Pebble

“I talked to the guy who ran Pebble, the smartwatch company, and he was like, 90% of our revenue comes in Q four because it's a gifted product.”

“I mean, I remember talking to the Pebble guys. Do you remember this watch, the smartwatch, the precursor to the Apple watch? And they, it was a pretty big business. I feel like they were doing like fifty million dollars a year in sales. Like, 90% of their rev…”

“In 2012, they launched Pebble on Kickstarter for the first time. They raised ten million dollars from 68,000 people around the world, and they went on over the next few years to sell two million watches And did over two hundred thirty million dollars in sales.”

“They forecasted a hundred million dollars in sales in 2015 after doing their, you know, 2012, and I think they did a 2014 Kickstarter. They projected a hundred million in sales, and they only sold eighty two million dollars worth of product. So they had eighte…”

“I remember that when I was working on Pebble we actually went to CES, which is this large consumer electronics show in Vegas. We didn't have a booth. We just went in gorilla style. We just like randomly started setting up in setting up meetings with potential …”

“I actually thought of it while lying on a beach, and it was like two years before we actually made Pebble, and I just like wrote it down in Evernote on a list of Good names.”

“We screwed up everything you could possibly screw up. In the first 10 watches we had a lot of problems, but we had a problem with RF. We couldn't get the signal out of the watch, because it's like a Faraday cage sitting on your wrist. And so we said, well, may…”

“We continued to manufacture hand by hand, one by one by hand, up until around 708 hundred units.”

“We raised a bit of money about 250,000 dollars including this kind of large check that we got from, ah, one investor. And I took all that money and invested in inventory, because I thought at the time the biggest constraint on us growing was we didn't have a r…”

“Most people don't know this, but when we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we had already made and sold around 1500 of our first watch.”

“Some of the most painful moments of my early career were, ah, not having full-time co-founders, and having to work with contractors or consultants who, honestly, like, you can't pay someone enough to care. I mean, firstly because you probably don't have that m…”

“I don't think we ever Reached escape velocity to a hit with any of our later products, and I think if we had built a more frugal organization, if we were able to build products cheaper, and then launch them and test to see if they were successful, and if they …”

“Right after we kind of hit on Kickstarter, we were only two people at the company. Two full-time people and two interns, and so we had, like, nobody, and all of a sudden we needed to hire people, and we could have spent, you know, three to six months hiring a …”