Prior to inventing GoPro Nick Woodman had a full on, VC funded bubble startup in 2000 called "FunBug". (1) (2)

FunBug was "designed to drive consumer traffic and spending to online and offline client businesses" via games & sweepstakes.

His FunBug co-founder, Stephen Baumer, is the current CTO of GoPro.

Woodman credits FunBug's failure as partial inspiration for GoPro in that he wanted to pursue something he was genuinely passionate about.

So what?

Don't give up on the dream, fail fast and fail big, keep your best people close, and build stuff you wish existed.

Good stuff to think about with the new year around the corner.

1 - http://www.dmnews.com/funbugcom-looks-to-infest-the-net/arti...

2 - http://web.archive.org/web/20001017210942/http://www.funbug....

The GoPro is an excellent example of how product design can be hindered by an excessive feature list. The conventional wisdom is that consumers always want more features and removing features or failing to support the features your competition does is a recipe for business suicide. But the truth is that often times some features are not necessary and supporting them can serve as a roadblock toward developing other features or improving the core meta-features (usability, performance, robustness, cost, etc.) GoPro was smart enough to realize that there is a huge market for a camera which is not a jack of all trades, which is optimized to be compact, light, super easy to use, good for action shots or establishment shots and also inexpensive but not necessarily good for still photography, portraits, close-ups, low-light shots, etc. By making those compromises they were able to create a product that excelled in its niche, cemented its brand name, and destroyed the competition.

If you want to learn how to disrupt existing industries and build billion dollar companies from nothing, there are few better examples.

Digital consumer video cameras predated GoPro by more than a decade, and the market was split between electronics giants. You wouldn't bet on a billion dollar company emerging from nowhere in THAT market, would you?

But, apparently, when you build a great brand, find a solid niche and make something consumers WANT to buy - as opposed to need to buy - great things can happen.

Just noting that based on the valuation of the company he is a billionaire, but GoPro is still a privately held business, so he [probably] doesn't have that sort of money on hand or available as short/safe investments.

There are rumors of a GoPro IPO early next spring though[1], so he may have the cash very soon.

[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-17/gopro-widens...

Congratulations to Gopro. They basically created the market of action cams. The dinosaurs Sony, Nikon, Canon are seeing their hegemony erode because of the incredible vision and product design of Gopro.

One interesting thing is that we are seeing a huge amount of "fisheye" videos now because of Gopro. Where it was once an extremely gimmicky kind of image, now it is becoming much more normal to see. And in certain situations (surfing, skiing) it really makes sense.

pg says that founders should be relentlessly resourceful. Well GoPro founder Nick Woodman is definitely resourceful: he raised initial capital ($30k) partially by selling bead-and-shell necklaces! http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/gopros-incredible-small...

Did anyone else take notice of the percentage stake being 8.88%? It's interesting because eight is a lucky number in China where the buyer is located. I haven't noticed such a blatant use of this particular superstition in a western business deal before.

Also, this post currently has a score of 88....

You don't just buy a GoPro, you buy all the accessories too. I bought a Hero 3 Black last month, my first GoPro and found myself spending almost as much on accessories (LCD, batteries, mounts,etc.) as I did on the camera. I would think thats where they make most of their money being that its cheap to manufacture a couple pieces of plastic that sells for $40.

I don't do any sports, I'm not really interested in photography but a GoPro is something I always wanted.

I used it to record the plane landing as I came home from vacation and even use it to record my kids in the backseat while driving. It's a fun camera and congrats to woodman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zb7OBLtoAo

I've used GoPros a few times on road trips, and they are fantastic.

I did a time lapse of 5 days driving through the South-West on one occasion, and new SLC on another, and the picture quality is great, and its time lapse functionality is really amazing. The only problem is that it generates a lot of data... I had to scale down from 1 pic per second to 1 pic every 10s, and I still had about 30GB of data. Anyone considering using the GoPro for time lapse, though, 1s frequency is what you want for a smooth video afterwards, 10s is too coarse and it gets really jumpy.

I've used every GoPro camera made, minus the first film camera they started with. I love them, but I also tend to hate them at times too. I've had to RMA about three of them, and my friends have had issues too. Hopefully they can put their massive popularity and growth (money) back into the product to make it more stable and robust. They've really created an awesome product when it works well. I know that if someone came up with a product that worked flawlessly every time, they could chip away at GoPro's market share.

What prevents a serious camera company like Nikon or Canon from rolling and and owning this market? Is a couple $bn not enough to get them out of bed in the morning?

Does anyone remember flipcam?

Amazing cameras. Super affordable. And, the amount of marketing consumers do for them is insane.

GoPro and RED are definitely shaking things up in the camera business. The japanese companies are just too slow/old school to keep up.

Both also uniquely have excellent proprietary video codecs - RED has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDCODE and GoPro acquired http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineForm

AFAIK GoPro 3 is using Sony sensors, yet Sony can't seem to get it's act together to produce a decent GoPro competitor (ActionCam).

My money long term is on high quality sensors from Sony etc. running on Android, and h.265 for higher resolutions/framerates rivaling offerings from GoPro and RED. Give it 1-2 years.

Just got my Hero3, it's brilliant! :) (and living here in Taiwan, Foxconn's CEO is regarded pretty much as a business hero by the locals)

They never saw the market. They didn't even know it existed.

Woodman is a surfer—the market was right in front of him. He saw a need, and he solved it with a very simple, high quality device tailored to that specific need.

A better argument there has never been for solving real problems with real solutions, rather than trying to essentially trick people into believing they both have a problem and need a solution. The latter is possible, but the former is a far better path to success.

The funny thing is that Canon, in particular, pretty much stumbled into pro/prosumer video and has done very well with it. Whether it causes itself harm by starting to try to deliberately segment its video and stills/prosumer video market remains to be seen.

But, yeah, they weren't aiming for the sports video market and they don't especially have a brand there. Actually, neither Nikon nor Canon have an especial brand in even waterproof cameras. (Canon does have one--only recently updated--Nikon AFAIK does not.) The point about getting out of bed in the morning is probably relevant. You get to a certain size of company and even large niches aren't especially interesting.

They never took it seriously to begin with, and now that its clear that this is a serious market, they're too late. I wouldn't put it past them to invest additionally in GoPro (or some competitor).

Separately - who are GoPro's competitors?

It would require a serious investment to make a camera that would exceed GoPro in terms of quality and reliability, and then even more investment in marketing to get some sort of consumer mindshare. All of this for a market that is something like 5-10% of their point and shoot market. It's the type of gamble most companies aren't willing to make.