Eric Migicovsky faced rejection from over 30 investors for his hardware startup, Pebble, before successfully crowdfunding it on Kickstarter.

The hardest part of my journey with Pebble was the five years it took to achieve product-market fit, which involved a lot of trial and error.

Using crowdfunding as a marketing and sales channel can be effective, especially if you've already sold a significant number of units before launching the campaign. We received feedback from about 1,500 eager individuals who were very open with their thoughts, allowing us to tune and tweak the Pebble product effectively.

Despite having a promising product, we struggled to secure investment, leading us to consider launching on Kickstarter, which was suggested by Paul Graham. We built our Kickstarter page and filmed the video ourselves, starring our friends and interns.

We designed Pebble by incorporating feedback from our first product, ensuring it worked with iPhones and included features that users wanted.

We aimed to raise $100,000 to sell 1,000 Pebble watches, but we reached that milestone in just 2 hours and hit our first million in 28 hours, ultimately raising $10 million from 70,000 people in 30 days.

We built our first 500 watches by hand in a garage, which gave us a deep appreciation for the effort involved in creating consumer electronics.

It's mindboggling to see how far we've come from starting out to create a watch just for ourselves to now having a global community building innovative applications for Pebble.

I started working on Pebble back in 2008 while I was an engineering student at the University of Waterloo.