Most successful “kickstart” ever!

As a follow up from the recent blog entry on sources of finance in the internet age comes the story of “Pebble” - a watch that connects to the iphone. Their quest for finance on kickstarter.com was successful beyond their wildest dreams! This is a great example of the use of “crowd-sourcing” as a means of raising finance.

Initially, the creators of the Pebble, which now consists of 9 employees all under the age of 28, tried to raise money by pitching their idea to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. But they found that while it was relatively easy to get funding for software development, the venture capitalists were much less keen on hardware because of the lower profit margins involved.

So the team took their idea to kickstarter.com and hoped to raise $100,000 to begin production. The video they made to pitch their idea can be seen on the Pebble kickstarter page here.

The response was phenomenal and when they closed it off, they had nearly 69,000 backers and over $10 million in the bank! In fact, the massive amount of finance meant that their plans for production in the USA had to be changed (the reward for a $100 contribution was one pebble watch) and they are now investigating much bigger production facilities in China.

Further information on Pebble’s journey via kickstarter can be found here.