GoPro’s comeback: Why the action camera brand took two years to clean the decks and reboot
Two years ago, GoPro’s fortunes were looking dire and its drones were dropping from the sky. CEO Nick Woodman says listening to customers and besting cheap rivals will save it.
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The brand synonymous with action cameras was in dire trouble two years ago.
Everyone who wanted a GoPro seemingly had one, upgrades were minor, and the drone no customer asked for had begun falling from the sky due to a battery fault.
The “unicorn” public tech firm valued at more than $US1 billion that single-handedly created a market suddenly stopped turning a profit.
Chief executive Nick Woodman and his executive team fronted the media with grim faces.
He collected an annual salary of just $1.
It’s why Mr Woodman says GoPro now feels like a new, totally refreshed company.
“It feels like a reboot,” he said.
“And I think it’s not always obvious from the outside how much time and energy it really takes to reboot a company. It’s been two years of spring cleaning.”
The period also saw GoPro forced to defend its market share from ruthless rivals — something Woodman says he “takes very personally” — and come to grips with a growing list of smartphone competitors, some of which offer “horrible” wide-angle camera lenses that “there’s no effing way” GoPro would have released, he says.
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GoPro is now preparing to launch products for new types of customers, as well as paying more attention to its army of users.
Woodman, who sat down with News Corp at the Consumer Electronics Show, puts the company’s dark days down to not listening to its customers.
“In the era of (the Karma drone), we were still a very much from-the-gut company where we didn’t do a tonne of consumer research to understand what the consumer really wanted to see in our products,” he said.
“That worked for 12 or 13 years when we were really building the company … but it got to a point where it wasn’t about resolution or speeds and feeds any more. What people really wanted to see from GoPros was help to make footage more usable and a higher number of ‘wow’ shots.”
First, GoPro undertook extensive consumer research, Mr Woodman says, followed by new investments in imaging, software, and ways to digitally remove a video’s bumps and shakes.
“Product development of real technology takes time and during those two years we were also clearing the retail channels of all the product we had and selling out Karma,” he says.
The “reboot” led to the development of Hypersmooth, the stabilisation technology in its new GoPro Max and Hero8 cameras. The devices were credited in a recent financial statement as “setting record unit sales for new cameras”.
But the company is no longer just targeting extreme sports people.
Starting with a light, but soon to be joined by a microphone and extra screen, GoPro is preparing its own line of YouTube-ready additions.
“We know our cameras are great for vlogging but there seems to be this ongoing debate,” he says. “I thought, ‘well, why don’t we just make it obvious for people and create accessories that do a much better job than the hodgepodge of accessories people are sticking on their GoPros already?’”
Mr Woodman said he was confident the accessories, or ‘Mods’ as they call them, and new software would make it harder for rivals to knock off GoPro in the action camera market.
Challengers have included Sony and DJI, both of which released pocket-sized, rugged cameras last year.
GoPro has also created a video-editing app for smartphone users, Mr Woodman says, but he reserved criticism for Apple’s new wide-angle camera, which he said was too distorted to be publicly released.
“We would never launch the product. We’d be like ‘there’s no effing way, the distortion is just horrible!’ It’s a bad look,” he said.
“I can tell you, from image quality review meetings, we would have dropped the feature. Our customers would have ripped us apart.”
And he would know.