The company had also started attending trade shows in all the action-sports, motor-sports, and consumer-electronics markets, and began to give cameras away to attendees. "You'd have people walking all around the show wearing our cameras," says Dana. As word of the giveaways spread, Woodman decided to make a bigger deal of them by gathering friends of the company in front of his booth at 3 p.m. each day of a show.
"Are you fired up?" he would yell to the assembled, borrowing a routine from his high school football coach.
"Yeah!"
"Are you fired up?"
"Yeah!"
It was infectious, and the crowd of corporate buyers milling around soon began to join in the chorus. Woodman would announce that whoever yelled the loudest would get free cameras, and then he would lead everyone in a chant of the company's name: "GoPro! GoPro! GoPro!" The commotion would bring the rest of the show to a halt as everyone wandered over to see what was going on. GoPro landed its accounts with Dick's Sporting Goods and REI that way.
It wasn't long before the company's growing profile led Best Buy to come knocking, in early 2010. GoPro had reached out to the retail giant several times but had never gotten a response. Now, though, people who had learned about GoPro online were going into the stores and asking for the cameras. Best Buy has a specialty-product division that responds to such requests and tests new accounts in anywhere from 10 to 100 stores, so the company offered GoPro a shot that way. Sales outperformed expectations, and by May 2011, just weeks after Cisco decided to shutter its Flip camera business, GoPro had shiny white point-of-purchase displays topped with flat screens in all Best Buy stores. In September, Best Buy gave GoPro its Bravo award for being a top new supplier.
Woodman is standing at a whiteboard in a conference room at GoPro's headquarters, where a slick highlight video of footage shot with the company's latest camera, the HD Hero2, plays on a five-minute loop on a big-screen TV. He draws a circle on the board and labels it with four words connected by counterclockwise arrows: Capture, Creation, Broadcast, and Recognition. Woodman likes to talk about the "democratization of professional content," and these are the elements that make that possible, he says.
Capture is what the cameras enable—shooting pictures and videos. Creation is the editing and production process that turns raw footage into a compelling piece of content. Broadcast is the distribution of that content to an audience. And Recognition is the payoff for content creators—spiritual recognition in the form of views on YouTube or Vimeo, Likes and Shares on Facebook, high-fives from friends, or financial recognition in the form of revenue sharing from YouTube or ad dollars from their personal blogs.
"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," Woodman says. He points to the circle on the whiteboard. "If you take this circle and flip it on its side, it's going to go like this," he says, and starts drawing a spiral that coils upward. "This is our DNA. This is how we grow, and it's all driven by the content." The company's content strategy is a simple positive-feedback loop, in other words, and the theory is that each revolution lifts the overall quality of the content the audience is producing, the size of the audience, and the number of cameras and accessories sold.
To date, GoPro has focused its business mostly on democratizing the first step in the content cycle: capture. Now the company is training its focus on the rest of the cycle—creation, broadcast, and recognition. "We spent a lot of time recently thinking about, What are we really doing here?" Woodman says. "We know that our cameras are arguably the most socially networked consumer devices of our time, so it's clear that we're not just building hardware. You think about the implications of that and where it can go.…We're thinking of new ways to enable our customers to communicate through video and new businesses that spawn from that."
On the creation side, GoPro's media group manager, Bradford Schmidt, persuaded Woodman to acquire a leading digital-video software company, CineForm, in early 2011, right around the time GoPro released a rig that allows users to shoot in 3-D by calibrating two cameras to shoot simultaneously and create layered 3-D files. At the time, there was no such thing as a simple iMovie-like interface for regular consumers to edit 3-D video (primarily because shooting in 3-D was prohibitively expensive until GoPro's device hit the market). CineForm promptly designed a dead-simple user interface, and GoPro's users were a step closer to being amateur James Camerons.
On the broadcast side, GoPro is working out the details of a partnership with YouTube to create a GoPro network. "Within YouTube, there's no standardized metadata system for video files, like there are for JPEGs," explains GoPro's CTO, Stephen Baumer, "so there's no easy way for us to know that a user-generated video was shot with a GoPro, other than if it's been proactively tagged as GoPro by that user. To our delight, customers have been doing that to a huge degree, and it's been a big part of our success"—but no amount of tagging by users allows GoPro to get involved in the business of user-generated videos on YouTube. That will change in the first quarter of this year, when GoPro releases a Wi-Fi plug-in for its cameras that will allow customers to upload video directly from their cameras or via a mobile app. GoPro itself will then be able to tag the videos as they are uploaded, place them on the GoPro YouTube network (which it aims to launch at the same time as the Wi-Fi plug-in), and begin to monetize all that user-generated content.
