- The speaker started working on the concept of Pebble in 2008 while studying abroad.
- The first prototype was a bicycle computer that would show text messages.
- The prototype evolved into a watch and was funded through pitch competitions.
- The early prototypes only worked with Blackberry phones.
- The company leaked a render of the product to generate buzz before the official launch.
- The leaked render created excitement and media coverage.
- The company received validation from a thousand interested customers.
- The speaker continued to build prototypes and generated press coverage by showing the product to people.

- The company started in a garage in Waterloo, assembling watches by hand
- They applied to Y Combinator and were accepted, despite being a hardware company
- They launched an SDK and received a lot of developer interest, with over 100 apps available for their watch
- They received feedback from customers and used it to design a new product called Pebble
- They struggled to raise money from investors and decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign
- The Kickstarter campaign was a huge success, raising $10 million in 30 days
- They flew to Asia to work on production and successfully shipped 85,000 watches
- The founder wore the first watch off the assembly line for a year, realizing their hard work had paid off

- The team grew significantly and the company now has hundreds of thousands of watches in the market.
- The founder started the company to make a more affordable smartwatch after seeing expensive options on the market.
- Apple and Google are also entering the wearable space with their own perspectives on the future of wearables.
- Pebble is focused on building a product that integrates seamlessly into users' lives, is lightweight, has a long battery life, and is open and hackable.
- The company is excited about the community of users who are hacking on and building interesting things for Pebble.
- Pebble aims to be a growing platform for others to hack on and add value to over time.
- The company is committed to making Pebble a part of users' routines and habits, adding more value over time.
- The community has created over 250,000 different watch faces for Pebble, showcasing the platform's versatility and popularity.
- The founder is excited about the future and appreciates the time.

- Pebble is a smartwatch company that started in 2008 with a prototype bicycle computer.
- They gained attention through leaked renders and received validation from interested customers.
- Pebble launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising $10 million in 30 days.
- They have shipped thousands of watches and continue to grow their team and user community.
- Pebble focuses on creating a lightweight, long-lasting, and customizable smartwatch.

Eric Migicovsky at Startup School Silicon Valley 2014

View the annotated transcript, and add annotations of your own, on Genius: http://tech.genius.com/Eric-migicovsky-eric-migicovsky-at-startup-school-sv-2014-annotated

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 2 years ago.

I'm here to tell you a little bit about that, but also take you 4 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, kind of unlike engineering, everyone is always sketching.

And as an engineer, I didn't have those same drawing skills at the time.

And the first thing that I sketched was a bicycle computer that would talk to your phone.

Everyone in Holland bikes practically every single minute of their life.

And I wasn't born with the gene that let me type on my phone while I was biking.

And 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?

And while I technically could have just tried to pull my phone out of my pocket while biking probably would have ended up in the canal.

So I thought of this bike computer that would show you text messages.

1 of my friends came along and said, hey, that bike computer that you're building probably would be a little bit more useful as a watch since some people don't bike every single minute of their life.

So, I took apart a cell phone, the Nokia 3310, which is 1 of the most popular phones in the world, ripped that apart, combined it with an Arduino, and made this super early version.

You can actually see where I cracked the screen off of the phone And made and made this first prototype myself It wasn't beautiful.

It certainly didn't work perfectly But it showed me at least that this was something that I could use on a daily basis.

I went back to Waterloo to finish up my final year of engineering and did what I'm sure a lot of you guys do, which is pitch.

The company at the time was called InPulse, which stood for Information Pulse, and it aimed to do 1 thing, which was show you text messages, emails, and calls right on your wrist.

I did these pitch competitions where you stand up and you talk for 45 seconds in elevator pitch competitions.

And that was actually how we funded the early stage of the company.

I would win these gigantic checks, comically large checks, which are very difficult to cash at ATMs.

And the first prototypes that we built were actually funded from these pitch competitions.

I borrowed some money from my parents who were extremely generous at that time.

I think the argument was, well, it's cheaper than grad school.

And we built, me and a couple friends, built the very first actually working prototype.

And you notice that my prototype was the first 1.

This is the much better prototype that was actually built by some talented electrical engineers and computer engineers.

Being in Waterloo, I'm sure there's a couple of Waterloo people in the crowd.

How many of you guys remember what Blackberry is?

It's this really popular phone and keyboards.

So you can see here the first prototype actually worked with Blackberry.

And it wasn't just it worked with Blackberry, it only worked with Blackberry.

So you could see there's still some wires coming out of it, but generally it actually did the job.

This is a real text message that someone sent to my Blackberry at the time.

It didn't look great, again, but it finally worked.

And we could show it off and began talking about it in the community.

People said, hey, this is a interesting little project, but you know it could actually become a company if you want it.

So, I, the first step was actually trying to make it look a little bit better than what a couple of 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 smartphones of the time to build what would become our first watch, Impulse.

This is pen and ink marker 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.

It's a 3D printed prototype with actual electronics running inside.

This was the first stage that we actually 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.

Kind of hard for people to imagine wearing a circuit board on their wrist.

3D printing was still pretty early at the time.

This was our first, you know, somewhat 3D printed, a little bit hand-painted as well.

But it did a little bit of a better job at showing off what a smartwatch could be.

So naturally the next step in 2000, this is 2009, end of 2009, was to launch it.

You know, just like every good software company in the world you have to launch early and often.

And 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.

And I'm sure many of you read Engadget and The Verge and that kind of stuff.

And you see these occasionally posts of people posting leaked photographs or blurry photos of new products.

And the secret is that sometimes those are actually devices that fall off the back of a truck at the factory, but other times it's 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.

And about a week before we were planning to actually launch the product to the world, I, you know, there's tips lines at various blogs, like tips at Engadget, tips at whatever, so I emailed a couple of these blogs with a render of what our product could look like.

And I emailed it to Crackberry, which is 1 of the most popular Blackberry blogs at the time.

I said there's this company working on this interesting Blackberry watch, Would you be interested in getting a little bit more information?

And within 30 minutes, the guy emailed me back, phoned me actually, said, I got to have more information.

I want to blog about it right this second.

And I had to explain to him that, no, this isn't like, I'm not actually leaking any private information, like it's our company, we're a little startup in Waterloo.

And he's like, I don't care, I don't care, I still want to share this with the world.

And I said, sure, if you want to do that, let's do it.

And so on October 19th, 2009, Crackberry ran this, And you could see it's got that vibe of, I'm not sure exactly where I got this image.

First Images, BlackBerry watches 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.

The culmination of the first week was really exciting.

It was a reporter for CNBC 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's like, I've got no comment, no comment.

So it was amazing for us, because we saw this massive kind of adoption of it.

But we still didn't know how to parlay that into actual people knowing that it was our product.

So about a week later, we followed up with all these blogs.

We posted our page online and then followed up with every single blog saying, you know that watch that you ran last week?

And we were worried, you know, would they think that, you know, we were cheating them or screwing with the system, or maybe they wouldn't even post again about us 1 week later.

We were worried, but then we forgot the cardinal rule, which is everybody loves page views and every single person ran it again.

We had about a thousand people who were interested in the product, who had signed up for a mailing list.

We didn't actually 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 wanted.

This is our first metal CNC milled prototype.

There's another little fun press thing at CES.

Instead of signing up for media briefings or getting a booth or something like that, we just kind of wandered around and showed this.

This was us walking into the NGadget studio and just showing it to people.

And naturally, they ran a story about that as well.

So never, if you're looking for press, there's absolutely no wrong way to do it.

You can pretty much get press any way you can try, 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, So even though we were graduated, on Sundays, we kind of just broke into the university and set up our assembly line in the lab.

We built the first 500 watches with our own hands, just sitting there assembling each part of it.

It gave us an immense Appreciation for what goes into these little consumer electronic devices And then we and then we started shipping them We didn't really We didn't really promise our customers that it was anything more than an alpha grade unit.

In fact, the first 20 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 like 5,000 of them all at the same time that we just built 10, 20, 50, 100 units and then shipped them out.

It was around this time that we applied to Y Combinator.

Up until this point, YC had only accepted, I think, 3 hardware companies in the entire lifespan of YC.

But we felt that we had finally latched onto something.

Our first product that people were actually starting to use had amazing engagement.

80% of all the people who used, who had purchased Impulse, were using it every single day.

And it wasn't just from the analytics, but people actually told us.

I have, in my email inbox, personal threads with practically every single person who owned 1 of these first watches, about what was good, what was bad, what needed to improve.

And 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 having spent 7 years in Ontario was amazing.

I still have not changed since, I've not changed out of shorts and t-shirts since I got down here, but after 7 years in a either crazy hot or crazy cold climate, I've got to say that Mountain View was pretty perfect.

And the 1 thing that we, the 1 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 the time.

Our first version of software didn't 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 that time on this smartwatch.

So we launched a firmware upgrade the week later.

And that began a cycle of kind of continuous integration of features and suggestions.

But 1 thing that we always thought was going to be too big and we were always pushing off to the future was launching an SDK.

We invited developers to write apps for the watch.

But keep in mind, there were only 1,000 Impulse watches in the field.

We spent about 2 weeks working on an SDK.

Within 2 or 3 months of launching the SDK, there were over 100 apps available for Impulse.

That's 1 app for every 10 watches in existence.

So obviously, people were not building it because they thought they would get rich or they thought that they would be able to start a company.

Developers who owned those early Impulse watches were building apps because they wanted to create something that they could wear on their body.

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.

It was very colorful, but the battery life wasn't great.

The watch also had a screen that wasn't great outside.

It would kind of get washed out when you took it out to go for a run.

But the biggest problem of all was that it didn't work with iPhone.

So we got down to the valley, we did YC, and we showed people our cool smartwatch, and they said, this looks great, But does it work with iPhone?

So in mid-2011, iOS 5 came out, which finally gave us the capability to run an application in the background when it was talking with a Bluetooth accessory.

We took all the feedback from Impulse and we funneled it into this new product, Pebble.

We did the next logical thing, which is to shop it around on Sand Hill Road, talk to the VCs, angels, investors, and we had this new product.

We had an idea of how we could actually build something people really wanted.

And we spent about a month talking to investors, 20 or 30 investors.

We couldn't get 1 single investor to actually sign on the dotted line.

We went back to YC, had our 20 minute session with Paul Graham.

I explained our problems and he says, no, you're not gonna be able to raise money.

This is a pretty common question that hardware entrepreneurs will get asked at some point.

And I had to explain, I don't think we're gonna be able to turn it into a software company.

And he's like, is there anything else you can do?

And I said, yeah, Well, we're thinking about going on this website called Kickstarter.

And so we explained, and he said, that sounds like an amazing idea.

And so we spent a month, and we 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.

It was 11 PM on the night before we launched.

When I clicked this button, I distinctly remember wondering what would be next.

Obviously, I would never have been able to predict what happens.

We were trying to raise $100,000 to be able to sell 1,000 Pebble watches.

We blew through that milestone in 2 hours.

And after 30 days, we had raised $10 million from 70,000 people around the world.

It was pretty ridiculous, to say the least.

You know, we have some, we're able to rationalize it now looking back.

The first 1 being some advice that we got from Paul Bukite.

Paul Bukite is a partner at YC and he's also an investor in Pebble.

He wrote an amazing blog post several years ago that talks about a startup's product has to do 3 things really, really well.

And not only does your product have to be able to do 3 things and preferably not more, you also have to be able to explain what those 3 things are.

And so I think that the reason why 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, like RunKeeper, or Strava, or Endomondo, and just see an instantaneous update of speed, location, distance on their wrist without having to do something like buy a Garmin watch.

And the third thing that we talked about was customization, being able to download and install different watch faces.

It had never been done before, and we offered our users that ability.

Where we went from there was kind of crazy.

We were 5 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 most people who are working on hardware do, is fly to Asia.

We spent, I personally spent, and the 3 people working on the hardware team, spent about 6 months off and on living near the factory in Shenzhen, helping build the first prototypes of Pebble, and then getting the production line up and running.

This is probably around 7pm on a Friday night, figuring out how to get the glue working so that the top of the lens would actually be glued into the bottom and still be waterproof.

I think that it took, you know, my mom would phone me up and she would say, are you sure you're okay?

Like, shouldn't you be a little bit more stressed?

You do have to ship 85,000 watches to people all around the world.

And I said, no, no, I think we've got it.

But I think we were dedicated, and we knew that 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.

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 when I realized that all of our effort finally paid off, that we had built something that was almost exactly like what we set out to build.

By the time we actually started shipping the watch, we've now grown immensely.

At first, it was people who didn't really know exactly what we were doing.

We still don't know exactly what we're doing, but we feel a lot better about doing that.

We have hundreds of thousands of watches out in the world.

And some people may say that, some people may think that I started the company solely so that I could use puns in advertising.

But I think there's a little bit more to that.

I started working on wearables now about 6 and a half years ago.

At the beginning, you know, I saw the other watches that were on the market.

There were actually other smart watches back in 2008.

There was a Sony Ericsson watch that cost $399.

I didn't really want to spend $400 on this brand new smartwatch.

So I wanted to make something that was cheaper, something that was more affordable.

So instead of just buying the $400 watch, I started an entire company to make a more affordable watch for myself.

But it's interesting that the same trends are coming back now.

They've built an amazingly beautiful, aesthetically awesome, metal, sapphire, expensive watch.

They definitely have their perspective on where wearables are going.

You see Google coming into the space, trying to take an entire smartphone and cram it onto your wrist.

And then us, we're going off in this slightly different but very important direction for building something that meshes into your life.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Eric Migicovsky at Startup School SV 2014