Pebble Time quickly asserted itself as a monster earlier this month when it became the most successful Kickstarter project ever. Now it looks like even after that record was broken, Pebble's funding continued to soar — and that's partly due to the March 9th Apple event.
TechCrunch points out that Pebble's funding rate per hour increased drastically on the day of and the day after Apple's MacBook and Apple Watch announcement. On the Sunday before the event, the Pebble Time Kickstarter was raking in around $6,000 per hour. The day of, that number rose to $10,000 per hour, and finally, it capped out at $16,000 per hour on March 10th.
"That’s the kind of validation you can only dream of"
"When the biggest company in the world enters your market, that’s the kind of validation you can only dream of," Pebble CEO and founder Eric Migicovsky told TechCrunch.
This spike wasn't unexpected — it makes sense that Apple's smartwatch extravaganza would get people excited about smartwatches in general. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham says the Apple event doubled the number of people joining the Pebble Time Kickstarter.
I asked Eric what happened to the rate of Pebble's Kickstarter signups after the Apple Watch announcement. He said it doubled.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) March 12, 2015
The Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel Kickstarter campaign still has thirteen days to go and it has already raised more than $18 million in funding. As of last month, Pebble had sold more than 1 million smartwatches, but we'll have to wait until the Apple Watch's April 24th release date to see how those numbers stack up.