How to build an interaction field from nothing

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In 2002, Nick Woodman, age twenty-seven, rounded up a few friends and flew to Australia to surf. By then, he had founded two businesses, both of which went belly-up. He decided he needed to rethink and reset his life. Surfing was the best way he knew how to do that.

Woodman loved surfing more than almost anything else. He shared fleeting moments of bliss with his friends on the waves, but once the moment was over, it was gone. “Some of the most intense and memorable moments in cranking surf were just that, memories,” he said later. “Every time one of us would get a sick barrel, we’d say to each other: ‘Agghh! If only we had a camera!’”?

Woodman went home to California and spent the next couple of years working on a camera prototype. He borrowed money from his father, a sewing machine from his mother, and invested about $10,000 of his own money from an earlier venture: reselling shell necklaces he bought at a low price in Bali out of his Volkswagen bus on the California coast.?

In 2004, out of the same VW bus, he launched the first GoPro Camera: a basic 35mm still camera, modified with a leather strap and a rugged housing. The price: $20. The cost to make the product in China: $3.

By 2012, GoPro was selling more than 2 million cameras a year, and Nick Woodman became America’s youngest billionaire. In 2014, the company went public, and Woodman became the highest-paid CEO in the United States.

GoPro has some missteps along the way. To some investors and observers, GoPro is now seen as a disappointment. Since going public, management has made mistakes, botched initiatives, and failed to maintain its financial momentum.?

But GoPro provides an interesting example of how to create an interaction field from scratch.

GoPro is the aspirational, cool, invisible camera that Woodman envisioned. It enables regular people to get the kind of images that only professionals had been able to capture previously—hence the name GoPro, short for “going professional.”

The nucleus

The key to GoPro is sharing. Their nucleus began with surfers, and is now composed of all kinds of adventurers, with features like image stabilization to smooth out jumpy action, time-lapse capability for longer-duration events such as river rafting, voice control for hands-free situations, waterproofing for use in or under water, wind noise reduction for quality sound during cliff jumps, high-altitude skiing, storm surfing, and the like, and it can be attached to almost anything: a surfboard, ski tip, wingsuit, or skydiver’s arm. The nucleus expanded to consume spectators, admirers, groupies, wannabes, and someday-will-bes—the consumers, some eighty million of them.

The ecosystem

In February 2005, a year after GoPro launched its first camera, three former PayPal employees created a service called YouTube. As the camera went from still to video, Youtube was also taking off, and the combination provided a way for extreme athletes to share their feats with people anywhere. This enabled GoPro enthusiasts around the world to show up and show off, exchange knowledge about places and practices, and challenge one another to new heights of achievement.?

In order to have maximum reach and create value for the extreme athletes, GoPro has developed a vibrant ecosystem of media partners. These include YouTube, where GoPro has over 10 million subscribers.

There are close connections and mutual exchanges between GoPro and professional photographers, surfers and other action sports athletes, and brand ambassadors and influencers. Such high velocity in the GoPro interaction field is not a coincidence. GoPro actively manages it.?

The market makers

GoPro shows that it is necessary to recognize the power of market makers and design ways to attract them, so as to accelerate velocity. The challenge is that market makers don’t benefit the same way as participants in a platform business or digital ecosystem. This is particularly so when market makers are new consumers, benefitting only indirectly, while platform participants and ecosystem participants benefit directly. Consumers that are not part of GoPro benefit from the entertainment value of the videos created by participants showing off their latest adventures. That’s a different benefit from the one that GoPro camera users get by watching videos to learn new tricks.?

No other company could reproduce, or match for richness and velocity, GoPro’s interaction field.

Despite its missteps, GoPro has managed to steadily build velocity and maintain its virtuous cycle. The company has struggled with revenue growth and profitability, but over the past few years, there has been a turnaround. Not bad for a company that began out of the back of a van.

Want to learn more?

Check out my book, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society.

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