151: GoPro: Nick Woodman - From selling bead belts in a VW van to creating a billion-dollar empire

Vijay Peduru (0:02)

Hello, friends and Zoomers. This is Vijay Peduru, and welcome to another episode of How They Made Their Millions from ideasu.com.

My goal is to help digital entrepreneurs like you bypass failure and eliminate risk so you can achieve super fast business success. Tony Ford, my good friend, will be narrating the story. Here he is.

Tony Ford (0:30)

These incredible stories, featuring the world's most accomplished millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs, will provide you with powerful game-changing insights and deep heart-rending inspiration to help you eliminate risk and achieve phenomenal success in your business.

This is episode 151, and today's multi-millionaire founder story is about how Nick Woodman went from selling beads in a Volkswagen van to building a multi-billion-dollar empire.

Through his story, we discover the secrets behind GoPro's success and the power of an individual's impact. Join us on a journey that is personal, inspirational, and significant for anyone who dares to imagine.

Nick Woodman started a business, and when everything was going well, disaster stuck. His business began to crumble. But let us go back to the beginnings.

Nick Woodman was born on June 24, 1975, in California. His father, Dean Woodman, was working at the investment bank, Robertson Stevens. His mother, Conception Woodman, was a philanthropist and active charity worker. From an early age, Nick displayed an affinity for adventure and invention. He developed a love for surfing while growing up in Menlo Park, California, a passion that would later shape the trajectory of his career. Encouraged by his parents, he showed an entrepreneurial streak, selling lemonade as a child, and eventually launching a business selling electronic parts in high school. Woodman attended the Menlo School. Later, he attended the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a degree in visual arts. It's during this time that he developed a passion for photography and videography, skills that would prove crucial in his later years. He learned not just the artistic side of this field, but also the technical aspects, understanding how cameras work and how to manipulate them to get the desired output. Despite the rigorous academic schedule, Woodman also found time to pursue his love for surfing. A hobby that gave him a break from his studies. UCSD's proximity to the beach made it easy for him to pursue this hobby. His upbringing, while comfortable, was not without challenges. His parents divorced when he was young, an experience that gave him an early lesson in resilience. All these experiences laid the groundwork for the creation of his future endeavors. The dot-com frenzy was happening, and after his college, he decided to start a startup.

So in 1999, he started Empower All, a dot-com company. The platform aimed to sell electronic goods at significantly reduced prices, no more than a $2 markup from the wholesale price. The concept was quite progressive for its time and tapped into the online retailing trend. However, it encountered challenges due to the slim profit margins and the complexities of e-commerce logistics and operations.

This venture did not last long and ended in failure. Boyed by the initial venture's learning experience and unfazed by the failure, Woodman launched Funbug in 2000 During this time, he met Jill Scully. She worked as an account manager at an advertising agency in San Francisco. They fell in love. Funbug was a website where people could play skill-based games to earn points that could be exchanged for the chance to win money. Woodman then managed to raise $3.9 million in funding for Funbug, indicating his entrepreneurial drive and ability to convince investors even at such an early stage in his career. However, Funbug didn't turn out to be the success Woodman had envisioned. His company fell victim to the dot-com crash in the early 2000s, failing to gain sufficient traction and eventually going out of business. This was a significant setback for Woodman. He completely lost his self-confidence and led him to question his abilities and future as an entrepreneur. He was unsure of what to do. Surfing had always been a passion for Woodman, providing not only physical exercise, but also a mental and emotional escape.

So he decided to take a break and go on a five-month surfing trip to Australia and Indonesia. During this surfing adventures, he began to slowly regain his self-confidence and creativity. It was during this period of relaxation and reflection that the seed for GoPro was planted. As an avid surfer, Woodman wanted to capture his surfing experiences on camera. He tried to look for camera equipment, but it was in vain.

The high-quality action shots he wanted to capture of his own surfing were simply out of reach due to the high cost, unwieldy size, and lack of durability of the cameras available on the market. At that time, capturing professional-level photos and videos of surfing required expensive equipment and often another person to operate the camera. He slowly realized that there was a gap in the market for a durable, affordable, and easy-to-use camera that could capture high-quality action shots from the first-person perspective, particularly for amateur surfers like him. The problem became apparent when he tried to take pictures of his friends surfing. He was frustrated with the picture's quality and the inability to get close-up action shots.