The forgotten Smart Watch company: Pebble

Back in 2015 or 2016, I, along with my college friends attended Hackathons. Hackathons were picking up pace and since we were about to graduate, it made perfect sense for us to attend these Hackathons from a learning point of view. Besides, they also provided Pizza and RedBull which were very attractive. So, we loved to attend Hackathons.

In one of the Hackathons, there were three themes that we could build upon. I don't recall all the three, but one of them indeed attracted me. We had to build apps for a watch called 'Pebble'. This company was quite famous in the smartwatch market at that time. The opportunity to work on such an incredible and new technology felt magical.

My excitement lasted only for a few minutes. We couldn't pursue it due to the lack of Pebble Watch and the Hackathon organisers didn't provide one (or they were pretty limited).

We solved a different problem during that Hackathon but were unsuccessful in coming up with a functional prototype. We didn’t do our presentation, left food and drinks at the venue and came out feeling like losers. I felt even more  disappointed because we couldn't work on the Pebble watch.

I thought of getting a Pebble watch and building applications for it but since there were a lot of changes happening in my life, like leaving college, joining an internship etc., I got busy and that thought slipped my mind.

Over time, I completely forgot about the company.

Fast forward to this year, almost six years later, in April 2022, I learnt that company is no more. Founder of Pebble, Eric Migicovsky, wrote an insightful blog post on the Success and Failure at Pebble. That's sad to know. On the other hand, I am also glad that Eric is working on a new product called Beeper.

On a high level, this looks something like WUPHF.com, which Ryan had built in The Office TV series. It was really fun project for Ryan but the project fails in the series. Can Eric bootstrap this product successfully? Given his experience with Pebble, I hope so. Only time can answer this question.

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