So I was going to write about something else today and then I checked Kickstarter this morning and just, no, we have to talk about Pebble.
Quick recap if you missed it: a company called Allerta put up a Kickstarter last Wednesday, April 11th, for a watch. Not a smart-smart watch like the stuff Apple rumors keep promising and never delivering. Just a watch with a black-and-white e-paper screen, a bit like a Kindle strapped to your wrist, that talks to your iPhone or Android phone over Bluetooth and buzzes you for calls, texts, emails, all that. Ninety-nine bucks for the early bird tier. They were asking for $100,000 total.
They hit that in about two hours.
I dont mean two hours after launch counting overnight, I mean two actual hours of people being awake and clicking a button. By the next day they'd crossed a million dollars, which is the kind of number that used to take a Kickstarter its entire 30-day run to hit, if it ever got there at all. And as of a couple days ago they blew past the $3.3 million record that Double Fine set back in February with their adventure game project. Double Fine felt like a fluke at the time, this weird one-off thing because Tim Schafer has a cult following and gamers wanted to prove a point about crowdfunding. Pebble is a watch. A watch nobody had heard of until last week, from a company most of us cant even name off the top of our heads (its Allerta, I had to look it up twice while writing this).
I checked the total again before sitting down to write this paragraph and honestly Im not going to type the exact number because it'll be stale by the time anyone reads this post. Thats not hyperbole, thats just where this thing is right now, it changes hour to hour.
Why does a watch do this
Ive been chewing on this a bit and I think its a few things stacked together. One, the guy behind it, Eric Migicovsky, already built a smaller version of this thing called the inPulse, so this isnt some guy with a sketch and a dream, its a guy with a sketch and a dream and also a working prototype and a track record. Two, e-paper is genuinely the right call for something you wear on your wrist all day, because the battery life on those things is supposedly measured in days not hours, unlike every backlit LCD gadget that dies by 4pm. And three, honestly, people are just sick of waiting around for Apple or somebody to make the smartwatch everyone keeps insisting is inevitable. Every few months theres a rumor, never a product. Pebble just showed up with a real thing you can pre-order for less than a hundred bucks and said here, this exists now.
Im not backing it, for the record, mostly because Ive got an actual watch I like (a cheap Casio Ive worn since college, it does not need Bluetooth) and Im skeptical of anything that requires charging on top of my phone already needing charging. But I get the appeal. I get why 68 dollars from a stranger in Ohio and 68 dollars from a stranger in Melbourne add up to a company suddenly having more money than they know what to do with.
Side note because I cant not mention it: this is the same week Facebook announced its buying Instagram for a billion dollars, which is a completely different kind of internet-breaking-news but its funny that both stories are basically about small teams with almost no headcount commanding numbers that dont make intuitive sense. Instagram has like thirteen employees. THIRTEEN. I dont have a tidy point to make about that, it just still doesnt sit right with me a week later, a billion dollars for an app that puts a fake vignette on your brunch photos.
Anyway. Back to the watch thing. If youre the type who backs these campaigns Id love to hear about it, drop a comment or find me on Twitter. Ive got a soft spot for Kickstarter even when Im not pulling out my wallet, theres something genuinely fun about watching a number climb in real time and knowing its just a few thousand people deciding, independently, that a thing should exist. Beats waiting for a keynote.