When the Pebble smartwatch returned to Kickstarter to raise funds for a third iteration, the Pebble Time, it rapidly broke every record the crowdfunding site had going, hitting its funding goal 17 minutes after launch.

The fundraising period isn’t even over for the watch, and yet it’s already the highest-funded project on the site, by a comfortable margin. As I write this, it’s raised $19m; by the time you read it, it will be more again. And with every one of those dollars, Pebble is demonstrating why creators come back to Kickstarter again and again, long after they’ve already been kickstarted.

Pebble’s record-breaking funding is not surprising. The original Pebble watch spent more than two years as the most-funded Kickstarter campaign ever, and was only eventually overtaken by the Coolest cooler, a combination blender, beer cooler and bluetooth speaker which seemed a shoe-in for crowdfunding success from the moment that description was put to paper.

But what was surprising was that Pebble felt the need to return to the site at all. The $10m it raised in 2012 had been sufficient to bootstrap a successful company, and the second edition of the watch, the Pebble Steel, had been released in a more conventional manner, hitting the company’s website for $200 to buy straight away.

And it’s not like Pebble needs the cash injection to get the watches made: they’re already manufactured, allowing it to promise backers that they’ll receive their watch by May 2015. In Kickstarter terms, that’s practically overnight shipping.

So what enticed the company back? “It just made a hell of a lot of sense,” says Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky. We meet at the pre-launch event for the Time in Austin, Texas, at the height of tech conference SXSW Interactive.

Anyone who backed the Pebble Time on Kickstarter is invited, as is anyone who backed the original Pebble. There are free tacos, and a cocktail list named the SDK – or Signature Drink Kit (a pun on Software Development Kit, the tools platform owners release to developers). Migicovsky is in his element.

“We have a new product that we’re launching. We’ve worked on it for over a year, we already have a million people who’ve bought Pebble in the last two years. And what are the ways you can launch a product? You can go to Best Buy, and have people line up; you could sell it on your website. But we knew that we’re going up against a gigantic competitor, Apple.

“How do small companies compete? They go to the people that love them the most. And in our case, that’s Kickstarter.”

Kickstarter crowdfunding in 2014: $529m of pledges from 3.3m backers Read more

Kickstarter offers a direct line to Pebble’s most engaged customers, but also a ready-made platform for seeking out new ones. The publicity garnered by rocketing to the top of the most-funded list didn’t hurt, and nor did launching the campaign over a month before the Apple Watch goes on sale for a product not due to arrive until a month after.

Altogether, it seems to have worked. “Fifty per cent of the people that backed us on Kickstarter had already got a Pebble,” says Migicovsky. “Fifty per cent don’t, they’re new to Pebble.”

Practice makes perfect

In coming back to Kickstarter for a second go, Pebble is not alone. The site is increasingly a home for repeat creators, who return to launch new projects a second, third or fourth time.

They are enticed back by the community that builds up around successful projects; by the ability to workshop new ideas in the same way as that first attempt; and, yes by the money, and particularly the ability to get that money up-front (although in pure cash terms, taking a project to Kickstarter costs more: the company charges 5% as its own fee, and between 3 and 5% for payment processing).

According to the Kickstarter website, 12% of all creators – 21,000 of them – have launched more than one project, and taken in 21% of all the cash, a total of $280m. And practice makes perfect: creators who launch a second project after succeeding the first time have a success rate of 73%, compared with the overall success rate of 39%.

The idea of coming back for a second bite of the apple might be an obvious thing to creators, but from the outside it seems to go against Kickstarter’s mission. Even the company’s name speaks to the importance of that first major push – literally “kickstarting” a project. Once someone’s already successful, why not just do things the old-fashioned way?

John Dimatos, Kickstarter’s lead for tech and design projects, says that its just too natural not to. “The second somebody creates a project, completes it, and they’re looking for their next thing to do, it seems like such a natural fit, to want and desire to come back to the experience they had the first time.”

Quoting the title of a book by veteran Kickstarter creators Studio Neat, he describes that experience as “exhilarating”: “So a lot of it is just that, like, it will be fun. You’re creating a mini party around the creative endeavour that you have. And so let’s do it again.”

Pebble isn’t the archetype of these repeat creators. Although they’re more successful than the average, the majority of repeat creators are more like Studio Neat, a two-person design firm led by Dan Provost & Tom Gerhardt. Its first project, the Glif iPhone camera stand, was a major success back in 2010, and one of Kickstater’s first big hardware products.

Since then, they’ve been back around once a year with a new idea. There’s not really any common thread between the projects, beyond a keen sense of design and a knack for identifying what’s on the cusp of trendiness: past successes include a kit for making simple syrup - a key ingredient in many cocktails - and one for ice (pictured); a stylus for touchscreens, and an app for filling in college basketball tournament brackets.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Neat Ice Kit by Studio Neat - funded by Kickstarter. Photograph: Studio Neat

“Though it may sound surprising, our story is becoming less and less unique as more designers are finding creative ways to bring their ideas to life,” they write in It Will Be Exhilarating. “And experience is not required. Before the Glif, we had no industrial design, manufacturing, or retail experience; yet in the past two years we have released three hardware products (the Glif, Glif+ and the Cosmonaut), one piece of software (Frameographer), and one book (you’re holding it).”

But even if they aren’t all Pebble, there’s still a risk that repeat creators could change the tenor of the site. It wouldn’t be the first time a platform had become dominated by a group of insiders who know how to work the system.

But Dimatos says there’s no sign of that; and more than that, repeat creators help expand the ecosystem. “So here’s an interesting distinction, right: there’s the new creator that is Tim Schafer,” the veteran video game designer whose Double Fine Adventure raised $3.3m in March 2012.

“But Tim Schafer, he has spent decades building up a reputation. He’s able to look at Kickstarter and say: ‘This is a platform that suits my independence.’ He brings in his reputation and his work, and we welcome that. We welcome that this is a place where someone can come in and dictate a project and a game on exactly his terms, for his fans.



“On the other hand, you have someone like [Studio Neat’s] Tom and Dan, who ... before they came to Kickstarter, nobody knew who they were. They weren’t famous or visible in any way. So they launch Glif, and just by the power of their design, and the visibility of our platform, [it] allowed them to create a name for themselves, and they’re able to build on that with repeat projects.”

Smart straps

At the ultimate end of that spectrum, where a repeat creator can build their own community that ends up feeding back to the site at large, lies Pebble.

The Pebble Time includes a serial port on the back of the watch, which does nothing – at first. But for those who so desire, it provides near-total access to the device’s hardware and software, lending it a huge amount of adaptability. Migicovsky hopes that budding hardware hackers will use the port to make “smart straps”, which he envisages as anything from an expandable battery wrapped around your wrist, to a GPS sensor and heart monitor, or even a geiger counter.

Pebble Time: smartwatch maker returns to Kickstarter with colour-screen model Read more

But rather than sit back and wait for that to happen, Pebble’s goosing the system. The company has pledged $1m to support the development of smart straps – and is using Kickstarter as a vehicle to do so. “If you have an idea and want to be part of the smart strap revolution, this is your chance! Get a team together, build a prototype and put your project up on a crowdfunding platform. Our team will work to help bring your idea to life.”

In feeding back to the community, Pebble is doing exactly what Kickstarter hoped. The company has always viewed itself as a toolkit for all creativity. It does its bit to help out, being far more hands on than most ecommerce platforms are (Dimatos’s role as tech lead involves identifying promising projects and giving them a helping hand from an early stage), but ultimately it needs success stories like Pebble to come back to where they began.

And Kickstarter needs all the success it can get to become the new sort of commerce it’s always viewed itself as. Dimatos looked back on his days at New York University’s interactive telecommunications programme, which he described as having “a very natural affinity to Kickstarter”.

“You graduate from a place like ITP and look at the professional world, and sometimes you don’t always see a great fit.

“Kickstarter is always going to be a fit. Because you can literally just do the thing that you want, and if you find, like, 100, or 200, or 500, or 1000 people that care about it, you’re set. You can keep moving with it.

“So I think a lot about students. One of my goals is to say in 20 to 30 years, people will be graduating from college and saying: ‘Well, I could get a job, I guess. But really, shouldn’t I just do a Kickstarter campaign?’”