Crowdfunding platform
Pebble used the Kickstarter platform to get funding to launch its campaign.
- The sphere of smartwatches was unknown that day.
- The pebble smartwatch had an e-paper screen that allowed easy reading in daylight (Jowitt, 2017).
- The battery of smartwatches was more substantial than that of other watches at that time.
- The critical element was self-planning by Pebble, the device manufacturer.
- In April 2012, the famous Kickstarter campaign Pebble Technology was created (Jowitt, 2017).
- Pebble Time was a pioneer in this branch, so their offer interested many people.
- Pebble Technology chose to take risks, which brought them great commercial success.
How did the Kickstarter help the company?
There are the ways of Kickstarter helped the company to be successful:
- Raising money on Kickstarter gave the company the necessary freedom.
- The company did not need to answer to venture capitalists (Lapowsky, 2015).
- Pebble had access to all materials and did not need to coordinate each change.
- Kickstarter allowed us to work directly with consumers and understand their needs.
- A discount on the $150 watches on the first 200 pre-orders was offered (Vashishtha, 2019).
- Thanks to this platform, Pebble was seen by other companies.
- Best Buy – a giant American electronics retailer, started to sell Pebble smartwatches (Jowitt, 2017).
- Charles River Ventures saw Pebbles success and donated $15 million to support the company (Jowitt, 2017).
Constant smartwatch improvement
The company used its massive income from sales to improve watches, so the platform further brought income.
The first generation of Pebble smartwatches had some problems.
The following watches generation was connected with Android and IOS.
Smartwatches have an attractive and comfortable design.
Each notification was unique and had features that attracted more customers and ensured commercial success.
Competitiveness
Competitiveness helped Pebble to achieve commercial success by developing unique notifications in their smartwatches to compete with others companies.
- After Pebble’s watches succeeded, many other companies, such as Apple, started to produce smartwatches to fulfill the market.
- Pebble’s watch was based on energy-efficient E-Paper screens, which allowed the watch to run for a week on a single charge (Moore, 2022);
- Apple’s watch should be charged twice a day, so Pebble’s watch was more attractive to the customer;
- Pebble’s watches were suitable for both IOS and Android while Apple only with IOS (Moore, 2022);
- Pebble released smartwatches each year with new notifications and modern features;
- Pebble’s smartwatches offered a great function to meet each customer’s desire;
- Pebble Time smartwatches were cheaper than Apple’s.
The professionalism and previous experience of Pebble
During the campaign, new perks were released to incentivize backers to promote the campaign and back the smartwatch by the new ones.
The Kickstarter platform was used mostly as a promoting factor in advertising Pebbles smartwatches.
Pebbles team already has experience creating smartwatches for Blackberry.
Pebbles platform to understand and manage customers needs and desires.
The right way of promotion and discounts offered made the campaign successful.
All these factors helped Pebble Time to achieve $20,338,986 in sales of smartwatches (Alois, 2015).
The wise use of Kickstarter made Pebble Time the most successful project on the platform.
The key elements of Pebble’s campaign’s great success
One of the key elements of the success of the company is the idea that could project consumer needs. Moreover, Pebble founder Eric Migicovskys team already had some experience figuring to create smartwatches inPulse for Blackberry (Moore, 2022). Pebbles team was united and passionate about their work. In addition, the personal qualities of the founders, such as being ambitious and risky, helped the company. Furthermore, employees had the ability to wisely use resources and income to improve the product, and they were consistently developing new technologies to the smartwatches.
References
Alois JD. (2015). Pebble time: $20,338,986 in Crowdfunding, Kickstarter Record. Crowdfundinsider. Web.
Jowitt T. (2017). Tales in tech history: Pebble smartwatch. Silicon. Web.
Lapowsky I. (2015). Pebble’s insane success proves that Kickstarter is now a marketing tool. Wired. Web.
Moore T. (2022). The Pebble Smartwatch’s legacy remains 10 years on: ‘We invented the smartwatch’. Pastemagazine. Web.
Vashishtha Y. (2019). Pebble : The Biggest Kickstarter success story. YourTechStory. Web.