Crowd-funding: a story of success and failure

This is a story of two multi-million dollar projects and two crowd-sourcing websites, Kickstarter and Indiegogo.  The fact that one was successful and one wasn’t, despite the amount of money pledged, gives an interesting slant to the word “failure”.

Pebble

The Pebble is a smartwatch created by Pebble Technology and launched in 2013 after a successful funding project on Kickstarter. Pebble Technology was originally called Inpulse and had some success with early smartwatches. But they wanted to achieve something greater.  Enter the Pebble…

The company started a funding project on Kickstarter in April 2012. The initial aim was to raise $100,000 to kick off production of the new Pebble watch.  Within two hours of going live, the project had met the $100,000 goal, and within just six days, the project became the most funded project in the history of Kickstarter, raising $4.7 million. There were still another 30 days to go in the campaign.

When the funding project closed on May 18, 2012, Pebble became the biggest crowd-funded project to date with $10,266,844 pledged by 68,928 people.

This project showed Pebble Technology that there was a huge demand for their new smartwatch. As a result, some time was spent revising the design based on customer feedback, and revisions to their plans for the manufacturing process. Pebble went into mass production in January 2013 with output of 15,000 watches per week. At the time of writing, sales have exceeded 300,000 units.  The Pebble is on sale at Best Buy and Amazon, as well as at getpebble.com.

Ubuntu Edge

The Ubuntu Edge was the design of a state-of-the-art smartphone announced by Canonical on 22 July 2013. The Edge was to run a mobile version of the Ubuntu operating system in a device with the power to run the full Ubuntu desktop when connected to an external keyboard and monitor. Its design was meant to stretch to the limits the capabilities of hand-sized devices.  Edge would have been powered by a super-fast multi-core processor and 4GB of RAM. Internal storage would have been 128GB. These figures have never been used in the context of a mobile phone before.

Canonical sought to crowd-fund the production of 40,000 units via the Indiegogo crowd-sourcing website. The aim was to raise $32,000,000 within a month, which is the biggest target of any crowd-funded project so far. The Edge was not intended to go into mass production after this initial run but to serve as a demonstrator of what can be achieved. The project fell short of its funding goal, with pledges reaching “only” $12,809,906 from nearly 20,000 people and businesses.

The fact that so many people pledged so much for the Edge caused some in the mobile phone industry to sit up and pay more attention to Ubuntu than ever before. Canonical has since started detailed negotiations with several phone manufacturers about developing one or more devices that will ship with the Ubuntu Touch operating system. There may still be success despite their initial failure.