Impulse Watch

Impulse was Eric Migicovsky’s early watch product before Pebble, built inside Alerta and described in Eric Migicovsky on Pebble, Kickstarter, and Building for Yourself. It began as a way to see phone calls and messages without pulling out an iPhone while biking, but BlackBerry became the practical first platform because it exposed the needed Bluetooth accessory APIs.

The product’s wiki role is an early Consumer Hardware Startup Risk case. Press attention and thousands of signups did not become strong sales because the product shipped much later, many interested users had moved away from BlackBerry, and Eric had ordered one to two thousand units that became inventory pressure. Impulse therefore foreshadows Pebble’s later blend of real need, platform dependency, production delay, and Hardware Inventory Risk.

Connections

• Eric Migicovsky, Alerta, and Pebble - founder, company, and successor product.
• BlackBerry - platform that made the first version technically possible.
• Customer Pull, Consumer Hardware Startup Risk, and Hardware Inventory Risk - concepts illustrated by the early launch.