Pebble Time Raises $1 Million in 49 Minutes, a New Kickstarter Record
They did. (Pebble)
What’s that? Smartwatches aren’t popular? Pishposh, says smartwatch pioneer Pebble, who just broke a fundraising record at the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.
On Tuesday morning, the Pebble Time campaign reached its $500,000 goal in less than 20 minutes and hit the one million dollar mark in just 49 minutes. The latter is a new record on Kickstarter, a spokesman for the site told Yahoo Tech.
The previous record belonged to the Android-based game console Ouya, which raised $1 million in 2 days and 19 hours. So: Not even close.
The Pebble Time is thinner than the original Pebble watch (once the record-holder in all-time Kickstarter money raised; it now ranks second, behind a high-tech beer cooler) and also packs a color display. Part of the draw to Pebble’s new campaign was presumably the Early Bird deal that let the first 10,000 backers buy a Time for only $159, lower than the $199 planned retail price for the Time, and less than half of the $349 starting price that the Apple Watch will sell for beginning this April.
Pebble garnered over $10 million in funding during its first run on Kickstarter in 2012, but with Pebble Time breaking the $4 million mark in less than three hours, the company’s newest watch seems poised to shatter that mark and possibly set a new high for the website. The current Kickstarter record for pledge total is $13,285,226, held by the aformetnioned Coolest Cooler.
Records were made to be broken. (Pebble)
The highest goal-reach percentage among large-grossing Kickstarter campaigns was recently demolished by card game Exploding Kittens. Its creators were asking for $10,000 in funding, but instead hit $8,782,571, or 87,825% of its goal. Pebble Time, now almost five hours into its campaign at time of writing, has already reached 1,000% of its target. The Pebble Time also already sits at number seven in all-time money raised (and counting).
Needless to say, we’ll be watching these next four weeks to see how fast Time flies further into the crowdfunding record books. Sorry, couldn’t help ourselves.
Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com. Follow me on Twitter at @danielwbean.
