Four years after launching the (then) most lucrative crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter’s history, Pebble abruptly ended. The hardware startup closed 2016 by filing for insolvency, before being sold off to Fitbit. The fitness-tracking giant built much of the Ionic smartwatch with help from former Pebblers, along with the company’s pioneering software stack.
The first Apple Watch launched in mid-2015, proceeding to suck much of the oxygen out of the room. It would, however, be massively oversimplifying the situation to suggest that it was merely another case of Sherlocking. Apple, after all, raised public interest, ultimately setting the stage for countless other smartwatches after.
It could be argued that Pebble was cursed with foresight and was simply too early to the space. Founder and CEO Eric Migicovsky would argue that the company’s rapid growth and feature expansion caused Pebble to lose sight of his initial vision. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a hardware startup was felled by such fate.
Eight years after selling the company off to Fitbit, Migicovsky is ready for round two. “We’re restarting Pebble,” he told TechCrunch with a massive grin on a Zoom call Monday. That, too, however, is an oversimplification. After all, five years after buying the startup, Fitbit was sold off to Google. While Pebble branding ultimately faded as the company was absorbed the first time, the software giant still owns the technology and all of its IP.
Still in the idea stage, Migicovsky’s planned company needs a new name — something the Beeper co-founder and former Y Combinator partner hasn’t quite gotten around to. His decision to announce a Pebble 2.0 in its infancy is the product of a massively consequential decision announced by Google on Monday.
While it apparently has no plans to surrender Pebble as a brand, Google is returning to its roots by open sourcing the smartwatch brand’s software stack. While former Pebble employees have remained onboard at Google as the company has poured more resources into its own smartwatch operating system, WearOS, it’s not clear how much — if any — of Pebble’s technology exists in products like the Pixel Watch.
“This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016,” Google writes in a blog post.
By open sourcing access to PebbleOS Google is opening the door to new third-party hardware. Migicovsky’s unnamed smartwatch startup is first on that list. The founder tells TechCrunch that he’s thrown himself into the project full time and will be able to accelerate things as access to PebbleOS opens up. He is, however, currently its only employee, though there are plans to bring on another around March.
The startup’s goals are fittingly humble. Migicovsky says he simply wants to make the watch he wants, given that the Pebble he wears to this day is now a decade old. “I’ve tried everything else,” he says. “I have very high standards.”
Those are, according to a new blog post on Migicovsky’s personal site:
- Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
- Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
- Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
- Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
- Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watch faces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watch faces on the Pebble app store!)
During its relatively brief life, Pebble sold 2 million smartwatches. It’s an impressive feat in the world of hardware startups, but ultimately not enough to maintain the required momentum.
In spite of his time at YC, Migicovsky has no plan to raise VC funds. Nor does he plan to return to the Kickstarter model that gave rise to Pebble the first time around. He is currently self-funding the project and says he plans to build it modestly, based on consumer interest.
As for whether an audience remains for Pebble in a post-Apple Watch world, he jokes, “There are at least dozens of us.” He notes that the brand still commands its own active Subreddit, eight years after closing its doors. A small resale market has popped up around older devices, though as anyone who has bought a piece of consumer electronics in the past two decades can tell you, hardware doesn’t last forever.
Migicovsky is planning the company to serve the specific needs of those who want precisely what he laid out in his blog post. It’s difficult to say how many people yearn for the discontinued product in a world where Apple has dramatically shifted user expectations, but he’s betting on not being alone in his desires.
“This is a passion project. I have a vested interest in making the watch,” Migicovsky says of building a startup to create a product he wants to wear. “We’re going to make this happen.”
Despite being in its infancy, Migicovsky has visited Shenzhen in a bid to scope out the current state of manufacturing. “Turns out making hardware is much easier than it was 10 years ago,” he says. “There were no smartwatches factories. We had to tell the factories what to do.”
He also says that he feels confident about the small startup’s ability to build a new Pebble for the current era. “The hard part is the software.”
By opening up PebbleOS, Google made that bit considerably easier.
