Pebble
When Pebble launched a Kickstarter campaign for its original smartwatch, the startup met its $100,000 fundraising goal in just two hours, going on to become the most funded campaign in Kickstarter history at the time.
Three years later, Pebble has broken its own impressive record, raising $500,000 in just 17 minutes for its latest watch, the Pebble Time. When I started writing this story, the campaign had amassed $1.9 million in funding. When I finished, it was up to $4.3 million.
This kind of success should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following Pebble since its first campaign. Far from the risky bet it once was, Pebble is now a sizable company, with a sought-after product, sold in mainstream stores like Best Buy and Target. Particularly in these frothy days of 10-digit funding rounds, Pebble would likely have had no problem raising venture capital. The question is: Why even take Pebble Time to Kickstarter?
In a campaign video, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky tells potential backers: “We’re back on Kickstarter to work directly with you, the community that got us here.” And that may well be true. But whether Migicovsky acknowledges it or not, this is also about, well, marketing.
It represents a subtle change in the role of Kickstarter. The crowdfunding service has become a place where companies that are already widely embraced go to market themselves and drum up excitement for new products—excitement that, at times, can overshadow the projects that arguably need Kickstarter’s help most.
The Change
In its earliest days, Kickstarter billed tself as a place where independent artists, filmmakers, tinkerers, and entrepreneurs could raise money for worthwhile ideas. As Kickstarter co-founder and former CEO Perry Chen told The New York Times back in 2009 when the site first launched: “Money has always been a huge barrier to creativity. We all have a lot of ideas we’d like to see get off the ground, but unless you have a rich uncle, you aren’t always able to embrace those random ideas.”
Kickstarter is still a place for embracing those random ideas. But Pebble shows that it’s also a place for something more. In an interview with the online publication Backchannel about the Pebble Time campaign, Kickstarter’s current CEO seemed to underline this subtle shift—albeit without recognizing it as a shift. “The Pebble Time project will show that the real power and utility of our platform is not in money,” he said, “it’s in community and distribution.”
In other words, it’s about marketing. Take that idea to its extreme—where any company, no matter the size, can use Kickstarter to access a community and distribute its products—and Kickstarter becomes a microcosm of the very market dynamics it initially set out to fix.
Kickstarter isn’t the only platform wrestling with this issue. In a recent WIRED op-ed, one crafter accused Etsy of losing its soul, because it now allows Etsy sellers to work with third party manufacturers. That has led to a flood of mass produced products, that make it tough for sellers of handmade goods to compete. The network effect this creates is good for Etsy, just as it is for Kickstarter. For the sellers and creators on these platforms, though, letting in the mass market can make it as difficult as it ever was to get noticed.
The Cost of Freedom
At the same time, it’s hard to blame a company like Pebble for wanting to fundraise this way. After all, Pebble had the quintessential Kickstarter project the first time around. It was a worthy idea from a small and mighty team, that had been rejected by the venture capital community, and rose to popularity on Kickstarter largely on its own merits.
Raising funding on Kickstarter helped Pebble prove market demand and gave the company the creative freedom it might never have had if it had venture capitalists to answer to. That’s one reason why Kickstarter is often credited with, well, kickstarting the hardware revolution. Unlike many traditional tech investors, the crowd has been more willing to back risky hardware projects like Pebble and the Oculus Rift.
So it makes sense that Pebble—a quintessential Kickstarter success story—would want to replicate that success this time around. And yet the question remains: If successful companies like Pebble continue turning to Kickstarter, how many more success stories like Pebble’s will there be?
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