It baffles me how a niche product that everyone loved could fail like this. Smartwatch competition seems like a barren field compared to smartphones, and Pebble had things no other rivals could do - double the battery life, true always on display and a great open platform. The functionality was there, an the hardware was good enough.
It would be really interesting to see what actually failed - much smaller companies with niche products like Flirc.tv are chugging along well.
I can only hope that someone picks the torch up and makes a Pebble successor - the userbase is still there, without any matching product to choose.
Pebble made a bet on more growth than that niche userbase could provide.
It turned out the only functionality a significantly larger userbase than Pebble's early adopters found interesting in a wearable device was fitness tracking related. They pivoted too late to accommodate that.
I LOVE my pebble. I wish you would do a 2.0 to just address that niche instead of pumping it up with investor $$. Most current mainstream options are still "smartphones-strapped-to-wrist" as you call them.
Which is why I'm having a hard time finding a replacement for my Pebble. Everyone out so much emphasis on fitness capabilities that they forget the usability part.
The timeline concept on the Pebble was great, and no one currently come close to it.
If I'm going to wear a watch, it better excel at telling time and show me time-related events in a clean way.
I love the timeline, showing my calendar appointments, seeing notifications(and being able to use some of the Android notification commands on them), fitness tracking, but most important of all, battery life, I love not having to recharge my Pebble every day.
I liked the idea of Nokia Steel HR for instance, but there's little screen real estate for a smartwatch to show me notifications and appointments in a proper way.
IMO one reason Pebble failed was that the writing was on the wall once the Apple Watch launched: if you're not in the ecosystem, you're going to be weak by comparison. Case in point, a Pebble watch can receive notifications on an iOS device, but can't act on them. It has a microphone, but can't use Siri. As Apple expands the watch platform and doesn't let Pebble in, they become less and less competitive. The picture is much better on Android given its open nature - even after the death of Pebble you can use Gadgetbridge to keep going. But you can see how Pebble became something that investors looked at warily - they weren't in control of their destiny.
It's a huge shame. IMO, the Pebble Time Round[1] is still the best looking smartwatch created by anyone so far. And it has a longer battery life than the Apple Watch and (most?) Android watches.
This is the type of product that really needs a lightweight company to produce it. Sure, the initial sales can probably recover money used to pay a development and design staff, but that doesn't keep their paycheck going indefinitely. In order to employee a decent development team you need to constantly churn out new products, or have a larger product portfolio (which is why Samsung, for example, can still sell smartwatches, because those devs can get assigned to other projects between product revisions).
What Pebble needed to be successful was to have the product design teams completely outsourced from the beginning, so that initial development (and each revision costs) could be budgeted against expected sales, but once that is done, the development team (outsourcer) would then continue work for other customers. Instead of being on Pebble's payroll.
I wonder if it would be possible to approach a potential outsource that is growing, with your own team, and have them re-badged to the outsourcer with them dedicated to your project for its duration? Then the outsourcer can re-deploy those resources internally as needed later on.
This is kind of what happened at a company I used to work for -- they wanted to outsource IT, but keep their workers employed. So they found a company expanding in the area, re-badged us, and those of us that didn't stay dedicated to the original company after the transition were deployed to other contracts. The outsourcer then got an increase in pre-vetted high quality staff without the whole onboarding expense.
I loved my Pebble because it helped disconnect me from my phone. My phone's ringer got turned off, and I could rely on wrist vibrations and read alarms and text messages from my wrist. This lead to me getting 1/2 hour of my day back, because I would stop accidentally reading the news, opening Reddit, or playing a mobile game.
But it's much easier to monetize a product that forces more screen time on you, and keeps you more distracted. Does the Apple Watch get subsidized by Apple because of the App Store? Pebble could have gone that route, but it didn't feel like the customer they were targeting.
The main problem was that they ran out of runway while waiting for manufacturers and suppliers to line up and meet their demand. The software was solid, but for hardware products, that's less than half the picture. You need to worry about coordinating with suppliers, factories, and all these other logistical issues to produce a product a scale. If a supplier is unwilling to meet your demand, you're basically screwed and are left waiting indefinitely, unless you immediately pivot on your hardware design.
Having never heard of this before, I 100% thought you were just blending brands and words together--Amazon/Fit/Bit--and throwing out an absurd tech spec--45 days of battery--but I just looked it up and it's real. Wow.
Can confirm, mine was approximately US$59 from the Xiaomi shop here in Hong Kong, with full English support etc.
I don't know what, if anything, the US model has to justify a 40%+ price bump...
Thank you for posting this. I heard about it and never researched it. It looks amazing and it could be something to replace my Pebble once it stops working.
I am still getting a lot of compliments for Pebble, people often think it is an Apple watch. So Amazfit could be good replacement if I ever need one.
The hardware looks quite good, but do I want to give Xiaomi (an entity controlled by the PRC) access to my web browsing history, identity, contacts, calendar, files, location, calling history, SMS, etc? (these permissions are requested on Android by the associated app).
honestly, i don't they they were aesthetic enough. everyone I saw was incredibly ugly. I think most smart watch companies had this problem and by the time some had solved it, the novelty had worn off.
I bought a second hand moto 360 and got tired of having to charge it and my phone for what was practically the same return.
Obviously this is your opinion, but I will counter with mine..
I think the Pebble Time Steel [0][1] is actually the only good looking fully-functional smartwatch on the market, even to this day..
The Apple Watch looks like a wrist computer (yeah I know), and most of the other ones out there are either HUGE (I'm not into massive watch faces), or also look clunky and un-appealing. Or they are very blatantly "sport watches". I want a watch I can wear to work (where I have to dress up somewhat), or wear out at night..
Combine that with once-a-week charging, and I'm still super sad that mine will one day stop working and there won't be anything I can do about it. :-(
I have a Huawei Watch which is round, all-black and has a black steel band [0]. It fits in at work or basically any social situation. I ended up building my own watch face, which is quite subtle and mostly black. Mainly bought it because it was the first round one I liked (round, without 'flat tire' LCD).
Primarily use for seeing my agenda and message notifications, and to see the time.
It's AMOLED. I can get somewhere between 1.75 and 2.75 days, depending on how much I actively use it (and presumably, how much my movements cause the full face to light up). According to Watchmaker, my face has an OPR [1] of 5.5% bright, and 1.3% dim (idle) mode, and I leave it in 'always on' mode (where it is in the 'dim' mode most of the time). If you use a watchface with more stuff on the screen, battery decreases. If you change the face to turn off instead of dim, you get a lot more.
I've never had trouble getting through a full day and most days it has 50-60% left. If I'm not wearing it, I stick it on the charger (magnetic) which is always sitting beside my bed. I will say if I travelled a lot, the extra hassle of worrying about charging it and not forgetting/losing the charger would probably make me not bother with it, but I only am away for more than a night a handful of times a year (and either bring the charger, or wear a different non-smart watch).
Agree, but I think they were getting better in the later models. I use a pebble se with a eulit palma pacific watch band and it blends away very well compared to the original pebble. I’m actually afraid of switching to an Apple Watch since it’ll be heavier.
The SDK part of the Ionic is what was built by the Pebble team, and it's a really pleasant-to-use SDK -- developing stuff is super easy to do. They've also actively courted all the former Pebble developers to port their apps over, so a lot of the popular Pebble apps are already ported to the Ionic.
That said, I did prefer the Pebble hardware to the Ionic hardware -- I miss my reflective LCD.
Probably drowned in trying to support so many SKUs. Trying to segment their product beyond the ability of startup capital in a new and small market. Supply chain complexities, inventory burden, and too many subtly different models for a new (mainstream) customer to easily understand.
This baffles me too, especially when reading that he didn't had a long term vision all these years. That is not only textbook bad but very irresponsible.
Same for the argument that there was a ton of learnings when Pebble failed. Yes, maybe but how is that relevant to other startups? Even for the hardware space, if someone seemingly never managed to get the production pipeline going and never had a vision for the products, how much worth is the advice then? Failing fast and often is not applicable here.
Heck, I got a more or less failed startup, I probably can tell you some stuff but definitely not, how everything works or how to be successful.
SV is a strange place. It feels, it's more important how much money you have (raised) then how successful your company was/is.
When you are shopping for a legal adviser do you go with the one who lost his biggest case?
The premise is the same: he lost so he can teach quite a few lessons that he learned while losing.
How about this? Would you hire a football player that made it to the national team but performed horrible (and was fired by the manager) on that stage as a coach for your team - the one with the aspiration for Champions league?
How about a doctor? Would you go to the one whose patients died vs. the one whose have not?
You can probably know very well why you lost, but you can't know for sure at all why you won. Startup founder at conference: "By the following lotto numbers to repeat my success!"
A dude who had to take a hardware company through all the shit required from the bottom up into a time where now people can finally actually start doing hardware companies is going to know so much about how to help companies in ALL regards, dude was one of the most successful trailblazers, even if the trail died out. Hardware is fucking hard from every aspect and he knows about every aspect, that's why people will want his help.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but your analogy isn't good. The best heart surgeons actually are the ones with the highest failure rates because they are the only ones prepared to take on the riskiest operations. I would imagine this is also true of the best lawyers.
I think it is. His failure rate is 100% of the single attempt he made.
Someone investing into US treasury would have made more money than they made giving him money. That's the only objective way that we currently have to establish a success or a failure of a company executive and his or her knowledge and smarts.
Yeah this is exactly what I was thinking as well. I feel like there are enough successful startups that there would probably be better candidates. I know HW is hard but it seems weird they picked him when their sell-off for $40 million barely covered their debt.
I am so glad you wrote this, as I was thinking the same thing. I am big fan of Pebble and it still has loyal following. Botching that, no matter Apple and others, is really not something that would recommend someone.
It's not about winning or losing, it's about the friends you make along the way. Important friends, ones who will take your call, as many of those as you can get.
I still wear my pebbles daily (one at a time!). I'll be loath to replace them when the time finally comes, nothing else comes close to the perfect balance of including what I want in a watch and excluding what I don't want. So many other watches out there, including the Apple watch and every Android watch are packed full of crap I actively don't want cluttering up my wrist.
It takes guts to make a device with push-buttons in a touch-screen world, but in every way they're a better interface for a 1" screen, that is totally obscured by most digits.
It also takes guts to use a dull e-ink screen, but it's perfect - always on, battery lasts for a week (still!), and combined with the beautiful animations of the OS it looks fantastic.
I wish there were more device companies out there with the guts to use mature, if slightly dated tech to build amazing products, rather than try and make everything voice activated just because they can, even if it makes for a worse experience over all.
I dearly miss my Pebble Steel, but arguably the dial + buttons + touch screen combination on the Samsung Gear Sport I got as a replacement provides a better interface.
Xiaomi's Mi Band/Amazfit bands are probably the only good options left.
I had a Mi Band 1 for 2.5 years before it died, and I'm currently running a Mi Band 2. It has a 20 day battery life and has good third party app support.
I still miss some thing from Gadgetbridge, like the inability to use some apps that requires Internet access (ie: HTTP Push) that I used to control my BlinkStick light status indicator at work.
From the Fitbit blog post on the topic, it looks like the effect will be nill for me. Can’t buy new apps? Don’t care. It appears that day to day use will continue uninterrupted, at least for me.
And this is why I didn't buy a Pebble. I'm basically not prepared to buy a smart watch at this point unless its software is open source. Otherwise you're completely at the mercy of the company's (mis)fortunes.
Incidentally, as I write this I'm wearing the first watch I purchased for myself ~20 years ago. It's still running strong with zero maintenance. On the other hand (wrist?) both my smartwatches have been consigned to the drawer of random curiosities.
> I didn’t have that longer-term vision in mind necessarily when times got hard. I wasn’t thinking about the company’s world-changing mission, and that’s something I talk about with startups.
To me this was the number one reason Pebble failed, I don’t think anyone in the management ever thought of it as more than a series of individual products. They didn’t need a “world changing mission”, they needed a business model with some kind of long term strategy to get off the crowd funding platform. If you are asking your customers to pre find your manufacturing runs after 6 years then something has gone wrong.
Shame because it seemed like a great product and everyone I know who had/has one really liked them.
It really was. I still have my Pebble classic on my wrist, and patiently wait for a similarly priced and spec'd (B&W eInk screen, HR sensor, simple look) watch to the Pebble 2 so I can retire it. I was genuinely bummed when they announced they aren't going ahead with Pebble 2 shipments because of their closure.
Unless you live in a country where every user can demand the release of the data about them. In Germany (and AFAIK all of the EU) for example, that is the case.
Besides that, I consider unfriendly design like that a big reason not to buy a product. Why buy a product you know you need to send legal letters to the developer just for properly using it?
Hi, I'm wondering about buying a used Pebble 2. Does it make any sense though? Isn't it using some services now maintained by Fitbit which they can shut down at any point?
While the servers are going down in June, projects like https://rebble.io are moving toward replacing those services. For the last release of the Pebble app, they included a dev mode which allows us to change the path for the store.
We'll see how it goes, but I bought a Pebble 2 HR a few months ago and love it. This is my third Pebble.
> If you are asking your customers to [pre-fund] your manufacturing runs after 6 years then something has gone wrong.
From what I understand, their later crowdfunding campaigns were more about building hype than actually raising funds. They could have made the watches without them, but since they were known for making such a splash on KickStarter, they went back again for later rounds. Was that the right thing to do? Did it project the right image for their company? That's up for debate, I suppose.
I bought a Pebble 2 and it was delivered just before the sale to Fitbit. It's great value for money, and I love the battery life. It's too bad they couldn't figure out a way to become more independent.
Same thing happened with the first Pebble Time Steel I bought. I took it back to the shop and swapped it. This one's been perfect for years, so I put it down to a batch problem.
Not to mention Eric's precursor to the Pebble called inPulse where they basically just shipped everyone a plastic brick, pretended nothing was wrong and then stopped supporting it.
I'm extremely proud to be joining YC. PG, Jessica, Harj, PB and Trevor were the first venture investors to believe in me and the idea back in 2010. Over the following 7 years YC helped in innumerable ways. While neither I nor anyone else was aiming for the particular conclusion to the Pebble story, YC and the whole network gave support at every twist and turn.
I'm sad the Pebble story had tonend like this, but I'm proud to have participated to both Kickstarter (own the OG Pebble, Pebble Steel, Pebble Time Steel) and I'm still wearing the PTS today!
The Timeline concept is unparalleled in the smartwatch ecosystem and the interface really put the "time" concept on the spotlight which I feel that current smartwatch makers forget to often about (to the benefit of fitness stuff, which is "trendy" amongst customers). I'll be sad when the thing will die. :(
Pebble was the best watch I've owned. I moved away to a mechanical watch since, but that experience is still what I want when I occasionally think of buying a new smart watch.
I adore my original Pebble and Pebble Time Steel. I'm curious to see whether Rebble [1] can pull together a new ecosystem.
I was under the impression Eric and the original Pebble team had deliberately ensured enough openings for that to happen, when the Fitbit acquisition news broke. Thanks to them if so.
How much do founders typically get when their startups sell for less than what investors put in? Not a troll question, genuinely interested. Any data on how this averages?
Officially, founders typically only hold common shares (often with further restrictions). Common shareholders should get $0 when selling for less than money raised because of liquidation preferences.
However, the acquiring company usually wants to retain some of the team. The founders often receive an employment offer, and that offer can contain anything negotiated, including signing or performance bonuses.
There can be some conflict of interest and negotiation ugliness if the investors view the employment offers as too generous at the expense of shareholders. In practice, most decent investors would prefer to spend their energy on their big winners rather than optimize a small loss into break-even.
A lot of people on this thread have praise for Pebble watches. I never owned one or any of its current competitors. Always got a a gimmicky feeling from those types of devices (i.e. no real added value over a regular watch and smartphone). Genuinely curious:
I'm not distracting anyone else; only I know I'm getting a call/notification. It works even when the phone isn't physically attached to me. And I quickly check/answer the call/notification without having to fish out my phone.
It's definitely more convenient to have a smartwatch.
My phone is always on silent now. It's much better to see notifications on my watch than have to dig out my phone to check. Like most people, most of my notifications aren't immediately actionable. A lot of them are just emails about things I'm already aware of but will be useful later. It's very useful to cut down the degree of interruption (and noise) from notifications day to day.
In certain situations it also greatly helps when there's a high rate of notifications due to some activity (sometimes I work events, for example), and there it can be helpful if you are part of a group of folks who are using messaging to coordinate in real-time to be able to not have to dig out your phone constantly to stay caught up. Typically you'll read many more messages than you'll write, so optimizing for reading without breaking your workflow (such as if you're working with your hands, walking, or doing something else) is practically a game changer.
Also, for me, I spent many years without a watch because it seemed superfluous during the cell phone era. And for a while when I owned a smartwatch I had only used it during events when I really needed it to keep up with a near continuous communication stream. But I spent a while experimenting with just wearing it everyday, partly to help with maintaining a more consistent schedule, especially with sleep. I have alarms (which just vibrate) on my watch to remind me when it's time to go home from work and when it's near bed time. That may seem like overkill but they are very unobtrusive and they've made it much much easier to avoid staying very late at work or staying up too late for no good reason. Also, I switched to using a cloth (NATO) watch band which makes wearing a watch much more comfortable than with a plastic or even leather band, in my experience.
Overall I've been wearing a smartwatch essentially every day for about two years now and I wouldn't go back easily. It's nice to just have a watch when you need it, it's nice to get notifications less intrusively, it's nice being able to leave your phone on silent forever, it's nice having a step counter without having to worry about it, it's nice having a way to control fitness apps like STRAVA so that I can go on a bike ride and see how many miles I've ridden, my average pace, etc. (although they dropped support for pebble unfortunately).
The thing I like particularly about pebble, and the reason I haven't upgraded since then even though I could easily afford it (I've even resorted to running an old version of STRAVA on my phone that still works with pebble) is that it's always on (it has a transflective LCD display), has weeklong battery life, and in general it doesn't try to be a 2nd smartphone just a complement to my existing smartphone. Unfortunately, so many other smartwatches seem to fall into the trap of being blingy high-status toys that are expensive and flashy but have super short battery life and displays that are only on sometimes. I wear my pebble when I go hiking or camping, starting from a full charge it works just fine as a regular watch even with my smartphone off.
Hellishly expensive in comparison, but I found the Garmin Fenix 5 to be the perfect replacement for my dear departed Pebbles. It helps that I wanted a fitness watch too, but even just as a smartwatch it ticks every box that the Pebble did for me, and looks way nicer on the wrist.
I'm the proud owner of two Pebble Time's, battery on one is unfortunately not so good but I can get 6 days with the other one, and both are swim proof. Great for festivals etc.
VC funds is where founders go to retire. Im not sure why this is a big/good deal - afaik, its a waste of talent.
The only people who can sustain investor jobs are the MBA hacks driven primarily by money and fomo. I have yet to meet a single founder who was happy with the lack of control that such a job requires.
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I can only hope that someone picks the torch up and makes a Pebble successor - the userbase is still there, without any matching product to choose.