GoPro's best reviews in a decade arrive as founder lends it money
The product press spent June praising a $599 8K camera. The business pages spent it reading a 26% revenue fall and a founder financing his own company.
On 8 July GoPro announced financing from its founder and chief executive, Nicholas Woodman. The man who started the company in 2002 is now lending it his own money.
The disclosure went out as a regulatory announcement. It followed a quarter in which revenue fell 26% and the company withdrew its guidance.
GoPro was worth roughly $10bn at its 2014 peak, on the Gazette editor's figures. It is worth about $200m today, with the shares opening last week at 78 cents.
Two months earlier the same company had shipped the best-reviewed product in its modern history. That gap is the story.
The MISSION 1 Series reached retail worldwide on 28 May, after being announced at the NAB Show in April. Prices start at $599.
The specification is unusual for the price. The cameras are built on a new in-house 50MP one-inch sensor and GP3 processor, shoot 8K and 4K Open Gate, and are waterproof to 20 metres with no housing.
Engadget scored it 8.7 and called it the best action camera video quality on the market. Tom's Guide gave it Editor's Choice.
RedShark News, which covers professional filmmaking rather than gadgets, concluded that GoPro had addressed every criticism levelled at it in recent years and surpassed expectations. That is the professional filmmaking press endorsing a GoPro, which has not happened before.
The company has not released a flagship Hero Black in nearly two years. MISSION 1 is therefore the product statement of its current era.
The next model completes the shift. The MISSION 1 PRO ILS, due this quarter, carries a standard Micro Four Thirds lens mount — the first GoPro built around a real lens mount rather than the twist-on lens mods introduced with the Hero 13.
The context is a business that has been shrinking for a decade. The Karma drone launched in October 2016 and was discontinued by January 2018, the same month GoPro hired JPMorgan to explore a sale, which it denied a month later. Waterproof phones and two Shenzhen rivals took the years after.
On the company's own figures it has roughly 2.2 million paying subscribers, more than 1,500 US patents, and direct-to-consumer sales at 39% of revenue.
The origin story is better known than the balance sheet. Woodman's second startup, a gaming site called Funbug, lost roughly $4m of other people's money in the dot-com crash; he went surfing for five months from January 2002 and strapped a 35mm camera to his wrist because nobody on the beach could get the shot.
The seed round was 600 bead-and-shell belts bought in Bali and sold from a 1974 VW Westfalia up the Californian coast at under $20 each. His parents added about $235,000. The first product, in 2004, was a 35mm film camera on a strap at about $30, waterproof to roughly ten feet.
For a founder reading this, the useful part is the timing. Good reviews are not revenue, and they arrive on the market's schedule rather than the cash flow's — which is why the man who sold belts to start the company is now the one funding it, twenty-four years on.
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