Eric Migicovsky explains how Pebble raised millions on Kickstarter by securing an Engadget exclusive that brought in $100,000 in the first two hours, then sustained momentum through PR work over 37 days. He details the manufacturing challenges and how they scaled production using a Chinese outsourcing firm with a local backup plan.
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One of the people that I approached was the senior mobile editor for Engadget. And I started talking to her maybe like 4 or 5 months before we went on Kickstarter. I just emailed her and I said, hey, do you want to go out for coffee sometime? And she was like, sure. So I ended up showing off the first watch, Impulse, that we were working on. I showed her a couple beta apps that people had written for Impulse. And then she was interested and asked if we can keep in contact. Then about a month before we launched on Kickstarter, I emailed her again. I said, hey, we've got this new product that we want to show off. Is there any chance that you'd be interested in an exclusive on this product way before it launches? And she was like, yeah, definitely. So we met up. I showed her an early prototype. I said, is there any chance that you would be okay under embargo, like not telling anyone about this until our Kickstarter page went live? And she was okay with that if it would be an exclusive. So we gave her an exclusive. We gave her the video before. We gave her photos. But then she went on vacation for a week, and we were planning to launch on Kickstarter during that week that she was on vacation. And I emailed her. I was like, hey, we're gonna go live soon. Have you written the article? And she said, no, can you guys just push your launch like a week? And I said, yeah. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions I'd made, because the Engadget post went live at 7 o'clock on the day that we launched our project. And it just exploded from there. The Engadget post was probably the one thing that blew this project up right at the beginning. We ended up doing $100,000 in backing in the first 2 hours after that article went live. And then it just— It just took off. Spiraled out of control. But this is kind of what— well, this is what the graph of our 37 days on Kickstarter looks like. You get that huge uptick at the beginning. The first— each point is a day. So you get that huge uptick at the beginning, but what I'm really proud of is that we were able to maintain the interest and traffic to the site throughout the whole period. And we did that through PR. I spent 6 hours a day doing PR in the first 2 weeks of the project. Every single person who emailed me about doing a story, we— I responded to. I scheduled Skype calls with people everywhere in the world. We ended up hiring a PR firm just to help us schedule appearances and stuff like that. They didn't really do too much outreach, but it paid off. Because you can see where the CNN article was, and the New York Times article, and traffic in other countries, and stuff like that. And a lot of Kickstarter projects kind of have this curve, and then a flat amount. But I think we were able to maintain interest throughout this 30-day period, and extract a lot of value from that.
So all the 68,000, they're the ones who actually bought the product? So was there ever a sense where you said, holy shit, this is scaling way too fast, how are we going to make this support?
So the reason why we weren't super scared about that is, A, we had made a product before, even though, to be honest, we should have been more scared. Why were we not too scared? We started working 2 months before this with an outsourcing firm that specializes in helping companies make stuff in China. Remember, this was when we were trying to raise money from VCs, so we wanted to get an idea of how much it would cost if we were to turn the project on into a high gear, i.e., if we had raised money from VCs, what would we have done with that money? So we had a plan. We hadn't really, I mean, we had a pretty good plan, but 2 days before we launched our Kickstarter, our secondary plan was just to make these products back in San Jose at a small factory. So a day into our Kickstarter project, I phoned up the outsourcing company and I was like, hey guys, We're gonna be going to China. They were happy.
