The GoPro Army
How a scrappy little camera company turned its customers into a stoked sales force and became a $250 million industry.
Radical Proposition All of the images here were taken with GoPro camera. the surfer on this page is GoPro's founder and CEO Nick Woodman.
Gregg Segal
Strapped Nick Woodman with a selection of GoPro cameras and mounts. On his chest is a 3-D setup.
Now That's Extreme the best-known GoPro video: amountain biker gets blindsided by a gazelle. It has been viewed 12.4 milliontimes.
Nick Woodman and I are strapped into the cockpit of a vintage racecar on a winding, narrow road in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, taking cliff-side turns at 60 miles per hour and rocketing up to 100 on the straightaways. Strapped to each of our chests are tiny high-definition video cameras. There are two more cameras on the doors, pointing in at us; one over our shoulders, pointing at the instrument panel; one mounted to the dashboard, pointing at my face; one under the nose of the car, to capture the road whizzing by; one attached to the front of the roof; and another looking up over the roof via a pole mounted to the rear end. The car is a Ford GT40, a replica of the legendary vehicle that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans rally race four times in the 1960s. It's the property of GoPro, the company that makes the cameras we're using. Woodman is the CEO and an accomplished amateur racecar driver (and surfer, mountain biker, motorcyclist, and all-around thrill junkie).
We approach a blind turn, and the engine emits a loud brap as Woodman guns it around the corner and down the hill, and the back end of the car fishtails out behind us in a slightly sickening way.
"This car wasn't road-legal until a couple weeks ago—I've never taken it up here with a passenger!" he yells over the engine noise. "I think we need to stiffen up the suspension." Then he hammers the gas again.
I've been trying to stay cool, but my mind is a blur of headlines in the tech press about a wild-man CEO and a journalist plummeting into a ravine to their deaths. I give in after about 15 minutes. "OK, you're starting to scare me," I tell him.
I've given him the sound bite he is looking for—the cameras are rolling, after all—so he slows down a bit, and we cruise the rest of the way through the mountains, through the biker town of Pescadero, and out to Highway 1, where we turn off at Pigeon Point, a clearing near a lighthouse on the cliffs over the Pacific Ocean. A film crew is waiting for us there with two electric motocross bikes from a company called Zero (the bikes are also strapped with tiny video cameras) and an elaborate remote-control helicopter (for overhead shots).
Woodman wanted to bring me here for three reasons. One, GoPro is a company that's deeply invested in storytelling (primarily in the form of extreme-sports videos), so he suggested we do part of our interview here, with a dramatic backdrop and some adrenaline-pumping action between questions. We had been at the company's office all day, just up the road in Half Moon Bay, but as the sun dipped enough to provide the magical golden light of late afternoon, it was time to switch venues and turn on the cameras.
Two, Woodman, who's 36 and looks a lot like Ed Helms playing a surfer, wanted to show me he's a risk taker and authentic action-sports fanatic, as are most of the people who work for him. The word dude is thrown around a lot at GoPro headquarters, and executives like to head out for a morning surf session or trail ride before hitting their desks. (It's no accident that some of the country's best surf breaks are minutes from the office.) This cultural authenticity is key, he says, because it means the company's employees are well attuned to what's going to excite their customers.
And three, taking me to ride electric dirt bikes at Pigeon Point is important because it demonstrates a vital part of the company's product development history. To shoot a truly satisfying action video, the audio feedback is almost as important as the visuals. You need to hear, for example, skis crunching through snow to get the full effect of a gnarly descent. But capturing that noise is not as simple as turning on a microphone. In sports such as skiing, skateboarding, and cycling, the wind noise rushing into a camera's mike tends to overpower the sounds of the action. When the company was developing an early version of its signature HD Hero camera, Woodman set out to solve the wind-noise problem with the help of Zero bikes, which are nearly silent except for a low electric whirring. On a Zero, he was able to ride fast and record almost pure wind noise in a real-world environment (here at Pigeon Point), which in turn allowed the company to isolate the sound of wind and then design firmware that could all but eliminate it from recordings.
The point comes back to storytelling. Videos created with GoPro cameras (check out a selection of extreme GoPro videos here) can have a level of production value that rivals that of professionally created content. That's great from a technical standpoint, of course, but even more important are the viral possibilities that kind of content unleashes. The more authentic and immersive the video, the more viewers get sucked in and feel as if they're experiencing the moment themselves. "It's like a teleportation device," Woodman likes to say. GoPro thinks not just about its customers, in other words, but also about its audience.
Let's back up. If you're not familiar with it, GoPro sells a line of wearable, mountable, and affordable HD video cameras that make all kinds of previously impossible shots much easier to capture. About 2 inches wide, the cameras don't look like much more than tiny gray boxes, but they pack a surprising amount of power and versatility—especially for their $300 price tag. An ever-increasing array of flexible harnesses, mounts, and other accessories allows users to attach the cameras to just about anything and shoot high-definition point-of-view action footage.
