Woodman's solution was simple: Create a wrist strap that held a disposable camera firmly in place against your arm. When you were ready to shoot a picture of your surfing buddy, you'd just pivot the camera up into place, get the shot, then snap it back down. What surfer wouldn't want that?
"We all kind of laughed at the idea," says Ducheyne. "He's going to make a wrist strap?" It hadn't even occurred to Woodman that he would eventually also make cameras. He fashioned a crude prototype for the strap and took it with him everywhere on his surf safari for testing.
Woodman had saved up about $20,000 from funBug, but by the time he made it to Indonesia, he knew he would need more money if he wanted to get serious about starting the business when he got back to the States. One day, Jill came back from a shopping excursion in Ubud, Bali, and showed Nick a bead-and-shell belt she had bought for $2.50. She was an aspiring jewelry designer and told him about her ideas for making the belt even cooler.
"Nick's always had a 'Go big or go home' kind of philosophy," Jill says, "so he asked me to take him to the market to see about buying more belts and incorporating my designs. We get there, and he's like, 'We'll take 600 of those, 600 of those, and 600 of those.'" He also bargained the price down to about $1.90 per belt. When the couple got back to California, after waiting two months for all the belts to be made, they spent another three months driving up and down the coast and living in Woodman's 1974 VW bus, stopping at street fairs and concerts to sell the belts. "We'd get as much as $60 for a belt," Jill says.
The belt profits gave Woodman enough cash to start GoPro. He borrowed another $35,000 and a sewing machine from his mom, and got to work making his first product—a process that took two years, while he lived with his dad in Sausalito and Jill moved to Santa Monica.
By 2004, Woodman had a product to market—not just a wrist strap but a still film camera to attach to it. (He had discovered that the legal and logistical issues around working with a bunch of camera companies were more complicated than just buying and modifying a simple camera.) Nick and Jill moved into a cottage in the redwood forest near Pescadero, where Nick set about working 16-hour days at the computer and the sewing machine, testing new fabrics for the next-generation product, designing marketing materials, writing patent applications, and starting to build up a network of retailers.
"There was fabric everywhere in the house," remembers Jill. "We had to sleep with the camera on, because if there was ever a sore point, that wouldn't be acceptable. He needed to find the perfect tightness and perfect fabric, so it didn't make you sweat, didn't make you sore. It was all-consuming." By this point, Jill was working full time in sales, and Nick's friend Neil Dana was doing sales from his home up the coast. Their first breakthrough moment was at their first trade show, the 2004 Action Sports Retailer show, where they got an order for 100 units from a Japanese distributor.
A bigger breakthrough came two years later, after the company started making a rudimentary digital video camera. Woodman had always harbored a dream of being a racecar driver, and once sales of the digital camera were going well enough, he indulged himself by going to racing school at Infineon Raceway, in Sonoma. The school tried to rent him a mounted camera for $100. Woodman said no, thanks, strapped his GoPro wrist cam to the car's roll bar, and had his eureka moment: The company would make mounts for its cameras so people could point them back at themselves.
The company bought a Lotus Exige sports car, and Woodman started testing all kinds of mounts for vibration and noise and other details. "He absolutely loves that Lotus," says Dana, who is now a director for GoPro's international sales operation. "He'd spend all day going 130 miles per hour around the Infineon track. He was basically the product test engineer, and he would get whatever tools he needed to test in real-world environments. If we had taken VC money early on, it would have been hard to justify a lot of those things. He wanted the freedom to be, like, I'm going to do it this way."
It was an extravagant investment of money and the CEO's time, but it started to pay off in sales to core enthusiasts in markets well beyond surfers. When the company launched its first high-definition video camera, in November 2009, sales hockey-sticked—and the flood of user-generated videos online wasn't far behind. "We sat back as a company and said, 'Oh, my God, people are really freaking out,' " remembers Woodman. "Soon we realized it was accelerating beyond anything we were doing on the marketing or merchandising side, so it was pretty clear that people sharing their own content was driving the awareness of GoPro."
