Hacker News Reader

Comment by proee | Hacker News Reader

In hindsight, what would have been the best path for Pebble? Did they grow too quickly, too fast?

Seems they have a really great product and team.

The article seems to suggest that their best path would have been getting acquired by Citizen last year. According to the article:

* Citizen was interested in purchasing them for $740 million in 2015

* Intel was interested in purchasing them for $70 million "before the launch of the Pebble 2" (which was the first half of 2016)

* Now they're apparently getting acquired for $34-40 million

> Did they grow too quickly, too fast?

...surely those are the same thing? And I'd argue it's quite the reverse - Pebble were one of the first smartwatches out in the market but they never managed to capitalize on that lead. I suspect their fate was sealed the day the Apple Watch was released.

They should have gotten into totally different sustainable product lines that still fell in the IoT realm. Maybe home routers for geeks, with upgradable Wi-Fi M.2 cards? Many of their backers were nerds, engineers, etc.

There are a lot of products they could have attempted that customers might have wanted. I think they maxed out how many watches they could push to their target audience. Everyone else just went with Apple/Google.

But there was nowhere to grow. Smartwatches have always been a niche product for people who like gizmos. If Pebble had stayed small and focused on their original "watch with apps" market instead of chasing the "phone on your wrist" market it'd still be business as usual.

When you raise a big chunk of institutional money though from VCs, the pressure is to grow fast and capture as much market share as possible though.

There was definitely a lot of sense behind the bet that they made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com