At this point, you've almost certainly seen video that came from a GoPro camera, even if you didn't know it. A Facebook friend might have shared the clip of a mountain biker in Africa being flattened by a sprinting gazelle; it has drawn 12.4 million views on YouTube since going viral in October. Or maybe you saw the bird's-eye-view video of a seagull picking up a camera and making off with it (2.8 million views) or a skier touching off an avalanche in the Alps and flying away from it with a parachute (2.1 million views). Every two or three minutes, a new piece of GoPro–created content is uploaded to YouTube, and Woodman credits those videos—whether produced by its army of customers or by the company's 20-person in-house media team—with much of the company's runaway success.
In the past two years, GoPro's growth has exploded, and the cameras' uses have spread far beyond the action-sports world. GoPros are being used on dozens of reality-based TV shows. Scientists are sending GoPros into near space and deep underwater. A GoPro was mounted on the rescue pod when the Chilean miners were rescued in 2010. The list goes on—surgeons, oil companies, the U.S. military—and one of the company's challenges is tracking it all in order to support it.
Two years ago, there were 14 employees at headquarters in Half Moon Bay; today, there are 150. The cameras are available in about 10,000 stores—lots of local sports-enthusiast shops but also REI, Best Buy, and Amazon. GoPro's closest competitor in the wearable-camera space, Contour, reported $15 million in revenue for 2010, and Woodman claims GoPro now holds 90 percent of the wearable-cam market, after growing well over 300 percent in 2011. Digital-imaging industry analyst Chris Chute of market research firm IDC estimates GoPro's 2011 revenue at $250 million, on sales of 800,000 cameras worldwide. He calls GoPro "the fastest-growing camera company in the world."
Perhaps even more impressive than the revenue growth is the passion GoPro's users have for its products, as expressed by the flood of GoPro videos spreading across YouTube and Facebook. GoPro's Facebook fan base grew from 50,000 to more than 1.3 million in 2011 alone. To put that in perspective, Contour had 56,000 fans at the end of 2011. Canon USA had 135,000, and Panasonic USA had 134,000. But it's not the size of its Facebook fan base that sets GoPro apart; it's the level of engagement of those fans.
"I think we have the most socially engaged online audience of any consumer brand in the world," Woodman says. The company uses a metric it refers to as a BARE (for brand audience rate of engagement) score to track the activity of its Facebook audience. The score is simply the number of fans Liking, Posting, Commenting, or otherwise interacting on the GoPro Facebook Wall divided by the total number of fans. (Facebook makes this calculation easy by posting a metric called Talking About This; see "The BARE Truth.") In mid-December, GoPro's BARE score was 5 percent. By comparison, Lady Gaga's was 0.9 percent and Fox News's was 1.9 percent. Among brands with a million or more followers, you would be hard-pressed to find one with a higher rate of engagement.
All right, you say, but what does that engagement mean for the business? Can the company directly track the revenue impact or leverage those users for more camera sales? Here the answers get a bit fuzzier, and Woodman is comfortable with that. "That's a big difference between GoPro and other companies," he says. "The first thing we get excited about isn't, What will this do for our business from a revenue standpoint—or, really, from any traditional business standpoint? It's, How stoked are our customers and fans?"
To understand GoPro's success as a social brand, you have to start back before the company's founding in 2002. After graduating with a degree in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego, Woodman started his first company in the dot-com go-go days of the late '90s. funBug was a venture-backed Web marketing company, and it went bust with the rest of the market in 2001.
"I feel like I went through the Great Depression," says Woodman. "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."
He knew he still wanted to be an entrepreneur, but he vowed to bootstrap his next operation: "I didn't want to take anybody else's money. I wanted to do something small that could be profitable from the beginning, and grow that way—and never need someone to write me a check to keep the business going."
He left California to live out of a backpack and surf in Australia and Indonesia for five months, first with his friend Ruben Ducheyne (who now heads up GoPro's customer support operation) and then with his girlfriend, Jill Scully (now his wife, Jill Woodman). It was in Australia that the idea for GoPro began to take shape. Woodman was frustrated that pro surfers tended to be the only ones who could get good images of themselves surfing—because you needed a professional photographer or videographer willing to bob around in the water documenting you. Surfers addressed that problem as best they could by using the buddy system and carrying cheap, disposable film cameras that came with a waterproof housing and glorified rubber-band wrist strap—but that usually ended with the cameras banging them on the head or getting lost in the water.
