Nick Woodman had just blown his second startup. $4 million of his investors' money. Gone.
To clear his head, he went to do something he loved. He went surfing.
While preparing for the trip, an idea popped into his head that led to the creation of one of the most influential action sports brands in history. GoPro.
In today's newsletter, I share Nick Woodman's story of how he built his brand using a wriststrap, sewing machine, a $3 plastic camera from China, and a Post-it note by his bed that read "I am doing this, period.". Plus you will discover:
Storytelling lessons on self-discovery, feelings vs. features, and brand evangelists
Just how big GoPro became
A video of Nick telling his surfing-founder story
Enjoy going pro on this entrepreneurial wave...LG
FOUNDER STORY: NICK WOODMAN, GOPRO
Nick Woodman grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley, in a place with a pretty clear definition of success. Team sports. Good schools. Prestigious careers. Ambition surrounded him from an early age, and for most people around him, the expectation was to stay on that path.
But by his senior year of high school, Nick wanted something different. He wanted to surf.
He quit team sports so he could surf. Every morning at 6 AM, he drove 34 minutes to the coast before school to catch waves at the closest reef. He started his school's first surf club and sold surf t-shirts at football games to fund it. At the same time, he spent hours building remote-control gliders and planes to satisfy his inner geek.
This wasn't him checking out. He was just becoming more interested in pursuing the things he was passionate about than the things he was expected to care about.
THE DEADLINE
That same mindset shaped where he wanted to go to college. He chose UC San Diego because it offered both a strong education and access to the surf culture he loved. The school rejected him at first, so he wrote an earnest appeal letter and convinced them to take him.
When he arrived at UCSD, he was still headed toward a conventional career. On his SAT, he had written "international law and business" as his intended path. He made the Dean's List his freshman year, but things started shifting.
He enrolled in economics and got a D, the first time he had failed academically. After retaking the class and getting a B minus, he realized the issue wasn't ability. He simply had no interest i the subject.
Fortunately, the school had a liberal arts requirement that quietly pulled him back to his passions. He took writing, acting, and visual arts classes and became fascinated with creativity, communication, and audience reaction. Some nights he stayed up until morning building installation art pieces around campus, then stood off to the side the next day just to watch how people responded.
After graduating, the spirit of the Valley was still pulling at him, so he gave himself a deadline.
He would become a successful entrepreneur by age 30.
He thought of himself less as a businessperson and more as an inventor. He didn't really understand entrepreneurship, but he felt drawn in that direction.
FAILURE ROAD
After college, he launched his first startup. EmpowerAll.com. A website designed to sell electronics for no more than a $2 markup above cost. The concept never gained traction and quickly shut down.
Next, Woodman took a job as a tech analyst at a private equity firm, where he learned how investors thought and built relationships that would soon matter. During the height of the dot-com boom, he launched his second company, FunBug, a gaming and marketing platform where users could win cash prizes playing retro video games and parlor games online.
Woodman raised roughly $4 million from investors he had met as an analyst. For a moment, everything looked like it was working.
FunBug depended heavily on advertising revenue, and Nick had little interest in selling ads or running that kind of company long term.
Then the dot-com bubble burst.
FunBug couldn’t raise more capital. The company eventually shut down and sold for nothing. Woodman lost all of his investors’ money, an experience that hit him hard and left him questioning himself.
At 26 years old, he was back at zero.
THE INNER WAVE PROBLEM
After FunBug crashed, Woodman was traumatized. He had four years left on his self-imposed deadline to make it as an entrepreneur by 30, but he had no inspiration and was gun-shy about starting something new.
He said to himself at the time, “Maybe I’m not good at this. Maybe I should do something else.”
But he remembered his "30 year old" deadline and decided to keep going.
After six months, he still wasn't sure what to do next, so he decided to go on a surf trip. He planned a five-month excursion through Australia and Indonesia, not just to surf, but to immerse himself in his passions in hopes of finding his next idea.
Ironically, the idea came before the trip even started.
While preparing, Nick wanted photos of himself and his friends in the water. The problem was there wasn't a way for a surfer to shoot from inside the wave. Existing cameras weren't built for it.
So he rigged a rubber band around a single-use film camera and strapped it to his wrist.
The prototype worked on the first test. A light bulb went off. There must be so many other surfers in the world that want something like this.
Throughout the trip, he kept testing makeshift wrist-strap prototypes, first with his friend Ruben Ducheyne, later with his girlfriend Jill, bringing different versions into the water across Australia and Indonesia.
Along the way, he started realizing the real opportunity wasn't selling a strap. It was selling the complete package: the camera, the waterproof housing, and the mount.
It was the first surf trip he was ever excited to come home from.
THE BISCUIT, THE CAMELBAK, AND THE SEWING MACHINE
While in Bali, Nick had an idea for how they might make some extra money when they got back. Jill had spotted a bead-and-shell belt at a market for $2.50, and he knew he could sell them for a lot more in the States. Before flying home, he went back to the market and said, "We'll take 600 of those, 600 of those, and 600 of those." Price per belt: about $1.90.
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Back in California, Nick and Jill bought a 1971 Volkswagen bus, called it Biscuit, and spent three months living in it, driving up and down the Southern California coast, thinking thru the wrist-camera idea.
They sold the belts and shell jewelry at street fairs and concerts for as much as $60 apiece.
By the end of it, they had cleared $10,000. That was their seed money.
He moved in with his father in Sausalito and founded Woodman Labs.
That fall, Nick raised $265,000 in startup capital. $30,000 from his own savings. $200,000 from his father. $35,000 from his mother, plus her sewing machine.
The first major challenge was building a camera. Nick didn't have the engineering background to build a camera from scratch, so he started looking for an existing device he could license and adapt.
He went to trade shows looking for someone who could help him build what he needed. At one, he found a $3 film camera from a Chinese manufacturer called Hotax.
NIck didn't use CAD software, so he modified the design by hand, drilled holes into plastic models, and FedExed them back and forth to China. Physical prototypes in place of digital files.
No schematics. No engineers. Just a sewing machine, a drill, and a lot of Biscuit road trips.
He worked seven days a week. Twenty hours a day. Even wore a CamelBak strapped to his back so he wouldn't have to get up for a glass of water. Nick was committed.
His sister told him to write a Post-it note: "I am doing this, period." Stick it by his bed. First thing he sees every morning. He did it for months.
"After three months of looking at it and getting myself pumped up to go to work, which was, you know, five feet across the room at my desk, I realized: I am doing this."
GOING PRO
Nick spent the next two years working non-stop. He and Jill moved into a cottage in the redwood forest where Nick worked 16-hour days at the computer and sewing machine. Testing fabrics. Designing marketing materials. Writing patent applications. Building a network of retailers.
"There was fabric everywhere in the house," Jill remembered. "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."
Two years in, the product was ready. It needed a name.
The name came from the goal itself: help surfers capture images of themselves that looked professional. Give amateurs a way to get pro-style action shots. Go Pro.
THE FIRST 100
That fall, at age 29, Nick attended the Action Sports Retailer Convention in San Diego and debuted the GoPro 35mm HERO. The world's first reusable film camera with a waterproof housing and a wrist strap.
The cameras cost $3.05 each from the Chinese manufacturer. They sold for about $30.
A Japanese distributor placed the first order. 100 cameras.
The same day he made the deal, Nick's 1971 VW bus, The Biscuit, was stolen from the parking lot. It was never recovered.
By year's end, GoPro had done $150,000 in sales, mostly to surf shops and specialty sports retailers Nick called daily. His college roommate Neil Dana came on as employee number two. Jill was employee number three.
They worked out of a barn with no floor, no door, five cats, and an allergic salesman. They drove Penske trucks through the night to trade shows, often not sleeping while building the booth and then working the event.
By the end of year two, GoPro had sold approximately $350,000 worth of cameras. Nick expanded beyond surf shops by appearing on QVC three times.
THE ‘DUDE, I MADE THAT’ REVELATION
By the end of their third year, GoPro had gone digital. Revenue hit $800,000. Nick bought himself a race car and enrolled in racing school at Sonoma Raceway.
The school wanted to charge him $100 per half-hour session to rent a camera for the car.
Nick had a better idea. He strapped his own GoPro to the roll bar.
The other drivers gathered around him. Where did you get that?
"Dude," Nick said. "I made that."
He drove his practice session, came back, and watched the footage. The light bulb went off.
GoPro wasn't a wrist camera. It was an everywhere camera. Helmets. Handlebars. Roll bars. Surfboards. Dogs. Ski poles. Everything.
A year later, revenue quadrupled to $3.4 million.
THE PRODUCT SOLD THE PRODUCT
GoPro went into their sixth year with 8 employees. They ended the year with 55.
A year later, IDC called GoPro the fastest-growing camera company in the world. $250 million in revenue. 800,000 cameras sold.
The cameras weren't selling because of ads. There were no ads. Customers shot the marketing themselves. Surfers. Skydivers. Mountain bikers. Race car drivers. By their tenth year, users were uploading more than 6,000 GoPro-tagged videos to YouTube every day.
The product sold the product.
A decade after Nick made his first sale, GoPro went public at a valuation of around $3 billion. Nick captured the entire moment with a GoPro clenched in his mouth.
His father's $200,000 loan was now worth about $280 million. A 140,000% return.
Today, GoPro generates $650 million in annual revenue and runs a subscription business that has crossed $100 million. The brand remains one of the most recognizable action-sports brands in the world.
STORYTELLING LESSONS: PASSION BEFORE PLAN
Nick Woodman's story is a powerful reminder that passion can come first, and the product can follow. He didn't find a market. He followed what he loved, and the idea found him. Below are three lessons every founder can take from how he tells it.
#1. Be Your Own First Customer
Nick didn’t interview surfers. He was the surfer. The wrist camera was built to solve his problem on his trip. Every decision in the early years was tested against one question: would he want this? That’s why the product had soul before it had scale.
ACTION: In your founder story, name the exact version of you that needed what you built. Don’t describe a “target user.” Describe the specific person you were, and the specific problem you couldn’t get out of your head.
#2. Sell the Feeling, Not the Feature
Nick didn’t pitch a waterproof camera. He pitched the ability to capture yourself doing what you love, in first-person, from inside the wave. He modeled the brand on Red Bull, not Canon. People don’t buy stuff, he said. They buy the version of themselves they see when the footage plays back.
ACTION: In your story, skip the spec sheet. Describe the feeling your product gives someone in the moment of truth. What does the customer feel the first time it works? Tell that scene, not the features.
#3. Let Your Customers Tell It for You
GoPro barely had a marketing budget. It didn’t need one. Surfers, skydivers, and skiers did the work — 6,000 user-uploaded videos a day on YouTube alone. Nick built a brand where the customer’s footage was the ad. A snowball of word of mouth that got harder to compete with the more it rolled.
ACTION: Build your story so the audience wants to repeat it. Give them a line they can quote, a scene they can picture, a number they can remember. If your story is good enough, you never have to tell it twice. Other people will tell it for you.
Fun Fact: The Brand that Customers Built
GoPro didn’t just build a camera company. It built one of the most powerful customer-powered marketing engines in modern consumer brands. The company announced in June 2024 that it had surpassed 50 million cameras sold since the HD HERO launched in 2009. By April 2019, its YouTube channel had already crossed 2 billion views, with fans around the world spending more than 7,800 years of cumulative watch time on GoPro content.
The community keeps feeding the engine. GoPro’s annual Million Dollar Challenge has drawn more than 42,000 submissions from 170 countries — a sign of how deeply users want to create with the brand, not just buy from it.
Video to Watch: Letting the Wave Come to You
In “GoPro CEO Nick Woodman’s Formative Moment” on Reddit, Nick shares how surfing became far more than a hobby. It became the thing that pulled him away from the expected path and ultimately led to GoPro. What makes this interview so interesting is seeing how quickly clarity arrived once he stopped forcing business ideas and reconnected with what genuinely excited him. Nick also shares the early prototype tests and why pursuing your real interests often reveals opportunities nobody else can see yet. Watch here:
GoPro CEO Nick Woodman's Formative Moment
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