That's what I noticed as well. If they had targeted 50M in sales, would they still be around today? I'm not sure what to take away from this except hardware startups are hard - you can make a wildly successful product and get bankrupted because you failed at supply chain management.
The problem is that $50M in sales is only about 500K units.
That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume.
Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died.
It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.
naw that's not true. The valley of death is >1k units but <10k. Not enough money to pay back your hw tooling. There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics. Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Tooling for injected plastic crosses over somewhere about 50K units. Before that you have to think hard about whether you can use advanced 3D printing to get where you need to go.
> There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics.
My FAEs and sales reps beg to disagree even in this mess. The first useful discount on microcontrollers I can get hold of generally starts at about 250K units annually (generally that's the first point where I can even get manufacturer attention--and even that's not great) and normally increases until about 1M units annually. The discounts increase from 1M to 10M annually but very slowly.
> Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Right now is very different from when Pebble was producing product. Right now, I've actually had pricing revoked on me. However, that is not normal behavior in the semiconductor business.
