This week's ClicksCast features a special guest from outside the Clicks team! Eric Migicovsky is a former partner at Y Combinator; he’s the inventor behind Beeper … and the man who first convinced the masses to put a computer on their wrist with the Pebble smartwatch. Now that the Pebble is poised for a return, Eric shares the lessons he's learned over the past decade-plus about how – and why – to build a business in tech!

We're not trying to turn the clock back with Clicks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take full advantage of everything the past has to teach us. Today on the ClicksCast, Joseph Hofer joins us to talk about his time designing the best keyboards of all time during his many years at BlackBerry! Also this hour: minimalism versus maximalism, the role of design in building a brand, and how many deprecated device code names from the mid-oughts can we fit into one episode?

So far on the ClicksCast we’ve told the story of launching a company on the back of a unique iPhone product, and we’ve shared the experience of bringing that product to a new audience, with Android. Today, we've invited our VP of Growth to the guest seat to give us a higher-altitude view, through the lens of her time at BlackBerry. On ClicksCast 003, we're discussing the challenges, the opportunities … and the absurdity involved in bringing niche tech to life in a post-iPhone world.

On last week's episode, Jeff, Kevin and Michael kicked off the ClicksCast "in medias res," focusing on the big news of 2025 (if you're a green bubble like Michael, anyway): bringing the Clicks Keyboard to Android! For episode 2, we’re going back to the beginning – or before the beginning, really, to share the tale of how Clicks went from a nascent notion in 2023 to a fully-fledged business and brand that's brought keyboards to 100,000 phones – and counting!

Greetings, button-lovers – and welcome to episode one of the ClicksCast – a podcast from the team behind Clicks: a family of accessories keeping phones productive and fun in 2025.

We’ll eventually talk about the origin story of Clicks and all the other stuff you expect from a self-serving startup podcast such as this … but they always taught me in writing classes that you start the story in medias res, with the glass falling off the table – only later do you go back and explain why it fell. So we’re gonna kick off by assuming that the folks listening to episode 1 already know that Clicks is a case that added a full physical keyboard to the iPhone in 2024, and that one year later … we’re bringing it to Android!

Why a podcast? Well a few reasons: for one, we get a lot of questions from customers and fans (and skeptics!) and a conversation between us can sometimes be the best way to address those. Also, it’s a very fun challenge to build a company, and a family of products, and we wanted to share a peek behind the curtain at that process. And maybe, if enough folks are interested, we’ll make some exclusive announcements on the pod in the future!

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/moire/new-life License code: BAKAN1FJBJ5E1GJL