We manufactured our first 100 units by hand, which allowed us to quickly iterate and fix problems as they arose during production.

We launched our first product, an alpha-grade smartwatch, and learned valuable lessons from customer feedback, including the need for a firmware upgrade to show the time.

Our team grew significantly after launching, and we shipped hundreds of thousands of watches worldwide, despite initially feeling uncertain about our direction.

I started working on wearables six and a half years ago because I wanted to create a more affordable smartwatch, as I didn't want to spend $400 on existing options.

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.

When we launched on Kickstarter, we were just five people, none of whom had experience in consumer electronics, so we spent six months in Asia developing the first prototypes of Pebble.

I had a moment of realization when I pulled the first red Pebble watch off the assembly line on December 28, 2012, feeling that all our efforts had finally paid off.

We decided to create our own hardware device instead of licensing our technology, believing we could do it better ourselves. Building consumer hardware as a startup was considered totally insane in the early 2000s, with very few successful examples to follow.

After some feedback, I pivoted from a bike computer to a watch, combining a Nokia 3310 with an Arduino to create an early prototype.