> The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.
How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky".
For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
Apple has both a sixth sense about this stuff and deep enough pockets to be wrong for quite a while before they have to give up.
If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.
I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.
One way to do it is to start small, build something, ship it to customers, get feedback and then iterate from there. This is a bit harder with hardware, though, but not impossible. We actually built an entire smartwatch called inPulse before Pebble, sold and shipped it to 1000 early customers, then got feedback from them. This is how we learned which features to put into Pebble.
I am a proud user of the pebble time round since a year (60$) and proudly wear it every day - especially on business trips were all have their bulky apple watch.
> I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
In that case, the reason I know people who didn't get the 12 Mini was it competed with the new SE, and they didn't want to upgrade during the pandemic when they were trapped at home. They're thinking about the 13 mini or the new SEs now that they are available.
Not really. Apple plans their phone line ups well in advance, and given that it's hardware it might be very difficult to change it on short notice. The mini significantly undersold expectations, leading to Apple even cutting production [1]. If you want further proof that the mini bombed, consider that every rumour has it gone from this year's lineup.
I actually think they’re carving out an odd model line with their small iPhones. They’ve gone back on the larger is better meme twice to make the first SE and then the Mini. I suspect we’ll get another mini model after enough demand has backfilled enough. I’m guessing it really is a size preference for certain people and budget for others.
The model line of “cheap enough for the people who absolutely have to wait until price drops to their level to upgrade.” And also whose numbers swell just enough every 3-5 years.
I have a regular size iPhone13Pro (which I really only bought for the depth camera), but I regularly leave it at home and just carry my iPod Touch, which is a much more svelte size, and does almost everything I need from a phone (so long as I can get wifi or tethered cellular wifi connection for it).
Bought a mini. Also guided a friend's wife to the mini when she surprised him with a new phone for Christmas, because he had told me he hated how big phones had gotten (iPhone X maybe?) and his next one was going to be the smallest one available. We're both very happy with them.
It's a great phone. Bummed to hear rumors than the 14 will drop the mini form factor.
I also had a Pebble Time and loved it, so I guess I'm just a fan of great-but-not-quite-popular-enough electronics...
I don't really care about ProMotion on my phone, if I could steal any of the Pro features it'd be the zoom lens and lidar. Unfortunately two parts that take up a lot more room than ProMotion does.
I don't think there's a winning way to do that, in order to add the "Pro" features you have to make a battery tradeoff, and then instead of reviewers saying "Battery life isn't great, but at least it's cheaper" you'll get a whole bunch of "IPHONE PRO MINI COSTS SO MUCH AND BATTERY STILL SUCKS?!?"
And there’s lag unaccounted for in the anecdote. I’m one of those apparent hypocrites who asked for a mini but doesn’t have one—because I haven’t purchased any new phone yet; my current one still works fine.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some correlation between preference for a less obtrusive phone and avoiding superfluous consumption.
I have a theory that if they had named the 12 mini just "iPhone 12", people would've bought it so much more because it would've appeared as The Default iPhone. Not sure if so many bigger variants would've existed in that imaginary world though.
I have no research on this of course. I just have an anecdote that my mom didn't even consider the mini (and just bought the regular 12) even though a few years back she did complain how big all the phones were. I guess an average person just gets used to everything and aren't as nit-picky on all the details and ergonomics as myself.
I still long for one-handed flagships. Maybe I'm just a weirdo for whom 5" phones from a few years back (e.g. Pixel 1) were perfectly operable with one hand. For a lot of the population those phones were already two handed devices in most use cases I guess? Couple this with how phones are the main computing and media consumption devices for most people nowadays... why not have it remarkably bigger I guess.
Yeah, for me (YMMV with your hand size), Nexus 5 was the ideal maximum size. (I even ended up removing the perimeter protection I bought because it made it cross the threshold into "too big".)
the canonical YC advice is to make something that you want, then to go find people like yourself and see if they want it too. whether that turns into a real market or not has a lot of luck, but it's often surprising how promising being your own user can be, especially when you solve a hair-on-fire problem for yourself!
Travel and surround yourself with new experiences and different kinds of people and build intuitions for things people want by becoming like these people. Share experiences, needs, wants, outlooks.
Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously.
If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution.
There is a whole group of learning around Lean Customer Development[1]. Those processes (and a bunch more) help you identify, with reasonable confidence, that folk will pay for your solution. This process is one part of "The Lean Startup" process
> How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence?
One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.
This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!
Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.
Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though?
For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money.
Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it.
Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner.
Definitely read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It goes over why you shouldn't spend ages on market research and instead just get an MVP out of the door as soon as possible.
One way to validate demand for SaaS without risking too much development time, is to just make a landing page with a sign-up button. If someone clicks the sign-up button, just present them with page that says it's coming soon. Then you can track whether people even click to sign up.
iPhone mini: price and battery life. Outside USA there is a huge market of great value Android phones. iPhone mini was an opportunity for a small screen affordable iPhone, but it was not delivered as such. Not everybody wants a 6" phone, not everybody wants a $1000 phone, but the opposite is also not true.
User feedback is not about taking what they say at face value, it’s about all the other nuanced things they do when you present them a solution to their problem. You have to understand all the minutia like their facial expressions…stuff like that. Most people don’t do it well from what I’ve seen. From my experience, you ask people if they like something and they say yes a lot, and that it’s wonderful. It’s still about solving something / doing something better - to discover that, you really need to understand humans. Lots of quick iteration and more user feedback is important until you get it right. You will know when you get it right.
Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…
As one of those people who said up-and-down that they wanted an iPhone Mini, but also was one of the few who bought one, the key thing I saw that turned people off was the battery life compromises for active screen-on usage. People have become used to 8 hours screen-on time, and the iPhone 12 Mini's 5 hours just isn't enough for a tech-y crowd, I think.
I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
> Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ?
If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird.
It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.
> many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it.
I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!
I did eventually buy an iPhone 13 mini. Still somewhat disappointed by it. What I really wanted is something like an iPhone 13 mini pro. I used the zoom on my iPhone 12 pro and never the wide angle, if they only pick two cameras, please give me the zoom.
It also would have been nice to have the better screen.
I was excited to iPhone mini but FaceID was a really serious deal breaker in pandemic. Some people may just bought iPhone SE with TouchID. Finally I bought it in 2022 with iOS 15.4, but it's too late for Apple not to stop future mini line.
I have a 12 mini. Love, love the size, but batt life hurts and I miss the 2x lens more than I expected. I hope it lives another generation or two to resolve camera and batt trade-offs.
That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.
>> For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.
They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.
The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.
ALL they had to do was continue with the original idea and not get greedy.
I was a high(ish)-tier backer of the original, still got my 2 sitting in a drawer, and wore them until they wore out. I absolutely loved the idea of a MINIMAL e-paper watch with easily customisable faces and basic notifications. I’m still a fan of the idea, and would love to see more use of e-ink in smart watches. All the fans wanted was that, iterated and improved upon. Better development tools for faces, some other styles of physical watch, etc. Instead the entire brand got hand-grenaded and now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste.
Can you explain what you mean by "the entire brand got hand-grenaded" and "not get greedy"? Is this in reference to them selling to Fitbit? Or something before that?
I purchased a Pebble Time Steel fairly late in the company's lifetime, so I was surprised and kind of confused about the whole situation.
Meh, I know that we did not get greedy. Greedy implies we were driven by a selfish goal of making more money for ourselves. As the founder, I can truly state that it was not our intention.
We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people and started scaling up. As I outlined in the post, we (poorly) tried to target a larger market segment and also scaled up our team. We were mostly right - smartwatches are objectively a major industry right now, but our strategy to do so was pretty bad. I don't think I would have changed anything, but looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.
If it makes you feel any better amazfit carry’s the torch now for long battery e-ink smartwatches, I still think the pebble did it better but at least there’s something out there.
> We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people
I think you were right.
I remember when my Time2 Kickstarter refund came, I was seriously considering using that money to buy an Apple Watch. But I didn't like the plasticy look/feel of the base models, and wasn't prepared to spend twice as much to get one with the nice metal mesh strap. I then spent about half that money on three 2nd hand Russian mechanical watches on eBay, and that was the start of a small but very enjoyable collection and hobby.
Now I'd guess 70% of my friends have a modern smart watch on their wrist, while I'm usually rocking my (poorly faked) Yuri Gagarin Sturmanskie replica, or my Raketa Big Zero, or my Amphibia. And I've got half a dozen eBay alerts waiting for a few interesting mechanical watches I want to add to my collection...
I’m gearing up to do so. I have bought a (cheap) watch repair toolkit and a degausser. I have an Amphibia that’s losing about 8 or 9 mins a day that I’m prepared to risk damaging by futzing with it myself, and a second Big Zero where the second hand has fallen off. There’s a local ish guy here who will service just about any old Russian watch, and most,y charges a flat $150 for pretty mush anything (I assume that wouldn’t hold if difficult t9 get it expensive parts are needed) But I’ve rarely spent as much as $150 for one of these, so having a shit at opening/repairing one myself doesn’t seem too much of a risk. I have a list of YouTube videos and blog posts queued up first though…
Honestly it never even crossed our minds at the time of picking a 'smaller' path. The natural path was to continue scaling. It's only obvious with hindsight that there was another path.
shame what happened to pebble. article is on point for my personal experience; I had both the original and a Time and preferred the original. the new capabilities were not compelling and the aesthetic was worse imo.
I loved the pebble time steel and wore it for years. But then when I compared it to the Apple Watch I got later, the pebble looked like a child's toy watch.
I'm still sad about the Gen 2 Pebble Time not being released. It solved the (few!) issues I have with the V1 Time. And I use the word have - present tense - purposely because I still wear my Time daily and have 3 in reserve in case it dies. The Rebble project and battery replacements have kept these devices relevant and for what I want out of a smart watch I still haven't found a better device.
There are lots of smallish e-paper displays intended for use as dynamic price tags. It's one of the main formats for the medium. Could you use them to make a largeish wrist computer device that might be more useful than the Pebble?
Could have been an alternative to watches running WearOS and watchOS, but it wasn't meant to be, other than a hackers toy that was killed by being squeezed out of the market with high operating costs and we are now left with the same old Apple and Google duoploy once again.
It's time to stop with this 'world's first' marketing. Apple entered the market late and were around the corner, came in and changed everything (Again). Not acting and moving quickly enough to when a giant enters the market and brushing it off as nothing also contributed to this failure as well.
I had high hopes for Pebble to go further than their current market, but it seems that it just became another Amiga-like product. Forgotten in the graveyard of many other failed products only to be used by hackers and hobbyists.
This is a cool story. I loved my Pebble and still have my Kickstarter Edition. I bought it because it was a geeky thing and I could write code and deploy that code to the Pebble.
Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space? The best case scenario is to exist long enough to get a billion dollar exit from a major tech company, who will then immediately gut parts of your product that don't support their own business goals. The more likely one is to be sold for parts (like Pebble) or just cease to exist entirely.
It is sad that there is so much innovation being left on the table in that space because the market simply doesn't allow it.
Gopro has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for many years now. Its stock fell from $87 in 2014 to $2 in 2020 (has recovered somewhat to $8 now). They started looking for buyers for the company in 2018 but still haven't found one. Hardly what I'd consider a major success.
iRobot has a somewhat better story, but is overall not worth too much more than Gopro (~$1.5B). It is also not a recent startup but has its roots in DARPA grants and defense contracts from the 90s.
Gopro is the default pop-name for what I can only describe as a Gopro form factor camera (tiny, hi res, easy to mount). While their company might not be successful, their brand very much is.
> Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space?
Epiphan Video ([1], [2])? They are fairly successful at selling their hardware to video streamers (both, b2c and b2b). They didn't do IPO as there was no pressure to do so - they primarily bootstrapped themselves. It's not a well-known story, but the market did allow them to exist & succeed.
You have to look outside of mass-market consumer products.
The problem with mainstream tech is that it's a race to the bottom. Consumers have extremely high expectations for both the product and the ongoing support. Only the biggest companies can afford to amortize the R&D costs across enough units to compete.
Step into niche hardware and hobbyist domains and there are small companies everywhere. The smaller markets are too small for big companies to play in and the users are savvy enough that they're willing to pay for high margin products instead of picking whatever is cheapest at Best Buy.
I imagined the second part modified the claim as well. Oculus wasn’t gutted and repurposed - Meta is building itself around it. Oculus was a successful company - selling hella units. Being bought didn’t result in a shutdown or anything. I would call it a huge success.
Then again Apple is the canonical consumer hardware startup and that’s the problem with these things. A successful startup just becomes a big company. No one would call Dyson a startup but it was one.
VR enthusiast here, Oculus was absolutely gutted of its core morals, its core goal, and the majority of its original talent. Oculus insisted they'd never require a Facebook account, and now they do. They've fully rebranded to Meta. They were focused on PC VR gaming, and now they're focused on mobile based social experiences with some garbage laggy interface to get PC VR if you're outlandish enough to want that. They only retain compatibility with other VR standards to appease their customers, but it just results in additional lag and a messy experience.
Facebook purchased Oculus before they sold a single consumer unit. Any headset that wasn't sold by Facebook was a dev kit you had to apply for. (edit: looked up the original kickstarter, they did sell 6-7k dev kit units, which was mostly targeted towards game devs. After the KS the DK2 was sold on an application basis. The consumer versions that moved 10mm+ units were 2 years after Facebook's acquisition.)
I've clocked 10k+ hours with silly screens strapped to my head and I am deathly afraid of what Facebook has done and continues to do to the VR industry. The "metaverse" existed long before Zuckerberg set his sights on it, and he's already killing it.
It is an amazing piece of tech at a price lower than the BOM. I own one myself and can't blame anyone else that likes it too. The dissonance is still too strong.
I don’t get it. Most people. The vast majority, won’t ever spend $700-ish on any thing that isn’t proven, incredibly popular, and has limited functionality. On top of that, as you stated, the higher priced VRs required a high end PC (maybe Windows?). Then a bit below that I think some were or are available for the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Isn’t very other VR set up not too cheap with no external requirements?
The average person in first word countries doesn’t have a ton of spare money. The majority of people don’t. How is being financially elitist about VR better than what FB did?
Problem is, there are plenty that don't get headlines because a single-product category company isn't going to generate profits like a conglomerate like P&G. You also can't simply just throw tech into every product category.
A lot of these IoT applications (home security, thermostats) feel like they're re-inventing the wheel over and over again, without any one providing any major benefits over the other - for one, they all want to sell you a subscription to your face, and sell your data behind your back.
I have been doing some covert market testing of IoT devices that are pay-up-front and offer privacy as a feature. Nobody is biting. The market doesn't seem to mind surveillance if they get a discount.
Some other companies that are tracking towards sustainable success that we look at are:
* Oura
* Wyze
* Peloton (though they made some growth mis-steps)
All three of those follow a subscription model to get off of the "‘consumer electronics’ release cycle" that Eric calls out in his post. That's not the model that we're following, but we do have an alternate strategy to avoid falling into that same trap.
Also I think these three companies founders are not typical SV founders but have like strong executive background from Amazon, Nokia and Barnes & Nobles.
Wyze isn't doing so hot, after just forcing everyone onto a subscription to maintain the functionality they thought was included with the product they purchased. To their credit, they let you 'subscribe' at $0/mo, but the pressure to pay was quite strong. They also didn't message it well — my brother got email warnings, but I (a longtime customer) received none.
I'm surprised to see Oura mentioned here as a success. They don't have a single customer currently paying for a subscription (everyone would still be within the six month free trial) and haven't released most of the features included in their subscription offering. It's doubtful that most of their users would pay for the subscription.
The feedback was presumably so bad that their CEO left the company less than two months after the announcement of the new product and subscription model.
What is success to you? If success means customer success and probable longevity of the company (and growth and valuation are secondary factors) then Niche Coffee’s espresso grinder is a consumer hardware success.
Thinking about it a lot of third wave coffee products fit the bill. The Decent espresso machine is another and makes the “should buy an Italian machine” argument no longer apply.
There are also successful coffee scales. Lots of new stuff!
Fully automatic machines that are better than a great barista are probably coming. Maybe an upstart could do it.
Of course the sales volumes might be too low to be consider a success on HN or even shark tank for that matter. But i would be happy to have that much success in a new product.
Glowforge? Higher price point than most consumer gadgets, but their crowdfunding campaign set a record at the time. (The founding team spent tons of effort on getting the product-market fit right)
I loved, loved, loved my Pebble Time. It did everything I wanted out of a smart watch, especially eliminating my phone-checking habit, because I was always on top of whether new emails were worth reading, it was a sanity saver during an intense M&A process. Also, it somehow had a super long-lived battery, and it had so much more personality than most electronic devices, with its little 8-bittish animated icons, reminded me of a Gameboy Advance or something. Thanks for making one of my favorite devices of the last decade, Eric.
I pulled mine out of storage a few weeks ago to resurrect it as a display for my EUC, and was surprised by it yet again. The fast refresh and good visibility is just so pleasant to use. Rebble was much easier to set up than I had assumed it would be, and isn't missing anything as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the link! I actually stopped wearing it at the end of the M&A process, because of how stressful the the M&A process was. As much as I liked the device, I started getting a bit of a negative Pavlovian reaction to the wrist buzzes, because the contents of the emails tended to be pretty stressful. I intended it to be a short digital detox, but since then, I've only worn the dumbest of dumbwatches. But maybe it's time to give it another go, it'd be great to have it help kill off my phone checking habit again. It's truly awesome that the fact that it was so open has allowed it to live past its parent company.
Oh cool! A friend worked at Pebble and I volunteered to run a Pebble hackathon in 2014 (sticker is still on my old macbook) and for my time they gave me a Pebble Time Steel and even a little wood panel sticker for the front. I knew they ceased operations but I did not know about rebble! I will have to check it out. I think I know exactly where my pebble is.
This was the end of both my kickstarter Pebble and my Pebble Steel. I adored my steel - it was such a great watch.
I struggled for years to find a replacement and eventually settled on a Skagen Jorn Hybrid because the long battery life, notifications for calls and always accurate time are the most important features to me. I don't need to read notifications, I just want an accurate and long lasting watch with critical notifications only. They look like classic watches as well, so they fit in very well in corporate environments.
I'd recommend them to anyone else who feels a little lost after their pebble died.
And the battery life!! My first Pebble still had about 7 days of battery life after ~6 years of use, just unreal. I think it was rated for 10 at launch. Seeing 10% battery usually means I'm good for a day, maybe two.
I'm on my second Pebble Time Steel now - I only had to get a new one because the waterproofing failed while I was surfing!
I've had two separate instances of strangers (in Sydney) coming up to me and bumping their wrist to my wrist, because they also had a Pebble and recognised mine. Really lovely community.
Oh, that's crazy that it still lasts 7 days. I guess it's had a lot fewer cycles than a smartphone battery typically gets in that time, because of the long battery life.
And looking on eBay, used Pebbles are actually surprisingly affordable, like $20-50.
Same. The Bip has a 30 day battery life. There's no SDK though so it's not as tinker friendly but when used with Gadgetbridge I get the privacy and some neat features on top. Plus there's a pretty big online community around hacking it.
No 3rd party apps for the watch of any kind, it has no ecosystem. I had one, and yes the battery time was good, but everything else about it was sub-par.
And how useful is that on Pebble sized screen? I can read all notifications on Bip (that's reason I bought it for), answer/reject calls, track all my vital signs, use it as navigation, use it as flashlight in night (that's second most used feature besides checking the time/date) and with little hacking I could use it as remote control for music player.
Please list useful apps I am missing and which are usable on small watch screen, because anything requiring typing is certainly not useful and it's horrible experience and I never use some predefined quick replies.
Obviously Bip with open system would be ideal, but if I have to choose between expensive abandoned old thick Pebble with crappy battery life but abandoned dead ecosystem of apps and cheap ultrathin light Bip with amazing battery life in weeks with all basic features one can require, it's easy choice and reason why nobody knows Pebble besides few nerds, why the company failed, but Bip is much more known about ordinary people and its brand still going strong (sadly with transreflective displays and amazing battery life abandoned).
One app I used quite often on the Pebble is a TOTP app, where I could retrieve my code from anywhere, even if I forgot my phone that day. Since the battery life was awesome, it was comforting knowing I wouldn't get locked out of my stuff easily.
I also used an app to see a camera preview from my phone and as a remote shutter, I also relied on NavMe to see the Google Maps direction while walking or while riding a bike.
Another app I was using was to send HTTP requests to toggle some of my IoT stuff, that was quite handy too.
IIRC the quick replies could be entirely customized, and I found myself using them quite often.
I'm actually shocked that battery life wasn't mentioned at all in this article. A watch that you don't have to charge for a week+ was Pebble's #1 differentiator. No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.
The super lightweight C-based runtime and eInk display combination was a genius move. But I'm not sure they realize it, even in hindsight, other than alluding to the "geeky/hacker user base." As one of those geeky hackers, I didn't buy the watch because it looked like an off-brand Casio calculator, I bought it (and came back to buy the Pebble Steel and Time 2) because I don't have to plug the damn thing in every night. And I'd buy another one today if I could.
> No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.
That's not really true, unless your definition of a smartwatch is limited to Apple/Android devices with LED displays. I use Garmin Fenix with a transflective display which lasts about 2 weeks on a single charge. However, like with Pebble, there are some tradeoffs: the display is not as bright (but clearly visible in the sun), it has less colors, and the screen resolution is lower.
Personally I think it was a mistake to market the transflective LCD as "E-Paper" when eInk was already an established product. They're very different technologies and people still get them confused.
I agree. I suspect someone at Pebble did that on purpose because I asked specifically about this during their kickstarter and they declined to change their wording.
Numerous Garmin smart watches sold since at least 2019 have over week of battery life. Mine would probably last 2 weeks if I didn't use the GPS every day.
I have a Garmin Instinct, the battery life is insane. Using the GPS for on average an hour a day I get a week to a week and a half on one charge. Without using the GPS at all it can go 3-4 weeks.
I've always thought it ludicrous that a smartwatch (like the Apple watch) should have to be charged daily - makes it pretty much useless to me, especially if it can't even tell the time! I realise that the latest Apple watches last longer but I still find them overengineered and ridiculous.
Since nobody else seems to have mentioned it, I'll mention that I've been delighted to have an AmazFit Bip (with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen) on my wrist for almost 4 years now (I previously had a Pebble) and it still goes at least 3 weeks between charges (previously more like 4 weeks) despite being connected to Bluetooth, taking my pulse every few minutes, and selectively relaying notifications to my wrist.
See https://m.gsmarena.com/amazfit_bip_review_another_shot_at_th... for details but many models have been released in the years since 2018, with higher resolution screens, they last even longer between charges ("up to 45 days") plus allow you to reply with preset messages and control music (sadly lacking from the model I have especially since the Pebble could do that) so perhaps I should treat myself to an upgrade sometime.
> with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen
Citation needed. afaik no such technology as "e-ink transflective screen" exists yet although there were some startups trying to propose such concepts.
I think you mean "transflective lcd screen" which is not e-ink.
I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one. Thats kind of true, depending what one wants from their smart watch.
But there actually is an alternative if you only need basic smart watch capabilites: Sport Watches.
I personally only want notifications from my phone, which my Garmin Forerunner 245 can do perfectly well.
And it has a battery life of up to 2 weeks, depending on how much I use the GPS of the watch.
Yeah but the issue with a lot of sport watches are they have a "tacticool" look that doesn't look very fashionable, the Pebble had the unique aspect of having models that looked stylish while still maintaining their battery life.
Are you implying Zuckerberg is fashionable? I'm not sure I've ever seen a positive comment about his appearance, in fact he's usually said to not even look like a living human
Withings wins that particular narrow field handily, their watches do about four things: notify, tell time, track steps, and heart rate.
But they have real hands, and the 'smart' part is subtle enough that most people just see a watch, a couple weeks battery is realistic as well.
Pebble hit a sweet spot in terms of how much you can do with it, while being good looking with a hardy battery. If we limit the comparison to the last two of those things, Withings is in the lead, not to mention still actively sold and supported.
> I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one.
My Fitbit Versa 3 has a week long battery life, can do Google/
Alexa Assistant, Google Maps, Spotify, GPS, health montoring, voice response to text messages although it does use its own Pay system. I think what they mean is that Samsung and Apple don't have watches with comparable battery life.
I would still switch back to my Pebble if they made it again.
that's pretty horrible battery life, with original Amazfit Bip you can have easily 35-40 days battery life out of the box and even after years 20-25+ days with always readable display, always on Bluetooth, I'm now on my second one since first one fall apart, then I had short stint with OLED smart watch which lasted only few days and had problem to read it outdoors until I gave up and after few months bought used Amazfit Bip for 20USD, which serves me until now
actually main reason why not go for Pebble instead Amazfit Bip would be for me extremely short battery life (and huge bezel mentioned in article) and price, while hardly offering more useful features worth the disadvantages
Sadly, mine last only a day now, so I switched to the "Bangle.js 2" which I ordered during the Kickstarter. I believe it's based on the SMA-Q3 but with a reverse-engineered firmware (Espruino) and apps are all JavaScript-based.
My Pebble 2 still has 7 days of battery life to this day :-)
I managed to procure a couple of cheap spare Pebbles over the years in case this one ever gives up the ghost but I'm unlikely to ever give the platform up so long as GadgetBridge supports it, I also wrote some software for it that I still use every day to track my working hours (it had a C SDK).
I'm also stunned at how much better it was at connecting and staying connected to every single phone I've owned.
Every other smartwatch I've tried (a couple fitbits, fossils, etc) has been absurdly flaky. It's common for all of them to just not react to notifications for a couple hours. Or they'll connect to some wifi but not others (why wifi anyway!?? it's insane! it's SO much more complicated!). Or their apps have utterly monstrous installation and/or permissions setups (looking at you in particular, Fitbit) and any connection they use breaks randomly every few days.
If I could just get another, I'd stick with a pebble time for probably a decade. It did almost everything right.
You're right, the connection was rock solid in a way that bluetooth basically never is. And I don't know how that didn't wreck its battery life. Even my Airpods give me grief every now and then, and those are often held up as the exception to the rule that is bluetooth being crap. I think that was why I liked it so much, it was a tool I could trust to just work consistently. Tech doesn't have enough of those outside of Unix CLI tools.
I just looked them up on eBay, looks like you can get another for <$50.
I wonder if there's going to be a Pebble maintenance scene in 20 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if there was.
Sort of like how retro IBM Thinkpads have all sorts of modifications from new motherboards to screens? I can see something like that happening, I was on the verge of purchasing a Pebble when they announced their doom ^W acquisition via Fitbit.
I really hope so. I wear my Time Steel daily and will probably continue to do so as long as I can get parts for it. I've seen some guides out there on replacing the screen and battery, but so far I haven't had to crack mine open.
I'd estimate I still get about 5 days of battery (depending on how much solitaire I play, or how long I use the speedometer app).
(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things:
1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none.
2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs).
FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).
Now how can we get the all-buying eye of the Garmin acquisition strategy team to look in that direction?
If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.
Ex-Garmin engineer here. There are pockets of the company that use Android, and a bunch of the larger-scale systems have moved to using embedded Linux with Yocto.
The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there.
It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.
Thanks for the glimpse! My personal Garmin angle is cycling, which eventually that also "infected" my left wrist. When they first came under pressure in cycling from leaner competitors that are deep into the outsourcing game, I was interested to the point of pre-ordering. But since then I've learned more about the company and have come to respect them in an entirely unexpected way, for being that almost anachronistic twentieth century remnant that just keeps staying in the high tech innovation game. The mix of continuity and openness to change you describe sounds just right for that.
No kidding. What's even more amazing is that the Bluetooth is still that reliable today, more than 5 years after support ended, communicating with new devices with new Bluetooth chips and new OS versions. Every time I get a new phone or upgrade my version of Android I expect it to break, and somehow it never does.
I loved my pebble time, but it has been absolutely infuriating that I can't manually set the date and time on the watch. I no longer have an android phone and I can't use Rebble. I would continue to use this watch if I could change the damn time but alas, another piece of waste in my life. I am going to get rid of it
Same. I was devastated when I broke it. I would probably still be wearing it. My modern smart watch really doesn't do much more - except perhaps keeping track of my heart rate.
Had to laugh that he jumped into a paid chat service, I get combining all these services into one app is a way to "solve" this problem, but no one is going to pay $10 a month for it.
I know I'm probably a rare user here but I pay monthly for the hosted element account which I hardly use. I consider it more like a donation to FOSS and I check back every few weeks to see how the project is going.
I am not necessarily sure I agree with this analysis. Will fleshing out the long term vision necessarily win you more customers?
I just think that this was a sad case of a very good company that made a wrong guess - efficiency tools instead of sport/fitness. It does not even sound like a mistake. Maybe the size of the bet on a risky guess was too big, and that is what caused the failure.
For those who don't know - Eric's new company, Beeper [1], is a proprietary Matrix chat client with hosted Matrix bridges to other chat platforms. The bridges are open sourced which is a huge contribution to the Matrix ecosystem.
Surprised the FAQ doesn't say anything about encryption/privacy.
The big selling point for Signal et. al. is knowing that corps/govs/etc can't spy on my conversations. If I was going to give another app permission to use my Signal, I'd need assurances I'm not sacrificing my security.
You are, by design. Beeper gets around the e2e encryption by just running WA themselves on their side; there is no other way for them to be doing what they say they are doing…
I run several bridges from my home. With End-to-Bridge Encryption enabled this gives you about the same security guarantees as E2EE with a second device added (Signal Desktop, etc). With Beeper you can do the same, IIRC.
Their value proposition then hinges on how good their clients can aggregate conversations and different chat networks, I guess.
I'm using Beeper! The app is solid, feature set meets my needs, and overall works quite well. It's still rough around the edges in a few spots. I'm waiting for the e2e protocol to have a self hosted bridge option, but once that's rolled out I'm a happy camper.
Some smart people are running this, that's for sure.
What is it that you are looking for with this comment? If you already know texts.com is there a degree of comparison you cannot glean from reading beeper.com?
Beeper is based on Matrix and the bridges they use are almost all open source. It's an amazing Matrix client (including on Android and, reportedly, iOS) and that makes it pretty great at everything else. Though the Discord integration could use a bit of work still.
Texts looks entirely proprietary and the FAQ says they're working on an iOS app.
Mobile app is the big one. iMessage too. Texts iMessage solution is wanting. It requires leaving messages open on the computer you have it installed on. Might be Mac only.
Texts was too buggy for me to keep using. I still think it has potential though.
That's disappointing, but I guess it's the reality of today if you want a cross-platform application with full design freedom. I mean personally I think application developers should just pay for and hire development teams for native platforms, with one small team per platform you can do a lot.
But it also means compromising on your designs, I think, because I'm fairly sure it's a lot more difficult to implement a custom design on a Linux app. And Apple MacOS apps have certain design guidelines and Expectations as well.
I wonder if they could make this into more of a client-server architecture; a crossplatform server that runs as the back-end on the user's machine (or an embedded core), and a native client implemented for the specific OS. With an open protocol so that the community can build alternative clients, e.g. CLI based, or native with less bells and whistles, or more compact.
I dislike electron apps a ton. But if an app is going to take over for a bunch of messaging apps, many that have bloated apps themselves, I don’t see it as a major problem.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but from the above link:
> Yes, iMessage works even on Android, Windows and Linux!
How could this be sustainable long-term? I've hacked together tools to forward iMessage content before and it's very unappealing.
I suspect they must be using a makeshift solution. I hope it works (and would sign up if there was a way on the landing page), but this seems like building on sand.
From my understanding, they use a Mac the same way you would, and they forward the messages over by sheer force of will and also money.
It works fine for me so far, though there's no out-of-the-box solution for forwarding iMessages that go to your phone number. That requires extra hackery.
I'm a bit surprised to not see Jabber on there; surely there's a Matrix/Jabber bridge? Or perhaps I'm the only one of their potential customers that still uses jabber...
I love the idea of paying for hosted bridges but I'm not willing to switch my main ID to one they own. (And I don't want to have two accounts because that sort of defeats the the whole point.) If they would allow accessing the bridges with an arbitrary matrix account I would have been paying months ago.
Counterpoint: you were always going to fail in the long run without full platform integration that you cannot have. The Apple Watch is a seamless experience and you can't replicate it. Although Google hasn't managed to produce an Android ripoff with any staying power, so maybe there's a market there.
Agreed. It was impossible for us to deliver an amazing notification and call experience for iOS users because Apple did not (and still doesn't) expose APIs for sending iMessage, starting calls or talking to Siri.
Counter counterpoint: Samsung, Fitbit, Garmin and dozens of other players are still selling smartwatches. The majority of phones in the world do not run iOS, so you can't pair a Apple watch with them.
There is a still active market for 2nd hand Pebbles. There are things you can do with a Pebble that you can't do with an Apple Watch (e.g.: use it in a barcode reader, make your own watchface, etc).
At this right moment I have a Pebble in my left hand. I don't want to use an iPhone or Apple Watch.
Still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day. The form factor is unmatched by any other smartwatch before or since. I don't think anyone else is even trying to make a watch this thin and it's a damn shame.
The tech community likes to imagine that Pebble would still be going strong if they stuck to their early product vision, but I'm not so sure that would have helped:
> Sales for our version 2.0 (Pebble Time) in 2015 didn’t hit forecasts and the oversupply in inventory put us into a major cash crunch (targeted ~$100m in sales, we did $82m).
That $82m in sales is still 8X higher than their 1st kickstarter sales and 4X higher than the 2nd kickstarter. They actually did ramp up sales and sell a lot, but they built and spent as if they were going to sell even more than they actually did.
The unclear half-pivot into different spaces didn't help, but I don't see how they would have done better if they had ignored the fitness space altogether. The market for people who want lo-fidelity hackable wristwatches is going to saturate quickly.
That's what I noticed as well. If they had targeted 50M in sales, would they still be around today? I'm not sure what to take away from this except hardware startups are hard - you can make a wildly successful product and get bankrupted because you failed at supply chain management.
The problem is that $50M in sales is only about 500K units.
That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume.
Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died.
It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.
naw that's not true. The valley of death is >1k units but <10k. Not enough money to pay back your hw tooling. There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics. Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Tooling for injected plastic crosses over somewhere about 50K units. Before that you have to think hard about whether you can use advanced 3D printing to get where you need to go.
> There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics.
My FAEs and sales reps beg to disagree even in this mess. The first useful discount on microcontrollers I can get hold of generally starts at about 250K units annually (generally that's the first point where I can even get manufacturer attention--and even that's not great) and normally increases until about 1M units annually. The discounts increase from 1M to 10M annually but very slowly.
> Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Right now is very different from when Pebble was producing product. Right now, I've actually had pricing revoked on me. However, that is not normal behavior in the semiconductor business.
honestly my impression even at the time before the sale was that Pebble hired _loads_ of people.
I honestly think that there was an alternate universe where they slowed down, paid people "normal" salaries, really tried to not scale up... I dunno. They had a perfect spot in the market where they could rely on older tech, but every company wants to become the biggest company controlling everything all the time.
There are companies that survive without having 100% of the market share in something, or even 20%. Selling products at retail are hard and you have way thinner margins in theory. But it felt like there was a sweet spot they could have stayed in for a long time
Yes, the article identified the scaling issue. Since they received minimal VC they were perfectly positioned for “organic growth”, but being part of YC, may have led them to follow the pack and try to hire their way into 10x growth. The original model was made in a garage and then they took on a large staff which burdened the company to produce a higher volume of products. They could have chased more VC money or debt to keep the lights on, but facing up against the Apple Watch behemoth isn’t such an attractive proposition.
> Over the next few years, we sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales.
According to Wikipedia: The Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device: 4.2 million were sold in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.
In a single quarter, Apple sold twice as many watches as Pebble did in total. Pebble was doomed once Apple entered the market to be anything but a niche product.
You can't be a small player with hardware when big players exist in the same category. Customers start to ask why the watch costs as much as an Apple Watch but contains an 8th of the features.
"Apple sells millions of iPhones, therefore Android phones (samsung, Xiaomi, etc) are doomed"
I have a Garmin watch, an apple watch, whoop, etc (not all on at the same time of course). Different people want different things, ex: apple watches should be charged daily, but the pebble could be charged weekly. That in itself is a big selling point. I'm sure there were many such differences that could make for a successful product.
I had the Garmin first, and a colleague recommended whoop specifically for sleep / recovery tracking. I got the apple watch as a gift, which has since taken over most things because of the wonder WorkOutdoors app :)
As you say, there are essentially only two mobile platforms today, and only one of them has really been successful extending that platform to a watch. If none of the Android device makers have been successful selling a smart watch, what hope did Pebble have?
So again, Pebble's only hope was to remain a niche product. They were never going to compete in Apple's market.
It's fine to remain a niche product, but I don't think that was Pebble's aspiration.
(I too have a Garmin watch and I gave my Apple Watch away to my sister because it didn't fit my use case. I hope you recognize that having multiple smart watches makes you not just a niche user, but a niche niche user.)
This is a bit of a difficult comparison. Apple also spent orders of magnitude more on marketing the product. Probably an order of magnitude more developing it.
My point was you had to take those factors together. Yes, they had a smaller market, but they were also spending far less to have that market. It may have been doable.
Edit: consider, by market size alone, fountain pens probably shouldn't exist anymore; per that argument.
Often a competitor entering the market increases the overall market for everyone. Pebble definitely could have survived as the high-battery life minimal alternative to the Apple watch and obviously be well ahead of whatever was going on with Android watches.
Interesting. I just came across an old email from Eric this morning, looking for something else in my inbox, telling me I was the first official customer. This was before the kickstarter I think, when it was announced on HN. It was a fun thing to tinker around with at the time.
>Our goal is to build the best damn chat app. In the process, it’s likely that Beeper will become the underlying communication system for everyone on earth.
That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadHow the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky".
For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
Does anyone have some insight?
If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.
Somewhat, but not quite!
I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.
The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.
1: https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reported...
The model line of “cheap enough for the people who absolutely have to wait until price drops to their level to upgrade.” And also whose numbers swell just enough every 3-5 years.
It's a great phone. Bummed to hear rumors than the 14 will drop the mini form factor.
I also had a Pebble Time and loved it, so I guess I'm just a fan of great-but-not-quite-popular-enough electronics...
I have a 13 mini myself and am very happy with it.
I don't think there's a winning way to do that, in order to add the "Pro" features you have to make a battery tradeoff, and then instead of reviewers saying "Battery life isn't great, but at least it's cheaper" you'll get a whole bunch of "IPHONE PRO MINI COSTS SO MUCH AND BATTERY STILL SUCKS?!?"
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some correlation between preference for a less obtrusive phone and avoiding superfluous consumption.
I have no research on this of course. I just have an anecdote that my mom didn't even consider the mini (and just bought the regular 12) even though a few years back she did complain how big all the phones were. I guess an average person just gets used to everything and aren't as nit-picky on all the details and ergonomics as myself.
I still long for one-handed flagships. Maybe I'm just a weirdo for whom 5" phones from a few years back (e.g. Pixel 1) were perfectly operable with one hand. For a lot of the population those phones were already two handed devices in most use cases I guess? Couple this with how phones are the main computing and media consumption devices for most people nowadays... why not have it remarkably bigger I guess.
Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously.
If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution.
Just an example.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...
One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.
This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!
Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.
For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money.
Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner.
[1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally
One way to validate demand for SaaS without risking too much development time, is to just make a landing page with a sign-up button. If someone clicks the sign-up button, just present them with page that says it's coming soon. Then you can track whether people even click to sign up.
But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...
Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…
I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ?
If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird.
It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.
I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!
It also would have been nice to have the better screen.
The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.
That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.
People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.
They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.
The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.
[0]: https://rebble.io/discord
I was a high(ish)-tier backer of the original, still got my 2 sitting in a drawer, and wore them until they wore out. I absolutely loved the idea of a MINIMAL e-paper watch with easily customisable faces and basic notifications. I’m still a fan of the idea, and would love to see more use of e-ink in smart watches. All the fans wanted was that, iterated and improved upon. Better development tools for faces, some other styles of physical watch, etc. Instead the entire brand got hand-grenaded and now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste.
I purchased a Pebble Time Steel fairly late in the company's lifetime, so I was surprised and kind of confused about the whole situation.
We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people and started scaling up. As I outlined in the post, we (poorly) tried to target a larger market segment and also scaled up our team. We were mostly right - smartwatches are objectively a major industry right now, but our strategy to do so was pretty bad. I don't think I would have changed anything, but looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.
I think you were right.
I remember when my Time2 Kickstarter refund came, I was seriously considering using that money to buy an Apple Watch. But I didn't like the plasticy look/feel of the base models, and wasn't prepared to spend twice as much to get one with the nice metal mesh strap. I then spent about half that money on three 2nd hand Russian mechanical watches on eBay, and that was the start of a small but very enjoyable collection and hobby.
Now I'd guess 70% of my friends have a modern smart watch on their wrist, while I'm usually rocking my (poorly faked) Yuri Gagarin Sturmanskie replica, or my Raketa Big Zero, or my Amphibia. And I've got half a dozen eBay alerts waiting for a few interesting mechanical watches I want to add to my collection...
Thanks for the valuable retrospective!
Could you expand a bit on the pros and cons of going smaller -vs- going bigger in that situation, and what motivated you to choose the way you did?
Also, do you feel the ambient culture/advice on that decision tried to push you in either direction?
That's way too harsh. While Timeline is gone, rebble still works. This is waaaay better than your typical device that stopped being made !
Especially since for a wrist computer, touchscreen input would actually become better than a row of buttons).
Could have been an alternative to watches running WearOS and watchOS, but it wasn't meant to be, other than a hackers toy that was killed by being squeezed out of the market with high operating costs and we are now left with the same old Apple and Google duoploy once again.
It's time to stop with this 'world's first' marketing. Apple entered the market late and were around the corner, came in and changed everything (Again). Not acting and moving quickly enough to when a giant enters the market and brushing it off as nothing also contributed to this failure as well.
I had high hopes for Pebble to go further than their current market, but it seems that it just became another Amiga-like product. Forgotten in the graveyard of many other failed products only to be used by hackers and hobbyists.
It is sad that there is so much innovation being left on the table in that space because the market simply doesn't allow it.
Roomba?
iRobot has a somewhat better story, but is overall not worth too much more than Gopro (~$1.5B). It is also not a recent startup but has its roots in DARPA grants and defense contracts from the 90s.
Epiphan Video ([1], [2])? They are fairly successful at selling their hardware to video streamers (both, b2c and b2b). They didn't do IPO as there was no pressure to do so - they primarily bootstrapped themselves. It's not a well-known story, but the market did allow them to exist & succeed.
1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video
2. https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-...
The problem with mainstream tech is that it's a race to the bottom. Consumers have extremely high expectations for both the product and the ongoing support. Only the biggest companies can afford to amortize the R&D costs across enough units to compete.
Step into niche hardware and hobbyist domains and there are small companies everywhere. The smaller markets are too small for big companies to play in and the users are savvy enough that they're willing to pay for high margin products instead of picking whatever is cheapest at Best Buy.
- Fitbit
- Raspberry Pi (I suppose this is not really consumer)
- Withings
- Peloton
- Tonal
But the biggest success is definitely Oculus. Definitely a hard thing to get right.
But I would say the Raspberry Pi is an excellent example.
Then again Apple is the canonical consumer hardware startup and that’s the problem with these things. A successful startup just becomes a big company. No one would call Dyson a startup but it was one.
Facebook purchased Oculus before they sold a single consumer unit. Any headset that wasn't sold by Facebook was a dev kit you had to apply for. (edit: looked up the original kickstarter, they did sell 6-7k dev kit units, which was mostly targeted towards game devs. After the KS the DK2 was sold on an application basis. The consumer versions that moved 10mm+ units were 2 years after Facebook's acquisition.)
I've clocked 10k+ hours with silly screens strapped to my head and I am deathly afraid of what Facebook has done and continues to do to the VR industry. The "metaverse" existed long before Zuckerberg set his sights on it, and he's already killing it.
And what looks a breach of contract in selling Oculus Rift with Windows 7 support only to drop it some years later.
The average person in first word countries doesn’t have a ton of spare money. The majority of people don’t. How is being financially elitist about VR better than what FB did?
- Thermostats (nest, ecobee)
- Home wi-fi (eero)
- Sonos
- I think Whoop and Oura will get there
- Beats headphones
Problem is, there are plenty that don't get headlines because a single-product category company isn't going to generate profits like a conglomerate like P&G. You also can't simply just throw tech into every product category.
Some other companies that are tracking towards sustainable success that we look at are:
* Oura
* Wyze
* Peloton (though they made some growth mis-steps)
All three of those follow a subscription model to get off of the "‘consumer electronics’ release cycle" that Eric calls out in his post. That's not the model that we're following, but we do have an alternate strategy to avoid falling into that same trap.
Thank you for trying! You have an amazing product and provided much needed innovation in this space.
(Written from my Framework Laptop)
The feedback was presumably so bad that their CEO left the company less than two months after the announcement of the new product and subscription model.
Sheesh, seems hardly worth it.
Thinking about it a lot of third wave coffee products fit the bill. The Decent espresso machine is another and makes the “should buy an Italian machine” argument no longer apply.
There are also successful coffee scales. Lots of new stuff!
Fully automatic machines that are better than a great barista are probably coming. Maybe an upstart could do it.
Of course the sales volumes might be too low to be consider a success on HN or even shark tank for that matter. But i would be happy to have that much success in a new product.
[0] https://rebble.io/
I struggled for years to find a replacement and eventually settled on a Skagen Jorn Hybrid because the long battery life, notifications for calls and always accurate time are the most important features to me. I don't need to read notifications, I just want an accurate and long lasting watch with critical notifications only. They look like classic watches as well, so they fit in very well in corporate environments.
I'd recommend them to anyone else who feels a little lost after their pebble died.
I'm on my second Pebble Time Steel now - I only had to get a new one because the waterproofing failed while I was surfing!
I've had two separate instances of strangers (in Sydney) coming up to me and bumping their wrist to my wrist, because they also had a Pebble and recognised mine. Really lovely community.
And looking on eBay, used Pebbles are actually surprisingly affordable, like $20-50.
Please list useful apps I am missing and which are usable on small watch screen, because anything requiring typing is certainly not useful and it's horrible experience and I never use some predefined quick replies.
Obviously Bip with open system would be ideal, but if I have to choose between expensive abandoned old thick Pebble with crappy battery life but abandoned dead ecosystem of apps and cheap ultrathin light Bip with amazing battery life in weeks with all basic features one can require, it's easy choice and reason why nobody knows Pebble besides few nerds, why the company failed, but Bip is much more known about ordinary people and its brand still going strong (sadly with transreflective displays and amazing battery life abandoned).
I also used an app to see a camera preview from my phone and as a remote shutter, I also relied on NavMe to see the Google Maps direction while walking or while riding a bike.
Another app I was using was to send HTTP requests to toggle some of my IoT stuff, that was quite handy too.
IIRC the quick replies could be entirely customized, and I found myself using them quite often.
but those things you described as not available are extreme niche, so Bip would be still winner for most of the people
The super lightweight C-based runtime and eInk display combination was a genius move. But I'm not sure they realize it, even in hindsight, other than alluding to the "geeky/hacker user base." As one of those geeky hackers, I didn't buy the watch because it looked like an off-brand Casio calculator, I bought it (and came back to buy the Pebble Steel and Time 2) because I don't have to plug the damn thing in every night. And I'd buy another one today if I could.
That's not really true, unless your definition of a smartwatch is limited to Apple/Android devices with LED displays. I use Garmin Fenix with a transflective display which lasts about 2 weeks on a single charge. However, like with Pebble, there are some tradeoffs: the display is not as bright (but clearly visible in the sun), it has less colors, and the screen resolution is lower.
- having a wide set of capabilities
- being sufficiently open so that an "ecosystem" of third party developers can form
I assume that Garmin Fenix succeeds at the first one, but fails the second ?
https://developer.garmin.com/
Pebble didn't use eInk. It used transflective LCD.
Since nobody else seems to have mentioned it, I'll mention that I've been delighted to have an AmazFit Bip (with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen) on my wrist for almost 4 years now (I previously had a Pebble) and it still goes at least 3 weeks between charges (previously more like 4 weeks) despite being connected to Bluetooth, taking my pulse every few minutes, and selectively relaying notifications to my wrist.
See https://m.gsmarena.com/amazfit_bip_review_another_shot_at_th... for details but many models have been released in the years since 2018, with higher resolution screens, they last even longer between charges ("up to 45 days") plus allow you to reply with preset messages and control music (sadly lacking from the model I have especially since the Pebble could do that) so perhaps I should treat myself to an upgrade sometime.
Citation needed. afaik no such technology as "e-ink transflective screen" exists yet although there were some startups trying to propose such concepts.
I think you mean "transflective lcd screen" which is not e-ink.
Also, maybe a customer will remember the sporty watch contrasting with the formal suit, and call you instead of a competitor.
Also, Zuckerberg wears t-shirts and jeans.
But they have real hands, and the 'smart' part is subtle enough that most people just see a watch, a couple weeks battery is realistic as well.
Pebble hit a sweet spot in terms of how much you can do with it, while being good looking with a hardy battery. If we limit the comparison to the last two of those things, Withings is in the lead, not to mention still actively sold and supported.
My Fitbit Versa 3 has a week long battery life, can do Google/ Alexa Assistant, Google Maps, Spotify, GPS, health montoring, voice response to text messages although it does use its own Pay system. I think what they mean is that Samsung and Apple don't have watches with comparable battery life.
I would still switch back to my Pebble if they made it again.
actually main reason why not go for Pebble instead Amazfit Bip would be for me extremely short battery life (and huge bezel mentioned in article) and price, while hardly offering more useful features worth the disadvantages
https://hackaday.io/project/175577-hackable-nrf52840-smart-w...
https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2
I managed to procure a couple of cheap spare Pebbles over the years in case this one ever gives up the ghost but I'm unlikely to ever give the platform up so long as GadgetBridge supports it, I also wrote some software for it that I still use every day to track my working hours (it had a C SDK).
Every other smartwatch I've tried (a couple fitbits, fossils, etc) has been absurdly flaky. It's common for all of them to just not react to notifications for a couple hours. Or they'll connect to some wifi but not others (why wifi anyway!?? it's insane! it's SO much more complicated!). Or their apps have utterly monstrous installation and/or permissions setups (looking at you in particular, Fitbit) and any connection they use breaks randomly every few days.
If I could just get another, I'd stick with a pebble time for probably a decade. It did almost everything right.
I just looked them up on eBay, looks like you can get another for <$50.
I wonder if there's going to be a Pebble maintenance scene in 20 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if there was.
I'd estimate I still get about 5 days of battery (depending on how much solitaire I play, or how long I use the speedometer app).
1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none.
2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs). FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).
If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.
The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there.
It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.
I just think that this was a sad case of a very good company that made a wrong guess - efficiency tools instead of sport/fitness. It does not even sound like a mistake. Maybe the size of the bet on a risky guess was too big, and that is what caused the failure.
[1]: https://www.beeper.com/
The big selling point for Signal et. al. is knowing that corps/govs/etc can't spy on my conversations. If I was going to give another app permission to use my Signal, I'd need assurances I'm not sacrificing my security.
But then _you_ need to make sure it's available 100% of the time?
Some smart people are running this, that's for sure.
Anyone know?
Texts looks entirely proprietary and the FAQ says they're working on an iOS app.
Texts was too buggy for me to keep using. I still think it has potential though.
But it also means compromising on your designs, I think, because I'm fairly sure it's a lot more difficult to implement a custom design on a Linux app. And Apple MacOS apps have certain design guidelines and Expectations as well.
I wonder if they could make this into more of a client-server architecture; a crossplatform server that runs as the back-end on the user's machine (or an embedded core), and a native client implemented for the specific OS. With an open protocol so that the community can build alternative clients, e.g. CLI based, or native with less bells and whistles, or more compact.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but from the above link:
> Yes, iMessage works even on Android, Windows and Linux!
How could this be sustainable long-term? I've hacked together tools to forward iMessage content before and it's very unappealing.
I suspect they must be using a makeshift solution. I hope it works (and would sign up if there was a way on the landing page), but this seems like building on sand.
It works fine for me so far, though there's no out-of-the-box solution for forwarding iMessages that go to your phone number. That requires extra hackery.
That's the bridge Beeper uses. I've got it running on a 2011 MacBook Air on MacOS 10.13, almost zero issues.
I'm digging it so far.
Matrix.org also has an XMPP implementation (see https://disroot.org/en/services/xmpp), but it was quite unreliable when I tried it.
I can only guess what messenger platform they will push on their next phone.
2015-05-24: Pebble 2.0 (Pebble Time) release
One month to the day. That's some truly unfortunate timing.
There is a still active market for 2nd hand Pebbles. There are things you can do with a Pebble that you can't do with an Apple Watch (e.g.: use it in a barcode reader, make your own watchface, etc).
At this right moment I have a Pebble in my left hand. I don't want to use an iPhone or Apple Watch.
Wonder why they killed that one...
> Sales for our version 2.0 (Pebble Time) in 2015 didn’t hit forecasts and the oversupply in inventory put us into a major cash crunch (targeted ~$100m in sales, we did $82m).
That $82m in sales is still 8X higher than their 1st kickstarter sales and 4X higher than the 2nd kickstarter. They actually did ramp up sales and sell a lot, but they built and spent as if they were going to sell even more than they actually did.
The unclear half-pivot into different spaces didn't help, but I don't see how they would have done better if they had ignored the fitness space altogether. The market for people who want lo-fidelity hackable wristwatches is going to saturate quickly.
That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume.
Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died.
It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.
> There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics.
My FAEs and sales reps beg to disagree even in this mess. The first useful discount on microcontrollers I can get hold of generally starts at about 250K units annually (generally that's the first point where I can even get manufacturer attention--and even that's not great) and normally increases until about 1M units annually. The discounts increase from 1M to 10M annually but very slowly.
> Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Right now is very different from when Pebble was producing product. Right now, I've actually had pricing revoked on me. However, that is not normal behavior in the semiconductor business.
I honestly think that there was an alternate universe where they slowed down, paid people "normal" salaries, really tried to not scale up... I dunno. They had a perfect spot in the market where they could rely on older tech, but every company wants to become the biggest company controlling everything all the time.
There are companies that survive without having 100% of the market share in something, or even 20%. Selling products at retail are hard and you have way thinner margins in theory. But it felt like there was a sweet spot they could have stayed in for a long time
According to Wikipedia: The Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device: 4.2 million were sold in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.
In a single quarter, Apple sold twice as many watches as Pebble did in total. Pebble was doomed once Apple entered the market to be anything but a niche product.
I think the same people maybe don't even understand why someone might want a high quality product, and be willing to pay for it.
I have a Garmin watch, an apple watch, whoop, etc (not all on at the same time of course). Different people want different things, ex: apple watches should be charged daily, but the pebble could be charged weekly. That in itself is a big selling point. I'm sure there were many such differences that could make for a successful product.
I’m assuming you are training for something serious/seriously training since Apple Watch is usually sufficient for more steady state working out.
So again, Pebble's only hope was to remain a niche product. They were never going to compete in Apple's market.
It's fine to remain a niche product, but I don't think that was Pebble's aspiration.
(I too have a Garmin watch and I gave my Apple Watch away to my sister because it didn't fit my use case. I hope you recognize that having multiple smart watches makes you not just a niche user, but a niche niche user.)
Samsung, Huawei, etc. have quite successful smart watch lines. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-marke...
Edit: consider, by market size alone, fountain pens probably shouldn't exist anymore; per that argument.
That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."