Eric Migicovsky walks through Pebble's scrappy early days: assembling circuit boards in a university clean room, hiring high school students to build watches, and shipping the first run despite backs falling off and screws shearing. Early customers sent constant feedback that drove weekly software updates.
Chapters
This was our assembly line. I broke into the university because we still had keys, and so we used one of the cleaner rooms— it was cleaner than our garage— to do circuit board assembly. So these are the circuit boards that came back from China. We would test them again, and then we had these little metal cases that we would slot everything into. Ended up hiring high school students to round out our assembly line staff for $10 an hour, and we made the first— 1,000. 100 Impulse watches in September 2010. We ended up shipping them to customers that we had captured about a year ago with a fairly high conversion rate. Everyone thought that we had several thousand emails and we were like, oh, this is never going to convert into sales. But then we started emailing them and a surprisingly large number of people were still interested 10 months later. We told them that it was a beta product. We were like, guys, this is handmade stuff here. It's probably going to break. We'll fix it if it breaks, and we'll ship you a new one if it breaks. The software is going to be very, very rough. I think the first version of our software didn't even have a watch on it. It would only show text messages. So the number one requested feature from our early users, like my dad, was actually show the time. These are what they look like. We ended up buying just from the same Chinese gift place. They had a stock watch box or something that we bought for $0.80 apiece, so it even kind of looked nice. We'd send them in FedEx envelopes. It was a good thing we even tested the shipping process, because the first 10 units we sent broke because the backs fell out because the screws sheared off. And so we ended up fixing that before we sent out the next batch. So you're saying that the first 10 units But this was a hell of a lot of fun. It was great to see— this was 2 and a half years into the process when we finally started shipping out our first units. And it felt really good. The early customers sent us email feedback practically every night. They just sent us, like, here's the running log of what I did with my Impulse in the past 24 hours. And it was great. We issued a new software update every Friday. Broke a lot of things, but fixed them quickly.
