The founder of Pebble, Eric Migicovskyis doing things differently with its reboot of the Pebble smart watch brand and an AI ring. The team is small, inventory is not manufactured before being sold and there is no external financing.
More importantly, he says, the new business, Main devicesis “not a startup”.
“We’ve structured this whole company to be a sustainable, profitable and hopefully long-term business, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.
“Startups are good for the world,” he said. “You have to have money to build new ideas and create something. But it’s not a new idea,” Migicovsky said, referring to the smartwatch reboot. “It’s an old idea. We’re just bringing it back.”
The Pebble founder said he learned a lot from his previous efforts to build a hardware peripherals maker, including what not to do.
Pebble, the original company created by Migicovsky, was sold to Fitbit in 2016 for around $40 million; Fitbit was later bought by Google for $2.1 billion.
Just before its release, Migicovsky’s team had been scrambling. Christmas 2015 sent Pebble into a tailspin as the company purchased too much inventory.
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“Hardware is different from software. You have to predict in advance how much you’re going to sell, because you have to build the hardware,” Migicovsky explained, remembering the time when things went wrong.
The Pebble team then estimated that it would make $102 million in sales that year, but it “only” made $82 million. While that figure is impressive for a smartwatch brand (especially one that isn’t Apple, Google, or Samsung), the company was left with unsold inventory that had to be sold at a discount.
Retail partners were also upset because discounted sales meant reduced margins. During this time, Pebble did not have enough money to complete the development of its new products. To make ends meet, the company had to make rapid layoffs and reorganize. And finally, he had to find a way out.
“I think I lost sight of why I was building Pebble,” Migicovsky admitted. “At the beginning it was very clear. We had a Kickstarter. We posted on the web: This is exactly what Pebble does, this is what the features are, this is who should be interested. And then we wandered a little bit. We tried to do health tracking. We tried to do things that weren’t like us,” he said.
This time, Migicovsky wants to take a different path. The new Pebble smartwatches aren’t for everyone, he says. They’re aimed at people like him: a self-proclaimed “bit of a nerd” who just loves hacking, building, and creating things. They’re also not for fitness junkies or those who want a smartphone on their wrist.
“I want a companion for my phone, rather than a replacement for my phone. I want it to look more like a Swatch than a Rolex. I want it to be a little more fun, casual, playful and plastic.” Plus, he added, with the Pebble reboot, he can now settle for a watch that doesn’t try to do everything.
“I’m OK with a limited vision and a limited scope of what we’re trying to accomplish,” Migicovsky said.
Under the new company, Core Devices, the team announced the Pebble Time 2 Smartwatcha round face Round Pebble 2and a $75 AI smart ring called Index 01.
In particular, today’s company will no longer be a large team of 180 employees as before, nor a company working with distributors. Instead, there are just five people and the company sells directly to consumers on its website.
The basis, however, remains PebbleOS, the smartwatch’s operating system, fortunately open source by Google.
Migicovsky remembers running into a Google employee at a child’s birthday party, where he got the contact information for someone who could make a call about the open source of the smartwatch’s operating system. He sent an email to that employee, Matthieu Jeanson, demanding that Google make the operating system open source, and a year later he followed through.
“I’m really grateful to Google, because what other big company in the world would do that? » said Migicovsky. “I think they did it as a tribute to the Pebble community.”
Without PebbleOS, the rebooted Pebble smartwatch would have been impossible, as it took a team of 30-40 people working for years to originally build it. Recreating this from scratch was not an option.
So far, the structure of the new company is working. The company has sold 25,000 pre-orders for its smartwatches and about 5,000 for its newer AI Ring.
Pebble pre-orders currently ship in about six months, but Migicovsky said the team will reduce that time to a few weeks. Additionally, the Pebble App Store offers 15,000 watch faces and apps. In a few weeks, the team will also relaunch the SDK for developers.
Migicovsky says the team is in a “comfortable place,” where its expenses are paid and it is able to fund new projects.
That’s right, the team isn’t done yet. Migicovsky won’t detail what kind of hardware devices Core Devices might ship next, but says they’ll be the kinds of things he personally wants to have.
“A lot of products are already on the market. Nothing we make looks like something that already exists,” suggests Migicovsky. “[The next products will be] fun, casual, simple material, and it’s stuff that will make my life a little better, one block at a time. And they will work together.
