Eric Migicovsky built Pebble's first prototype from a Nokia 3310 screen, Arduino, and wireless chip to let cyclists check notifications without pulling out their phone. He bootstrapped early development with pitch-competition winnings and a few thousand dollars in components, showing that hardware startups don't need massive upfront funding.
Chapters
I'm Eric. I like building things. In high school, I don't know if you guys ever had those desks that were attached to chairs, which were really annoying, and if you're 6.5 feet tall, it's kind of rough on the upper back, so I started making things. I made this chair attachment that I would carry around from class to class to kind of extend the chair for my upper back, but I built a lot of things. I built robots. I built— little bits of electronics. I really like the idea that when you're working on a physical object, it's kind of— I mean, there's a lot of things that have electronics inside them, but when you're working on a physical object, it's something that you can use in your daily life and you can actually feel. So I kind of grew attached to that and started building robots, started building little electronic devices to use around the house. And then in university, I decided to go into systems design engineering, which is kind of a catch-all engineering program for people who don't really know exactly what they want to do and can't decide. So it was fun. I think, as the saying goes, systems design engineers, they may not know how to build it, but they sure as hell know what color to paint it. So we were pretty broad engineers. At the end of our 4 or 5-year program, the real benefit of having gone through that type of engineering was just the fact that we had built many, many projects, many, many sets of things over that 5 years. So by the time I got to my 4th and 5th year, I just started working on a project that would eventually become Pebble. It was called Impulse. I mean, this is one of my slides from December 8th, 2008. So it's fairly early. This is like one of the first renders that I'd ever done with SolidWorks, which is a 3D rendering software. And it was an early prototype of what I wanted to build, which was a watch that connects to your smartphone by Bluetooth and receives email, text messages, and calls. I thought of it originally because I'm a pretty big cycler and I commute by bike. To work at school at that point. And I wanted to find out what was happening on my smartphone without having to take my phone out of my pocket. So it was just sitting there in your pocket connected by Bluetooth. And the idea was instead of having to pull out your phone, you can just glance down and see who's calling or emailing or texting you and then decide if you want to answer that right then or maybe answer it when you get to the office. I originally started making like a bike computer. But then as people saw what I was working on, they were like, that actually would be kind of cool to do as a watch, because then it could be useful for more things than just biking. Since I was at the University of Waterloo, it's right next to BlackBerry. You guys might remember BlackBerry. It was a really popular phone that had a keyboard. I think they still exist now, but— Anyways, the first product that I worked on actually was designed specifically to work with BlackBerry. In 2008, this sounded like a good decision. I mean, BlackBerry was kind of at its peak. I didn't know it was the peak, but started working on this watch that would work exclusively with BlackBerrys. What I like to look at it that our company over the last 5 years have had quite a few different stages. We've had the concept stage, we've had the early product stage, and then we've had the Kickstarter stage. The early concept stage was just as I was in my last year of engineering. Just hacking on electronics. I basically made the first prototype out of an old cell phone, a Nokia 3310, if anyone remembers that very popular phone. And took that screen, connected it to an Arduino, connected it to a wireless chip, and then had it talking to my iPhone. Actually, iPhone, BlackBerry at that time. It was really early. duct taped to my wrist at some points. But it was a good chance to see what the hell I was working on. Was it actually something that I would want to use in my daily life? I started getting feedback from people. I started trying to get some of my friends interested in potentially coming to work with me. And it was definitely, I mean, definitely the early, early stage. We didn't have any money, didn't have any employees at the time. I didn't have a product. I didn't have anything I could sell. So the only things that I could really do were talk about The product and start building prototypes because we really had nothing else at that time. What I wanted to do today is, I know you guys are talking about fundraising this week, but one of the purposes of fundraising is so that you have money so that you could spend it. I wanted to give you guys a little bit of insight into what my startup actually cost to run at different stages because I feel like that's one of the things that It never really gets talked about. It's like, how much do things actually cost? And if you guys are interested, there's a really good presentation by the guys who started Mint, which was the online budget planning stuff that eventually got sold to Intuit. He has another really good presentation on kind of the cost associated with starting a software company. I kind of modeled some of my presentation after that, but with an application, specifically to the hardware side of things. Yeah, so hardware always sounds like it's some scary thing because you have to buy things and it's not just a computer. But at the end of the day, it's not ridiculously expensive to start making prototypes. For anyone who's hacked on Arduino or simple microcontrollers, it costs a couple hundred bucks. You buy it off a website called SparkFun, which is one of my favorite places to spend money. And we funded the company at the early stage off of pitch competitions. I would go and give 30-second elevator pitches, and sometimes I would walk away with like $500 checks, like the oversized novelty checks, which you can't cash at banks. But that was enough to fund us in the early days. We ended up not spending that much money to get to the concept stage where we had some sort of product that we could show off. It wasn't something we could sell, by any means, but it was something that visualized the idea that we were working on. That was really important, because when you're talking about making a watch that talks to a smartphone, people don't really— I mean, they can kind of imagine what a Dick Tracy watch looks like, but no one could actually imagine that it was useful. So having the first prototype that actually did a subset of what we wanted to do was really important to have on our wrists. And yeah. It wasn't that expensive. I mean, it seemed expensive because we didn't actually have that much money. But looking back, I feel like a lot of people overestimate how much money it actually costs. This is kind of what a couple thousand bucks gets you.
