When the Pebble Watch raised $1 million on Kickstarter in just 28 hours, it looked like an overnight success.
But Pebble's creator, Eric Migicovsky, has actually been working on smart watches for the last four years.
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Migicovsky first began tinkering with watches that display information from phones when he was a student at the University of Waterloo. He built his first prototype of the idea in his Netherlands dorm room, while studying abroad.
"Watches were just the first thing that appealed to me," he says of his initial inclination toward the product.
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After graduation in 2009, he and a small team started working on the watch full-time. Their first product, InPulse, only worked with BlackBerry.
"We sold about 1,500 and earned $200,000 in revenue -- which, up until three weeks ago, we thought was an awesome amount," he says.
While InPulse got a modicum of attention from Mashable, alongside The New York TImes and Wired, it did not see the kind of sales that tempt big investors. After graduating from startup accelerator Y-Combinator in April and changing its name to Pebble Technology, the startup had raised about $375,000 in angel financing but was struggling to raise a larger sum.
As an alternative to fundraising for its new product, Pebble, the company spent a month working on a Kickstarter video.
Unlike InPulse, Pebble works with both Android devices and iPhones. A range of watch-face options turn it into an analog, digital or sports watch at will, and developers will soon be able to build apps that display information on the connected watch's e-paper screen.
In their Kickstarter video, the team focused on how the watch could be used in daily life to, for instance, view text messages and incoming phone calls without actually picking up the phone -- a feature that is especially useful during activities like running or biking.
More than 55,000 Kickstarter users have committed to funding the project. With two weeks in the campaign to go, they've already contributed $8 million to the Pebble Watch.
Migicovsky had set his Kickstarter goal at a humble $100,000.
"Our plan was to make a thousand watches," he says. "We really just wanted to make a thousand watches. But we’re happy making more, that’s pretty cool."
The First Prototype
Migicovsky built his first smart-watch prototype in his dorm room when he was studying abroad in the Netherlands.
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This story originally published on Mashable here.
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