GoPro lets people take other people along for the ride with them.
Nick Woodman
Viral word-of-mouth marketing for GoPro is massive. Video is really the conduit.
A smartphone is a mobile computer in your pocket.
People don't go buy GoPro for the thing; they buy it for what the thing does.
People are watching GoPro content not to decide whether they should buy it or not - they're watching it for the entertainment.
I come into work late morning time and go at it until early evening, and I'm lucky that I'm at the point where I'm able to do that.
To get GoPro started, I moved back in with my parents and went to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I wrote off my personal life to make headway on it.
My friends used to tease me 'cause I'd wear a CamelBak while I was working so I wouldn't have to get up if I was thirsty.
In France, a hip replacement was captured using two GoPros in a stereoscopic 3D arrangement. Students can watch the surgery using a virtual reality headset.
Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors.
I think that that's something that's pretty interesting about a GoPro - it's the one camera that we know of that you can combine with like cameras to form new cameras. So it's a bit of a modular system.
I was inspired by how Red Bull isn't about the drink; it isn't about the product or the can. Red Bull is a platform to celebrate all that humans are capable of accomplishing. They built a lifestyle movement, a brand that sold this product.
In the early years, I would say GoPro's products were not that impressive.
Keeping people fired up starts with having a really clear vision for what the company is aiming to do.
If I walk up to a can of Red Bull, I'm thinking about Formula One; I'm thinking about incredible athletic performances. And it helps me choose that can over something else to either side of it.
If I'm a content creator, and I get recognition for my work, that's going to motivate me to spend even more time on my next production and make it even better.
I feel like I went through the Great Depression. All these companies are being successful around you, you're on that track, and then the market collapses, and you're out of a job. You're trying to save your investors' investment, and it doesn't work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal.
Somebody captures an incredible video, shares it online, and inspires millions of other people to go and do the same with their GoPros, and then it happens again and again - and what you've got is this incredible snowball of stoked customers capturing and creating rad content with their GoPros.
I feel like in a world where we all try to figure out our place and our purpose here, your passions are one of your most obvious guides.
I grew up with stories of people who start their own businesses and do really well. So I thought, 'OK, that's what you do.' I can thank my dad for that.
If I didn't follow my passion for surfing... I would have never come up with the concept to make a wrist camera.
As long as you can bootstrap, not at the sacrifice of competitive advantage, bootstrapping is a really powerful thing because it allows you to be totally devoted to your vision.
Things that burn very brightly, we wonder how long they can keep burning.
I don't want to wake up and see my kids going off to college and wonder what happened.
I'm half Puerto Rican.
It sounds cheesy, but if you are having fun, people will love your company, you will be more successful, and more ideas will come your way.
Your passions are a bit like your fingerprints: Everybody has them; everybody's are different. One's passions may just be a guidebook to one's life.
It's very difficult to get any footage of yourself doing what you love unless you have a friend who's a photographer or videographer and wants to document you. That was really the idea and the goal from the beginning: to help people get a good photo, and then it was to help people get a good video.
I think that devices like Glass are going to do a terrific job of capturing your first-person perspective. And that's what people first think of when they think of GoPro.
Smartphones are always in your pocket. They're about reactive capture.
I realized that a surf trip on a jet can be like a road trip. If you see a road you want to turn down, you can just go there.
When I think about dropping team sports and picking up surfing and also then geeking out radio control planes and gadgetry and all that stuff I love, that's what really now has led me in big part to GoPro.
Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period, too many opinions could be disruptive.
Now I'm the father of three young boys, I find myself using GoPro to film them more than anything - trips to the amusement park, the beach, the pool - just chasing them around as they grow.
I originally started GoPro with the sole purpose of helping surfers capture photos of themselves and their friends while they were surfing. I thought it was crazy that very few surfers had any photos or videos of themselves.
When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.
I enrolled in a race car driving school, where you go for three days, and they wanted to rent me a video camera and charge me $100 for every half-hour.
YouTube didn't really start to hit its stride until 2006.
You don't have to raise millions of dollars to be successful, you just have to work on something you are passionate about.
I come from surfing, and surfing is the worst cool-guy industry of all. I decided long ago to try and kill the cool guy.
Dedicating myself to actually following through was my single biggest achievement.
I think our slow, humble beginnings in surf shops, ski shops, bike shops, and motorcycle shops have been extremely important for our success. GoPro is all about celebrating an active lifestyle and sharing that with other people. It's authentic. It's not a brand that we went out and bought a bunch of ads for to create.
My first business was a retro-gaming site where you'd go and play all these cool old-school games. It was a good idea but ahead of its time.
A really important thing when you come up with a concept is that you solve a pervasive problem for people, and you don't try to create a new way to do something that isn't necessarily broken.
Fear drives you a lot harder than success does.
A smartphone is great for when one person is documenting another thing or another person doing something.
If we can become the de facto standard for image capture of unique perspectives around the world, we have a lot of growth ahead of us.
When I have a difficult decision to make, I imagine myself as a 90-year-old guy looking back on his life. I imagine what I'll think about myself at that point in time, and it always makes it really easy to go for it. You're only going to regret that you wimped out.
On the road and traveling - that's when people are at their most creative.
I get pretty focused when I start working on something. And I drink a lot of water, way more than most people.
