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by jdenning 211 days ago
I'm not shocked - Pebble showed their true colors years ago when they ran the kickstarter campaign for the Time 2, which they cancelled and sold out to Fitbit. They never cared about their community.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...

2 comments

Is that really an example of not caring about the community? The business failed, and they refunded everyone who had pledged. The sale to Fitbit was probably the way they funded those refunds. That seems like an unfortunate ending but one that indicated some amount of care for the community.
The timeline of the campaign makes it pretty clear that either:

1) they knew they were insolvent, and wouldn’t be able to continue

or

2) the campaign was used to demonstrate market demand to enable their sale to Fitbit

Edit: also, they sold for $23 million [1], total pledges were for about $13 million, and not everyone got a refund [2]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fitbit-bought-pebble-for-23-...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...

Shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone that followed them since the Allerta days.