice new Pebble Steel. But it was the moment that I realized all of our effort finally paid off, we had built something that was almost exactly what we set out to build. It was a fantastic feeling.
The team grew a lot. We only had around ten to eleven people, by the time we actually started shipping the watch we had now grown immensely. At first it was people who didn't exactly know what we were doing, we still don't exactly know what we are doing, but we feel a lot better about doing it. We have hundreds of thousands of watches out in the world, and some people may think that I started the company solely so I could use puns in advertising, I think they wouldn't be incorrect, but I think there’s a little more to that. I started working on wearables now about six and a half years ago, at the beginning I saw the other watches that were on the market-- there were actually other SmartWatches back in 2008, there was a Sony Ericson watch that cost $399.
I was a twenty, twenty-two year old I didn't really want to spend four hundred bucks on this brand new SmartWatch. So I wanted to make something that was cheaper, something that was more affordable. So instead of buying the four hundred dollar watch, I started a whole entire company to make a more affordable watch for myself. But it's interesting that the same trends are coming back now. You see Apple moving into the space. They have built an amazingly, beautiful, aesthetically, awesome metal sapphire expensive watch. They definitely have their perspective of where they see wearables going. You see Google coming into the space taking a whole smartphone and trying to cram it onto your wrist. And then us, we are going off in this slightly different but very important direction for building something that meshes into your life. We build a product that works with your phone that you already have, as long as you don't have a Windows phone.
It has a long battery life, it works as a sports watch, it's lightweight, it's inexpensive, it's completely open, hackable. In fact the part that I am most excited about for the future, is the community that's supporting it. There's hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have Pebble, who are hacking on it, who are building interesting things. Just last week, one of our partners Jawbone, Hosain is going to be on stage a little later on, Jawbone launched an activity app on Pebble that allows you to do step tracking and all this other good activity tracking. But it works with the Pebble that came out two years ago.
We’re really committed to making sure that Pebble can be a growing platform, that other people can hack on, and that will become more and more important as time goes on. It's not something that is revolutionary, it's not going to change your life the moment that you put it on. But it becomes part of your habit, a part of your routine, and over time it adds more and more value. Some of the other amazing stories from our community, a website, a website called hard to watch face generator which is this guy named Paul, he lives in Germany, he built this app, this website that lets anyone create their own watch face for Pebble. You just upload a bitmap, or an image, you move the little hands around on the screen, and you can create your own watch face. Over two hundred and fifty thousand people have done this. I believe, I don't know for certain, but I believe that there’s more different types of watch faces for Pebble than there are different types of watches available in the entire world. That kind of thing is just mind boggling when you think about the fact that we started six and a half years ago to make a watch just for ourselves, and now there are people all over the world hacking on it, building on it really cool things. And it leaves me pretty damn excited for the future.
I appreciate your time and that is a little bit about the Pebble story.