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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

You know, Pebble has garnered one of the best group of loyal customers I know of: well-off techies.

Had they came to the community and said, "hey we are losing sales and we need everyone to pitch in $10 / year for software support (maybe a web interface for fitness or something) I guarantee a few hundred thousand people would have done it.

Had they shared a coupon with the community (i.e. email add campaign, or add on watch - "buy one, get one half off" for christmas they would have probably had a large bump in orders. Although I recognize this would be a mild annoyance, I can also guarantee they would have sold plenty of units.

This simply seems like poor management and it's frustrating because it's the best smart watch I can find at the moment. It does exactly what I want, is cheaper than the competition, and is dead simple to use.

WTF pebble, you had the product people loved - you just didn't market it well.

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>"Had they came to the community and said, "hey we are losing sales and we need everyone to pitch in $10 / year for software support (maybe a web interface for fitness or something) I guarantee a few hundred thousand people would have done it."

What is this based on? I'd be shocked if that worked. I think it'd be a sign of blood in the water, and signal the end (if vendors see this, they're going to want to be paid up front, employees are going to start looking for the exits).

> Had they shared a coupon with the community (i.e. email add campaign, or add on watch - "buy one, get one half off" for christmas they would have probably had a large bump in orders. Although I recognize this would be a mild annoyance, I can also guarantee they would have sold plenty of units.

Pure volume wasn't what sank the ship, I'm sure. It probably would have put them out of business faster.

> "This simply seems like poor management"

That's an easy thing to say, but it's probably more complex than that. They were in a tough spot, with competition from much, much deeper pockets.

I would gladly pay around $10 a year, maybe even $15. My Pebble has been worth it. However, I am now going to return it because if the next Android update breaks the app, it will become a paper weight.

I really love my Pebble Steel. It still works, does everything I want it to do and has a cool look to it (I got the fancy linked metal wristband).

I mostly just use it with cycling (MapMyRide supports it) and for the music app. I realize their servers/app store will shut down eventually (I hope they at least decide to take whatever money they have left and keep the servers running as long as possible after paying off people/debts) and at that point it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get it working with new phones.

I'm going to do what I can to keep mine working until then though. I prefer the simplicity of a Pebble to any of the Google/Apple offerings.

I've been wondering about what happens if the next android update breaks the app. For now I've found this open source app which allows you to use your pebble (and mi bands) without the vendor's app.

https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge

It seems very much like poor management. The "go big, or go home" culture of the valley. Where businesses think if they can't be a billion dollar unicorn, then they might as well die. It makes companies push too hard for explosive growth instead of building a sustainable business.

This is exactly right. 100s of thousands of well off techies strap your product to our body and the best deal you could arrange is to put a bullet in the companies head?

It seems very strange they are basically just shutting down. That has to be an ego driven decision on the FitBit side - they wanted to kill Pebble. Are they even going to use the brand name? The combination of: working production facility, users in the wild, and (the biggest asset) a developer community had to have some value. Now that the deal is done there is no chance to pry that out of publicly traded FitBit, but it seems like this could have had a better outcome.

FitBit got the best deal, they get any salvageable tech/developer resources and put a bullet in a competitor's head.

Your next step: boycott Fitbit and make it known you are doing this because of the shutdown of pebble. EDIT: Also, this is my last post on YC. So Pebble's CEO is joining YC. And being critical of innovation killing deals by the boys on YC gets you down votes to negative territory.

OK over and out you guys, Done with your echo chamber. So long and thanks for all the fish.

> being critical of innovation killing deals by the boys on YC gets you down votes to negative territory.

I haven't noticed this effect. Your post is currently positive, in fact. If I were to downvote you, it would have been for _complaining about downvotes_, as I think (though might be mistaken) that such commentary is not considered on topic.

> Your next step: boycott Fitbit and make it known you are doing this because of the shutdown of pebble.

This is the interesting idea. I don't think it would be effective, as I suspect that if FitBit came out with a smart watch similar to Pebble (a year from now), most of the Pebble fans would hop ship and buy one. (I might be mistaken in such a belief.)

It's possible that people downvoted you to reflect an opinion of "that wouldn't work". It doesn't seem like a personal grudge, either, as your comment history doesn't seem (well, at my inexperienced first glance) to be downvoted very much.

Why are you mad at Fitbit? They didn't cause Pebble to fail or ask them to turn down the past buyouts.

Yeah seen that pattern before with the treo and handspring. That gang (palm clueless mgmt) even killed BeOS with the same stone.

Wow, I remember the Treo. That was a device long on promise, short on delivery.

I actually can't think too much about that era without being angry about how all of that sector played out. Frivolous lawsuits, bad management, amazing hardware, flashes of brilliant software.

And hope. So much hope.

>This is exactly right. 100s of thousands of well off techies strap your product to our body and the best deal you could arrange is to put a bullet in the companies head?

Actually, I think what happened is that Eric, the CEO, is now a multi-millionaire.

So, this is more of a success story than most of us might consider savory to think about.

? As founder he held common stock, which would be worthless now.

There are lots of ways around that. His stock is worthless, sure, but he probably has something else, whether it's a huge retention bonus (cash or Fitbit stock, which is public and can be sold), an executive-level salary at Fitbit, or some combination of the two. There's also the possibility that he sold some of his equity to investors for cash earlier on.

EDIT: I was wrong, he is joining YC. Thank you for pointing that out kobeya.

He's not at Fitbit. He's joining YC.

> So, this is more of a success story than most of us might consider savory to think about.

In general this sort of thing is probably far more common than you'd think (top brass gets paid, everyone else gets a "thank you"). If I'm not mistaken, that's what happened at Sam Altman's company, and a good number of the YC company exits.

I don't think they even have a few hundred thousand customers. Their first one kicked in the neighborhood of 50k supporters. Did they even ship the second?

A hardware company on the hook for fulfilling 50k orders of the sequel has some pretty serious expenses. A sale might have been the best landing and what got everyone a refund for the 2nd.

Their pebble app has 500,000+ downloads on the Google store, and they have 2 million in pebble sales (I believe that's delivered). They've shipped their second Kickstarter last year (Pebble Time Steal).

Ah. I guess they probably sold plenty of units through other channels.

Still, they might need an incredibly high number of people to pay. And then people would bitch and say that they're running a ponzi scheme like a bitcoin wallet that lost all of its deposits. My guess is they've engineered a soft landing for orders they can't fulfill and employees and it's the best option in a bad situation. I'd commend them for doing that rather than taking the easy route.

Pebble Time 2 would have been their third major product. They had the original Pebble, and then the Pebble Time. IIRC the Pebble Steel and Pebble Time Round were sort of secondary projects, but if you include them then they had 4 generations of delivered products.

Yeah, pardon my french but I'm fucking angry this morning.

There's some initial reports that they need service back-end to be live in order to do the initial pairing. My Time Round is a dead watch walking if that's the case.

There's not a comparable smartwatch right now that is like the Time Round, I'd happily have paid for ongoing support.

> There's some initial reports that they need service back-end to be live in order to do the initial pairing.

So much of the time "the cloud" is an anti-feature.

Assuming all of the ~200,000 kickstarter backers would have been okay with the $10/year software, and no duplication of backers between their three campaigns, and that yearly payment kicking in as soon as each of the three campaigns ended (so before the customers even got their devices), that would have brought in a bit shy of $5m, compared to the ~$43m they brought in from their three campaigns. It's a good thought, but I doubt their revenue stream was only 10% away from being sustainable.

You have to remember the overhead for that $5m in revenue would only be a few engineers let's say 5 at $1m, that's $4m profit.

Whereas on the $43m they still had to manufacture, ship, hire designers, engineers, etc.

That $4m profit would be a LOT more than 10%, that would cover 20 people's salary

I was assuming a flat "free" boost to their total revenue stream, so my assumption was even more generous than yours.

I sincerely doubt they were only 10% of revenue away from being solvent, even if it was money that came out of nowhere. Reports I've heard are that Fitbit paid ~40m to pay off Pebble's debts, meaning that instead of $10/yr the subscription fee would have to have been closer to $10/mo.

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