Pebble Watch Sells Out – Kickstarter’s Big Success
When their Kickstarter campaign first kicked off, for about $100, one could get a watch when manufacturing started. Within just a few short hours, Pebble had exceeded its goal of $100,000 and within just a few days breezed past $2 million.
For those who are not aware, Kickstarter is a website that allows people from all around the world to “crowd fund” any project they like to fund. Basically, all that this means is that when people like a project idea that someone has, they can become “investors” of a sort.
The main difference between this and traditional investment is that for their leap of faith, the people who make the investments are not promised dividends, but instead, they are promised the final product, among other rewards, for their faith in the viability of the product.
There has been an explosion of activity around Kickstarter projects as of late, particularly in the area of video games. However, that isn’t to say creative people outside of the video game industry aren’t finding success too. Kickstarter’s most successful project yet has been the Pebble digital watch.
The Pebble watch connects to your smartphone and can display a huge amount of information that is streamed to it, everything from the time to your emails and text messages. In addition to what is currently built into the watch, it will also have app support, so that people can develop more apps for the device once it comes out, adding more support.
When their Kickstarter campaign first kicked off, for about $100, one could get a watch when manufacturing started. Within just a few short hours, Pebble had exceeded its goal of $100,000 and within just a few days breezed past $2 million.
Inf act, the volume of orders was so large through Kickstarter that the makers of the Pebble were forced to do something no one had ever done before on Kickstarter and cap pre-orders at 85,000 watches, since they could not produce any more after that.
The whole crowd funding thing is really just totally fascinating, the idea that the consumer can directly be involved in the development and creation of a product without having to involve a large corporation is fantastic, and paves the way for many more independent creative thinkers to find their way in the world with the help of a few million people willing to give their idea a try.
