When Fitbit’s highly anticipated fitness trackers were a year late to ship, they still managed to debut to excitement instead of angry customers and bad publicity.

How? The company built a loyal pre-purchase crowd, and used its blog to explain the intricacies involved in creating a high-quality product. “If you look at Kickstarter now, many are following that model,” says Eric Friedman, co-founder and chief technology officer of San Francisco-based Fitbit, Inc. “They’re late to ship, but posting pictures of the founders in the factories, learning what’s going on.”

We named Fitbit a Most Innovative Company in the Fitness category for leading the pack for full-body personal activity trackers, with 67% of the market in 2013.

“At the time we were starting Fitbit, there were really very few hardware-based startups,” says Friedman. A major stumbling block was resistance from VCs who’d lost tens of millions of dollars in hardware startups. “There wasn’t a larger number of people to talk to,” he says. Investors initially questioned whether consumers would spend $100 on a fitness tracker. Now, ironically, the question is whether $100 is too low a price?

We talked with anyone who was willing to talk to us. You learn a lot that way.

Friedman and Fitbit Co-Founder and CEO James Park, faced another challenge when launching FitBit: they were both software engineers by trade trying to enter the competitive world of consumer electronics. The two launched Wind-Up Labs in 2002, a photo-sharing site that allowed users to easily get pictures off their cameras to share online. (The company was later acquired by CNET.)

Fitbit Flex

“We’d never done this before,” Friedman reflects. In developing Fitbit, he and Park spent a lot of time in Asia touring factories and asking lots of questions to see what was done similarly, what was different, and synthesizing all that information. “We talked with anyone who was willing to talk to us. You learn a lot that way,” Friedman says.

In the early years, Friedman and Park ran production themselves, which was a “great, hands-on lesson,” Friedman says. After all, you learn more from complications and what went wrong, he says. As Fitbit’s grown, the company’s added managers and teams who are “really strong doers” with specific areas of expertise.