Pebble Hits Its $500K Kickstarter Target For Pebble Time In Just 17 Minutes

Pebble knew that a return to Kickstarter was the right path for its new hardware, and the speed with which it reached its goal has proven that to be true: Already, the campaign has passed $500,000 on the crowdfunding platform. Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me in an interview that part of the reason they went back to KS was as a “stunt,” and this proves that kind of marketing strategy can be extremely effective.

But it was also about paying homage to the community that did it to begin with, according to Migicovsky.

“We decided to go back on Kickstarter, and it’s a pretty important choice that we’ve made,” he said. “When we started it was three people working on this thing that we knew was going to be big but that the world hadn’t woken up to yet. When we started making Pebble Time and Timeline, we decided to make it available to the people who supported us first. These are the people all around the world that backed us.”

It was about getting the product directly to the community that Pebble has always felt it did right by, thanks to consistent software updates for the previous product, and evoking the same sense of community around this new generation, Migicovsky says. But the spectacle and sustained attention that you can get with a meteoric campaign is a big part of that, too – this very article is proof that the Kickstarter angle, with its metrics and spectator sport incremental dollar value increases, serves Pebble better than any one-off retail launch could do.