18 ms·

GoPro cuts workforce, changes sales strategy

158 points by doppp 7y ago

obilgic 7y ago
I would guess their risk is similar to travel & sports industry's, they are mostly dependent on people being outdoors and recording things, you would probably use your phone or camera to record in doors.
ghaff 7y ago
Obviously the current situation is a big factor but I can't help but wonder to what degree things like GoPros and drones are something of a fad outside of a fairly niche market. I suspect a fair number of people buy GoPros for their association with adventure sports and, after taking video of doing a few runs down some blues at the local ski area, come to the realization that they don't in fact base jump or kayak off waterfalls. As for drones, I've thought about them from time to time. But after taking some video around my house, I'm honestly not sure what I would do with one. They're sort of obnoxious in wilderness settings and are often banned in any case.
- fock 7y ago
  I think they can have their place in vlogging and doing small scale productions as well, where ruggedness>flexibility. though that's obviously a very small market.
- aaron_oxenrider 7y ago
  I literally do kayak off waterfalls and while some in the group will have a GoPro or similar generic camera, they just aren't that good for documenting a trip. Someone bringing their phone in a dry box and getting setup on the side of the river usually provides better footage and a better angle than having the camera on my helmet. I just don't see them that often except for the professionals who post on Instagram all the time.
  - matwood 7y ago
    People told me I was crazy when I said GoPro was going to be killed by cell phones. "No one would risk their iPhone". Except prior gen iPhones are pretty cheap now, cases have become very good, and the abilities far surpass the GoPro. Plus, someone can shoot, edit, and upload all from the same device.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      And if it's your own older iPhone, it's essentially free. Slip a waterproof case on it and you have a pretty rugged camera/GPS/etc.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      Yes, there are people who do point-and-shoot photography with all kinds of equipment that they don't actually need. The iPhone also ̶c̶a̶n̶n̶i̶b̶a̶l̶i̶z̶e̶d̶ absorbed some of the DSLR market from point-and-shoot photographers who don't actually need DLSRs. That doesn't mean that niche markets aren't real. It it not going to make any sense to mount an iPhone to my helmet any time soon.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        There was a period when there were a lot of people buying DSLRs with the kit zoom lens, putting it on automatic, and snapping away. Maybe there was a period when this made some sense because of sensor size but it really doesn't today. I've been doing photography semi-seriously for a long time and have a couple different camera systems (DSLR and mirrorless) and, to be honest, if I'm on a trip where I know I'm mostly just shooting casually I'll often just bring my phone.
      - xapata 7y ago
        > cannibalized Apple doesn't sell DSLR, I think. Not cannibalism.
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      If you scuba dive, there's no option even close to GoPro for the combination of accessories, price, stabilization (the iPhone is still not quite there, and the old ones are totally useless), video quality, and access to the controls under water. It shoots in a flat color profile, which the iPhone still doesn't, so grading color is super easy. Editing and uploading from a phone is nice, but it stays on the boat when you drop in.
- unfunco 7y ago
  The cyclist/dashcam market is pretty big. I see plenty of cyclists with a helmet-mounted camera, to protect themselves against lawsuits and dangerous drivers, and I see plenty of drivers with dashboard-mounted cameras, to protect themselves against lawsuits and dangerous cyclists.
  - dharmab 7y ago
    GoPros make terrible dashmount cameras since they lack important features like automatic saves when a crash occurs. My older GoPros also had really useless implementations of rolling recording (I'm not sure if that's fixed on the current models, but it wouldn't clean up the rolling recording from previous sessions). They are great for bicyclists and motorcyclists who need a camera that will survive a direct impact with the ground.
    - Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
      They're also the best devices for simply filming your ride in any context where your main concern isn't people crashing into you.
      - dharmab 7y ago
        Hey, if you're not dropping your dual sport every once in a while, you're not having enough fun on the trail! :)
    - imglorp 7y ago
      Yes. For car/motorcycle, I also want external power (not all gopros have it) and a setting to start recording on powerup, so it's always on when the vehicle is powered. Plus overwrite mode, save current clip if crash, save if "i like this" button is pushed, etc. I feel like they have all the tech components to offer a dash product with minimal work.
    - driverdan 7y ago
      I have a Hero8 and it works fine for this. Rolling recording with a large memory card means it keeps stuff for a long time.
- mc32 7y ago
  One place they haven’t expanded that I know of which may be a nice potential market is vehicle insurance fraud cams (dash cams). This fraud isn’t big enough in the US, but maybe if they market it the right way or get the OEMs to install at the factory even better. Otherwise the will end up like the Cisco flip cameras... a nice niche that can live on if managed well but not going to grow big and should be private.
- goatherders 7y ago
  Drones have a lot of commercial uses and most of them havent even past their formative stages. From inspecting power lines (which most municipalities mandate every year) to mapping properties and utilities to eventual deliveries of goods, if another consumer drone was never sold I would still be bullish on the drone industry.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  I see drones and gopros following the same adoption arc as DSLRs. The DSLR market size definitely peaked a long time ago but there's enough professionals and enthusiasts who use them that it's a healthy market that's not going anywhere and they are going to be a tool in the toolbox of anyone who creates visual media for the foreseeable future. Drones and gopros seem to fit the same mold because they enable people who want to create visual media (and other people who need the equivalent capability) to do things that you formerly needed a helicopter to do. I don't see those people giving up that capability anytime soon so while the market may shrink, especially for consumer oriented devices, it will be around for the foreseeable future.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  I remember going snowboarding with a go pro. We were so excited to see the footage. The guy in the Chalet even offered to put it on the big screen so everyone could see. What followed was about 30 minutes of embarrassing slow and inordinately dull snowboarding. The jumps that seemed high were barely off the ground. The speed that seemed potentially deadly was a snails pace. Recording yourself doing sport only makes sense if you are really good!
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    Making appealing video requires thought, knowledge of lighting and how cameras work, and creativity. "Just strap on a camera and go" is definitely not the way to do it, people make amazing videos with mediocre skill in the thing they're doing. It's like any other complex tool, garbage in garbage out.
    - Thriptic 7y ago
      I think it depends on what you are doing. If you are doing something intense enough, it works. Check out on the roofs, the guys who break into sky scraper construction sites and scale the buildings. Go Pros work perfectly for their use case: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gLDYtH1RH-U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gLDYtH1RH-U
      - woobar 7y ago
        I think a 5 minutes clip of a climb that obviously took several hours proves GP's point. No one would watch raw garbage captured by their GoPros, you need heavy editing and a catchy soundtrack.
        jonplackett 7y ago
        If daft punk had been staying in the chalet with us and offered to put their next unreleased album up next to our snowboard footage, I still don’t think anyone would have stayed to watch it.
    - 7y ago
- bluetomcat 7y ago
  The main buyers of such products are bored people "without a life" and with a sizeable discretionary income. It's a way to relieve boredom in the short term - capture a few videos, spend a few hours editing them, share them, get bored again and forget the thing in some drawer. Call it unsustainable techno consumerism if you like.
- komali2 7y ago
  Youtubers and other content creators use it, and buy up a lot of the ancillaries equipment (microphone, lights etc). I've bumped tons of fellow travelers that use them just for raw convenience when making travel videos. I.e. I don't just use it that one time a year I snowboard, it also comes with me to the beach, when I try kayaking, trying to get cool sakura shots, etc. Then there's bicyclists and motorcyclists (again, me) that use it as a "dash cam." Thing is I'm all of the above... and I'll probably never buy another gopro. I have a gopro. It works extremely well. Best in class. The only time I'll buy another is if I lose this one or it breaks. Sometimes I buy batteries and the like but those are maybe 30, 40 bucks. And I have no interest in their moonshot cloud whatever bullshit. So I'm not sure how businesses like that continue to make money.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Every year you get millions of new customers who start adventuring for the first time. Things also get lost or break etc so it seems to be a viable long term business. This is common for durable goods. You get a spike of initial sales and steady stream after that, the difference is microwaves spiked decades ago and GoPros’s peaked more recently.
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    This is a good point, and the new accessories that make GoPro 8 so much better for content creators just landed at the same time as the coronavirus, so that's unfortunate timing from a business standpoint.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I bought a DJI spark last year and had a lot of fun for a few months flying it in my backyard. it got stale kinda fast though. it basically flies itself, so just flying around in a field gets boring. on the other hand, at $400, it was a little too expensive for me to feel comfortable trying any daring shots with it. I made some cool aerial panoramas, but the camera isn't really good enough to make anything worth sharing. if you want to get decent pictures, you have to spring for one of the $1200 models, which are still only about as good as a high-end smartphone camera. I did find one killer use-case for it though: cleaning gutters. the house I was living in at the time was designed in a way that made cleaning gutters very dangerous. I used the drone to see which parts actually needed cleaning, then my roommate would clear them using a long pole with a hook while looking at the camera feed. awkward, but much safer.
  - tibbydudeza 7y ago
    We are on a 4 week country wide Covid-19 lockdown stay @ home and as part of the regulations they banned all alcohol sales. Some entrepreneurial person now does drone deliveries of booze within a 5km radius of his home.
    - RankingMember 7y ago
      That's gotta be a pretty powerful drone- booze isn't light!
      - leetcrew 7y ago
        involves a lot of trust, too. I imagine the customer has to detach the shipment by hand. a drone capable of delivering a fifth of liquor must be worth at least $1-2k. considering the whole operation is likely illegal for several reasons, I doubt the owner would have much recourse if someone just stole it.
        s1t5 7y ago
        But then no more fly-in alcohol. The booze-drone is like a 21st century golden-egg goose.
- deleted 7y ago
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- izacus 7y ago
  > Obviously the current situation is a big factor but I can't help but wonder to what degree things like GoPros and drones are something of a fad outside of a fairly niche market. I see these comments a lot here but... what exactly is wrong with companies that cater to highly specialized niche markets? E.g. your Hegels, Ferraris, Tag Heuers, etc.? Companies that specialize to fit some people exactly as opposed to mass appeal companies that make products that try to appeal to everyone but then slightly suck for everyone as well? Can someone explain this viewpoint?
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    Absolutely nothing wrong with it, IMHO. But our business culture in the United States looks down on these sorts of companies. Growth is king. But I fully agree with you. It doesn't have to be this way, and it's (IMHO) incredibly harmful.
  - sarora27 7y ago
    I dont think there's anything wrong with companies that cater to highly specialized niche markets. I think the reason people knock on GoPro is because they raised VC money and went to market. By taking on VC, they signaled (imo) that there was a huge market opportunity ($XXB) for them beyond a highly specialized niche market.
  - ThrowAway83774 7y ago
    These Americans you witness see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires looking for moonshots to catch their big break which will never come.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Many of the companies that are in focus here have simply grown too big to be sustainable in the niche they cater for, either through aggressive funding or by riding a finite hype wave (e.g. Gopro, no idea if they also suffer from overfunding)
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Absolutely nothing. But GoPro obviously had much larger ambitions than being an action camera for people who jump off cliffs even though they used that tie-in to try to pull is a larger audience. Climbing equipment is relatively niche as well. But manufacturers don't really try to pull in a broader audience. (Though climbing gyms do, in part, aim for casual climbers.)
- xemdetia 7y ago
  The drones have always felt like a quixotic adventure for GoPro that seemed like a weird distraction for other product improvements. I don't even think that GoPro should be classified as part of the adventure usage category anymore, as most of the GoPro usage I have seen has more to do with the fact that it's a compact camera that's relatively durable or sacrificial depending on your application. What I've been seeing over the last few years is that GoPro cameras are less handy than a smartphones whose recording capabilities just keep enhancing from the last few generations of improvements seemingly primarily focused on that, especially as more people have been streaming video directly to viewers from their phone compared to a recording, edit, and then upload workflow. A few years ago I felt like I saw GoPro's being used for most of the content in a particular edited video but nowadays I see them used for one or two shots where the camera was more at risk. If anything I just see them getting pushed from mass appeal to a niche compact camera market because there's just better competition in this space and the middle to high end of the GoPro line competes with some of the entry level/second hand Canon and Nikon cameras for recording video and unless you have those space and durability requirements in the niche where GoPro shines.
- GuardianCaveman 7y ago
  My two cents: I own one and bring it to family gatherings to record family. It’s small and non threatening and people don’t react defensively the same way they do with iPhones. I also take iPhone pictures and video but I like the video I get from the GoPro also. I’ve also carried it with me when documenting something like going for a walk in my daily spot and going to mundane places. I usually do this before I move to a new place to capture those simple things I want to remember about the old one. Again no one reacts the same way as if you’re walking towards them holding a phone in the record position and I like the video I get from it. But I also used it on a hiking trip to big bend and it was nice to capture the hike passively and enjoy it without feeling the need to constantly stop and take pictures.
- hrktb 7y ago
  On of the appeal of a GoPro is the simplicity and ruggedness. When planning to go on vacation for instance, a GoPro is ideal for kids to shoot whatever they want without having to borrow parent's phone/camera or some expensive point and shoot. Same for people playing Pokemon GO, a super small side camera that is completely point and shoot, can take some rough handling and is mostly weather proof is ideal.
- cossatot 7y ago
  Another component to the disappointment with GoPros is that the camera perspective and flattening reduces the dramatic impact of what may have in fact been a challenging endeavor. I've seen footage of hard mountain bike trails and class V kayak runs that I have done, and also seen non-first-person footage of the same drops, and it's pretty impressive how much the GoPro footage makes a 25 foot waterfall seem inconsequential relative to a 3rd person perspective (i.e. someone on the bank). I wonder if having a stereoscopic camera could improve this situation. I pay no attention to VR or whatever so I don't know if this is the venue in which stereoscopic/3D movies would be viewed but it could be cool. Harder to share I suppose, and if your goal is to impress others on social media then it probably wouldn't work unless people start bringing those helmets to look at their phones while they poop.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    Watching first person action sports in VR doesn't work unfortunately, it's extremely nauseating.
- amerkhalid 7y ago
  This is probably not what GoPro execs had in mind but I find GoPro is perfect camera for my 2 years old. I know there are cheaper rugged water-proof cameras that would work just as well for kids but I already got GoPro. I bought GoPro thinking that I'll use it for my "adventures", however, it is mostly unused at home. So we just let our son play with it. However, on travels, we really love having GoPro with us as it is small enough, and easier to use than phones. With phones, if we are out all day, we are a bit worried about battery life. We also have a bigger camera, X100F, but that is a bit too big to carry all the time on a vacation. So we leave it in the hotel unless we plan to do a photography. So most of our vacation photos and videos are evenly split between GoPro and phone cameras.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    How does he play with it?
    - amerkhalid 7y ago
      Sometimes he pretends like he is taking photos or making videos. He also chases our dog as if he is recording him. He probably learned that from us as that's how we use it. Sometimes, he may use camera as a toy car or a block. The button is too hard for him to push but that's where voice commands come in. I can say "GoPro take a photo" while he is holding it. We have captured some fun shots like this.
      - p1esk 7y ago
        Ah ok, that's what I was expecting. I'd be surprised if a 2yo could consciously take photos.
        FireBeyond 7y ago
        I remember arguing with someone here a few years ago talking about "intuitive" interfaces and arguing that his 3-6 month old "understood the iPad". No.
- mgolawala 7y ago
  This is exactly their strategy, and it works to some extent. Their aspirational marketing works quite well. The people acquiring their product are aspiring to be outdoorsy, fit, and adventurous. I bought a GoPro several years back as well, after using it on one of my camping trips and a trip to a water park with the kids, I realized I don't really have the kind of adventurous, outdoorsy life I was aspiring to. The GoPro sits in a drawer. You actually have to be pursuing activities that you think are worth capturing on a GoPro or a drone, and then you have to have an interest in capturing/editing those pursuits. Longer term, there is a legitimate niche for their products. It is the intersection of people interested (personally or professionally) in photography/videography who have adventurous/outdoorsy pursuits and hobbies. Whether that niche is large enough to support a company of their size (and their competitors) is still an open question.
  - vidanay 7y ago
    Kind of like those annoying watch commercials showing everyone free climbing when in reality your adventure watch is only going to be telling you how late the 4:18 BART is.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    Seems like TV producers (and of course YouTubers) also use them, e.g. to mount them on and in a car for a car review video shoot.
  - KeepTalking 7y ago
    For me, the aspiration to own a GoPro was to capture footage in wet / water conditions. With an iP68 rating for the iPhone to makes sense for light use-cases, an iPhone is sufficient for me. 1. I think the underlying problem has been the lack of innovation from GoPro. I find that while the number of cameras in our daily life has increased, the use-case for something like a GoPro is marginal at best. Apple and other vendors have done an excellent job of improving camera technology on the iphone11 that today, I no longer carry a GoPro or even an SLR camera on holidays. 2. Another amazing shenanigan from GoPro was their accessories business. When I got my only go-pro in 2014, it required me to spend another $200-300 on some really basic accessories like an LCD screen. It just felt like the company added barriers that stopped you from actually using the product. 2a. Minor nitpick - Their packaging in 2015 was a piece of work. It took me forever to get it unpacked and even get hold of the device. 3. Mgmt focus - I live in San Mateo and the stink of constant GoPro layoffs made it an undesirable company to even consider working for. The people I knew that worked there all quickly bailed and went to work for Google or Apple. It also didn't help that I only remembered about my GoPro when I saw Mr Woodman show-up on Shark-Tank. I just felt he didn't focus on a struggling company and wanted to find other things to do.
- hugey010 7y ago
  GoPros are a fad or niche market, only because they market it that way. Even if you're not doing anything "extreme" it's really nice to have a running video of even the most mundane canoeing trip just to get still pictures and laugh at those people who kept flipping their canoe. It's the least interrupting way to record an event. I'm surprised GoPro hasn't formed partnerships for success in other markets. High school sports, and even younger, are often filming competitions and performing automated or manual analysis to rank players and provide feedback. Schools and Boosters are paying crazy amounts of money for these services, but it could be so much better aggregating videos of ~10 mounted GoPros together to get "on the field" perspectives. Then there's the whole professional sports media market. People LOVE hearing audio from NFL quarterbacks, imagine a first person view.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    > Then there's the whole professional sports media market. GoPro have made some efforts in that area - including employees working on special products for the professional broadcast market, "a partnership to enable GoPro HERO4 cameras with a professional grade, live, HD wireless broadcast solution" [1] and a partnership with the NHL [2] with the players wearing helmet cams. They laid off the people working on it internally and it's gone from their product pages (although you can still buy a kit... for $7,500 [3]) so I'm guessing they didn't find the market as lucrative as they'd hoped. [1] https://gopro.com/en/us/news/gopro-partners-with-vislink-for-live-wireless-hd-broadcast https://gopro.com/en/us/news/gopro-partners-with-vislink-for... [2] https://gopro.com/en/lu/news/gopro-and-nhl-new-partnership-will-change-the-way-you-watch-hockey https://gopro.com/en/lu/news/gopro-and-nhl-new-partnership-w... [3] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1198311-REG/vislink_9014867_herocast_wireless_transmitter_kit.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1198311-REG/vislink_9...
- Krasnol 7y ago
  I'd buy one to do Mapillary streetview "films" because the ones I did with my phone are not really good and the area I live in is not very covered. But it's too expansive for such a hobby and I'd feel stupid with it on my ski helmet ;)
- pilom 7y ago
  As a guy who kayaks off waterfalls and stopped using his GoPro a few years ago, most waterfall drops don't look that cool from a helmet view either.
  - wil421 7y ago
    Kayak fishing is the same. Either you need 3-5 cameras covering all angles or it’s not very dramatic. Most of the time it’s videos of me fumbling with my gear until my battery runs out. When I did some white water kayaking and rafting my camera would have water spots or a terrible angle.
- ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
  > a fad outside of a fairly niche market Sometimes I feel like for HN everything that is not in the bubble is a fad. Go Pro has a market, and that's why it's a company of this size that has released many instance of their product.
  - jerf 7y ago
    "niche" and "fad" are two very different things. They clearly have a niche. The "fad" part, only time can tell. Evidence is currently mixed.
- myself248 7y ago
  I bought a GoPro after sticking my old cellphone inside a running CNC machine to get video of the milling process. It was all well and good until the cutter started heating up and we decided we needed to turn on flood coolant after all. Phone's not waterproof, so that was the end of that. When you start pondering the optical clarity of Tupperware, perhaps it's time to just buy a proper camera. So I did. Since then, it's been stuck to CNC machines, laser cutters, car bumpers, car wheelwells, car suspensions, toy cars, Power Wheels cars, drones, rockets, and kites. It's been nestled into the sand between the launcher tubes of a fireworks show. It's produced documentation of countless projects, produced a record of machine assembly in case of warranty problems, and taken timelapses of packing and moving several houses and offices. I've used the wifi viewfinder as a "periscope" to keep an eye on the birthday boy's arrival for a surprise party. I'm about to buy my fourth battery for it, because those do wear out. People who buy a camera and let it gather dust lack imagination.
- Syntonicles 7y ago
  As a full-time skydiver & coach, I would say that's exactly who needs a GoPro the most. When we jump everybody wears at least one camera and often someone jumps outside to get a better angle. The video is not taken to capture an epic moment, it's to review and improve. After every jump the group breaks down every part of the skydive and tries to take a lesson from it. I have to wade through thousands of videos before I find something interesting enough to post online, but each of those videos has value. The worse the performance the higher the value.
mft_ 7y ago
GoPro has long baffled me as a company. 1. On the face of it, their main products in 2020 (i.e. action cameras) are barely innovative, and seem to have nothing to attract and lock customers in other than brand recognition built on expensive marketing campaigns. Essentially, they're selling commodity equipment at a large mark-up. Why haven't they been totally displaced by a manufacturer with a cheaper clone, also offering a good enough brand and ecosystem to compete? 2. Where they have innovated, they've hugely missed the target. In particular, their drone release was just an awful, awful misjudgement. Not just because it fell out of the sky. Not just because it came out at the same time as a superior competitor from DJI. But because it totally missed that GoPro is/was seen as a provider of action cameras - things that can be started and then forgotten about as they record your activities. They released a fairly generic drone, which required constant operator interaction. Had they released a drone with a tether, which could be started and then forgotten about as you ride your MTB, or your snowboard, they'd have likely had a hit, aligned with their brand identity (assuming it didn't drop out of the sky).
- cm2012 7y ago
  See: Beats by Dr Dre for a comparable company. Brands matter.
  - some_random 7y ago
    I don't think fashion headphones meant to be worn frequently compare well with an action camera that has limited branding on it which is meant to be used when you're already doing something cool
    - cm2012 7y ago
      GoPro invests an insane amount into branding. https://www.enrichmybrand.com/blog/branding-at-its-finestcult-brand-gopro https://www.enrichmybrand.com/blog/branding-at-its-finestcul...
      - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
kayoone 7y ago
> GoPro Inc. said it will cut more than 200 jobs > The operational changes, staff reductions of more than 20% and cuts to office space will save $100 million in 2020 That must be a very high average salary considering the office space is probably the cheaper part of that.
- serverQuestion 7y ago
  that line makes it sound they just killed off an expensive office somewhere + the people working there
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  if they can just cut off office space like that they must be renting flex space ... which is expensive. but yeah, 200 * 300,000 still only comes to $60MM.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  Or "the operational changes" will save a fair chunk - but those aren't really gone into (other than "will direct serve consumers", I suppose.)
akssri 7y ago
I heard that GoPro hasn't been doing well in the past couple years [1]. Did they ever transition out of their "badge re-engineering" approach to products ? [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qa1tGmi5g4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qa1tGmi5g4
for_i_in_range 7y ago
> ‘We have a clear opportunity to super-serve consumers’... Chief Executive Officer Nick Woodman said in the statement. Anyone fluent in CEO-Speak able to translate?
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  I'm not 100% sure, but in this context I think he means direct to consumer sales. Woodman might be trying to pitch it as a way to keep customers happy, but I have a hard time believing that anyone had an issue buying a GoPro at BestBuy or REI. It's pretty clear that this is just a way for GoPro to make bigger profits by taking profits from the full retail price, rather than only taking profits from the wholesale price. He might also be alluding to their subscription services, which make money for GoPro after a cameara sale, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. And honestly, they are doomed if they rely on their subscription services at all, because they suck. Anyone that wants to edit and share their videos is better served by other tools, and I don't think they make much money from subscriptions.
- wmeredith 7y ago
  "My head has been stuck up our company monoculture so long that I can no longer communicate effectively with normal people outside their group of yes-men." Super-serve? Come ON, man.
code4tee 7y ago
GoPro has been struggling for a while but like a lot of companies they will likely use the present situation as cover to make some changes. It’s a lot easier for executives to say “there was this terrible Coronavirus thing that forced us to downsize” vs “the business strategy I was in charge of wasn’t performing well and we have to downsize.” That’s happening a lot at the moment.
- esel2k 7y ago
  This! Exactly this was done already in 2008 crisis and it is just so weak and simple for management to blame anything else than themselves. For me I think we moved toward of a more connected society in feedback we give on companies. A company that would let me go with such a ridiculous argument I would not join or give a very bad review online... and more and more I will join companies that treat their employees good. After corona - people will jump and consider companies that treated their employees right in crisis time...
heyflyguy 7y ago
I would love insider knowledge on their innovation tract. I'm sure they are licking wounds after the karma fiasco but it's like they went back to vanilla action cams, and that market is seeming nascent. What's happening?
mgh2 7y ago
Here is a non-paywalled link: https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/20/04/15814828/gopro-to-lay-off-20-of-employees-and-shift-to-direct-sales-strategy https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/20/04/15814828/gopro-...
kube-system 7y ago
They are so close to being a premium product but they're having trouble getting there. I prefer to drop premium dollars on equipment that "just works" but my experience with their products is that every one of them has some kind of annoying issue. They need to figure out what kind of company they are. Are they producing cheap consumer toys, or are they making reliable prosumer equipment?
- mhh__ 7y ago
  I feel like their days are somewhat numbered anyway. At least as a hardware company - Chinese GoPro style cameras are getting really good now, as in you can get an action camera that is "good enough" (TM) for anything you are going to shoot for $100 at most these days. There's definitely a market for overpriced cameras that just work but they might have to widen their horizons to grow.
- ratfaced-guy 7y ago
  Exactly, I was expecting an Apple-like experience so I was very disappointed in that sense. The hardware was great (for me at least), but the UX was just too annoying that it soured the overall experience. I wish now that Apple would build an action camera.
andreyk 7y ago
I'm an owner of a GoPro and also of a nice digital camera (Sony Alpha 6000) and have done a decent deal of photography, so maybe I can comment on the appeal of GoPro: the interface and software on their device is excellent (far better than my Sony), and their app to interact with the camera is also excellent (far better than the barely functional one for my Sony), the form factor and built in smoothing makes it great for documenting outdoors stuff, AND their app has an excellent do-most-of-the-work for you video editor. For doing videos of hikes, vacations, etc (see eg this example https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E7a5-yH01JCxJcf1-35YiRAcOHBS_lDC https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E7a5-yH01JCxJcf1-35YiRAcOH...) it's really a game changer, so I quite like it. But of course it's only really useful for people who like making videos in the first place.
ww520 7y ago
A "personal dashcam" or bodycam product direction would be good for GoPro or some other companies.
jonahhorowitz 7y ago
There's a lot of negative comments here, so let me add my positive experience. I love my GoPro. I started with a "Hero3+" and have upgraded twice. I now have a Hero7 that I use a few times a week. I took five different GoPros on a rafting trip down the grand canyon and came out with some great footage. The advantage of GoPros from the beginning is that they're a small durable camera that takes good footage. With the image stabilization that they have now, you can get smooth footage even when you're mountain biking down a rough trail. The downsides are: they take a while to get used to using (although the newer ones have a much better interface), and you have to spend time editing the videos before sharing them. Also, it turns out a lot of what we do is pretty boring. As to why no other camera manufacturer has taken the market from GoPro, it turns out it's hard to build a compact camera that's durable and produces good footage. The $150 knockoffs just don't have the same quality or durability. I still see a bunch of them on the slopes though (particularly on kids, which makes sense). Still, it's a limited market, and phones have gotten better (and waterproof), so people don't feel like they need a dedicated camera, so it's going to suffer the same that most of the camera industry does.
- car 7y ago
  Second that. I've taken excellent videos freediving with a GoPro HERO7. It is color corrected for underwater lighting and waterproof down to 10 meters/33 feet.
davio 7y ago
They should do a quick pivot to high-end webcams.
cyberpanther 7y ago
They've always made it hard to use their devices as webcams. If they had that feature, they would be selling like gangbusters now. Wyze did a firmware update and bam, you have a webcam. It hurts you in the long term to always upsell and partition your features into different levels. That complexity in your business, translates into your code and processes and makes it harder to pivot.
knolan 7y ago
I was gifted a Hero 2018 when I left my last job. I use it for recording my cycle commute because I guess my death at the hands of a homicidal taxi driver should at least be recorded. It comes with a basic set of features. 1080p video and some simple time lapse options. Pretty barebones. Anyway it occasionally freezes when disconnected from the charger so I went and checked if there was a firmware update and it turns out that the Hero 2018 is the previous year's high end Hero 5 Black crippled by software. Someone put together a tool to load that camera's firmware onto it and now I have a 4K camera with GPS, a wide range of time-lapse and high frame rate features, stabilisation, wind noise reduction... https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero-is-actually-a-gopro-hero5 https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero-is-...
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  I won't ever buy a gopro if this is true. Why the hell would they do this?
  - somebodythere 7y ago
    Market segmentation? The same way Tesla limits its car battery capacity in software.
    - sergiotapia 7y ago
      Can you hack your battery to use its full capacity?
      - bdamm 7y ago
        It is unclear if anyone has broken through the crypto on the battery pack firmware (at least for newer cars, Model 3 and Model Y). Similar for the motor controller firmware.
    - throwaway1777 7y ago
      Was gonna give the same example. It’s common industry practice sadly. Tesla and gopro are hardly the only two offenders. It used to be a common tactic among cpu manufacturers also.
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/mrDnY https://archive.md/mrDnY
StillBored 7y ago
Back when gopro first introduced 4k video on their cameras, it was an impressive feat for the price compared with the many thousand+ dollar cameras available at the time. Most midrange+ phones these days can do 4k video. Sure they don't have a wide angle lense, but that is something like a $30 purchase on your favorite eretailer. The problem is that gopro is still selling the same midrange sony sensors, and expecting a premium. If they were doing 8k@60 FPS, then they would have something that could command the price premium vs the dozens of competitors that have discovered sony sensor+cheap SOC+battery = action cam. Or for that matter, they could move into the mirrorless camera market, but they are only releasing gimicky UI upgrades and drones to attach your camera while wondering why a lot of people are just buying cellphone mounts for their bikes/etc. So why exactly are the gopro's so darn expensive given its just using an off the shelf Sony IMX277 sensor (https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/gopro-hero7-teardown https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/gopro-hero7-teardown) and a super low-end SOC?
- ProAm 7y ago
  This is a great comment if you switch out GoPro for Apple. Every market has it's people.
russellbeattie 7y ago
I bought a GoPro Hero 8 a month ago, and for what it is, it works well enough. But I've been really disappointed in GoPro's attitude towards openness. They've locked down the USB port, WiFi and the OS pretty much completely. I think this is the type of company that would really benefit from an excited and engaged hacker community. The GoPro could be a camera-centric IoT device, used for a ton of things from webcams to 3D imaging to a bunch more. But there's no support at all for developers. It seems like they were going in that direction early on, then changed their strategy and killed their SDK and dev program. It's too bad. This will definitely be my last GoPro as a result.
- Asuchug4 7y ago
  Before buying Hero 7, I watched a lot of reviews and tried to decide between older but still powerful Sony action camera. The quality was great, but sometimes GoPro decided to freeze. It is very annoying to find that your camera stopped recording 20 minutes ago. I thought that my model might be just a bit faulty. Then comes the GoPro 8, and the improvement noted by few tech reviewers was that it no longer freezes. Totally destroyed any trust in reviewers I had left. No one told a thing about freezes in Hero 7.
- mackrevinack 7y ago
  car dash cam is something I would like to do with my gopro when I'm not using it
dvcrn 7y ago
GoPro is lacking innovation, each camera sounds identical to the previous one with only very small changes. They were still the market leader in action cams so for a while it was the only real viable option. Nowadays there are a lot more companies that innovate in this field. DJI released the Osmo Action with dual screen and fantastic stabilization, Xoami has the Mi Action Camera for cheap, and just recently Insta360 released the modular "One R" that allows to quickly swap the camera module for 360, 1" or 4k action. I was in the market for a action cam and went for the Insta360. GoPro created the market but nowadays I just don't see a reason to get a GoPro when there are arguably better options with more innovation out there.
- mackrevinack 7y ago
  well in fairness the hyperlapse feature they released a few years back was fairly innovative. and the stablisation was/is better than your find in some phones. but yea apart from that, most models seem pretty much the same to me
justlexi93 7y ago
It is so sad to see that even big companies cut their workforce. I am so glad that the company(4wheelonline) that I am associated with did not terminate any employees.

158 points by doppp 7y ago

I would guess their risk is similar to travel & sports industry's, they are mostly dependent on people being outdoors and recording things, you would probably use your phone or camera to record in doors.

ghaff 7y ago

Obviously the current situation is a big factor but I can't help but wonder to what degree things like GoPros and drones are something of a fad outside of a fairly niche market. I suspect a fair number of people buy GoPros for their association with adventure sports and, after taking video of doing a few runs down some blues at the local ski area, come to the realization that they don't in fact base jump or kayak off waterfalls. As for drones, I've thought about them from time to time. But after taking some video around my house, I'm honestly not sure what I would do with one. They're sort of obnoxious in wilderness settings and are often banned in any case.

fock 7y ago
I think they can have their place in vlogging and doing small scale productions as well, where ruggedness>flexibility. though that's obviously a very small market.
aaron_oxenrider 7y ago
I literally do kayak off waterfalls and while some in the group will have a GoPro or similar generic camera, they just aren't that good for documenting a trip. Someone bringing their phone in a dry box and getting setup on the side of the river usually provides better footage and a better angle than having the camera on my helmet. I just don't see them that often except for the professionals who post on Instagram all the time.
- matwood 7y ago
  People told me I was crazy when I said GoPro was going to be killed by cell phones. "No one would risk their iPhone". Except prior gen iPhones are pretty cheap now, cases have become very good, and the abilities far surpass the GoPro. Plus, someone can shoot, edit, and upload all from the same device.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    And if it's your own older iPhone, it's essentially free. Slip a waterproof case on it and you have a pretty rugged camera/GPS/etc.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    Yes, there are people who do point-and-shoot photography with all kinds of equipment that they don't actually need. The iPhone also ̶c̶a̶n̶n̶i̶b̶a̶l̶i̶z̶e̶d̶ absorbed some of the DSLR market from point-and-shoot photographers who don't actually need DLSRs. That doesn't mean that niche markets aren't real. It it not going to make any sense to mount an iPhone to my helmet any time soon.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      There was a period when there were a lot of people buying DSLRs with the kit zoom lens, putting it on automatic, and snapping away. Maybe there was a period when this made some sense because of sensor size but it really doesn't today. I've been doing photography semi-seriously for a long time and have a couple different camera systems (DSLR and mirrorless) and, to be honest, if I'm on a trip where I know I'm mostly just shooting casually I'll often just bring my phone.
    - xapata 7y ago
      > cannibalized Apple doesn't sell DSLR, I think. Not cannibalism.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    If you scuba dive, there's no option even close to GoPro for the combination of accessories, price, stabilization (the iPhone is still not quite there, and the old ones are totally useless), video quality, and access to the controls under water. It shoots in a flat color profile, which the iPhone still doesn't, so grading color is super easy. Editing and uploading from a phone is nice, but it stays on the boat when you drop in.
unfunco 7y ago
The cyclist/dashcam market is pretty big. I see plenty of cyclists with a helmet-mounted camera, to protect themselves against lawsuits and dangerous drivers, and I see plenty of drivers with dashboard-mounted cameras, to protect themselves against lawsuits and dangerous cyclists.
- dharmab 7y ago
  GoPros make terrible dashmount cameras since they lack important features like automatic saves when a crash occurs. My older GoPros also had really useless implementations of rolling recording (I'm not sure if that's fixed on the current models, but it wouldn't clean up the rolling recording from previous sessions). They are great for bicyclists and motorcyclists who need a camera that will survive a direct impact with the ground.
  - Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    They're also the best devices for simply filming your ride in any context where your main concern isn't people crashing into you.
    - dharmab 7y ago
      Hey, if you're not dropping your dual sport every once in a while, you're not having enough fun on the trail! :)
  - imglorp 7y ago
    Yes. For car/motorcycle, I also want external power (not all gopros have it) and a setting to start recording on powerup, so it's always on when the vehicle is powered. Plus overwrite mode, save current clip if crash, save if "i like this" button is pushed, etc. I feel like they have all the tech components to offer a dash product with minimal work.
  - driverdan 7y ago
    I have a Hero8 and it works fine for this. Rolling recording with a large memory card means it keeps stuff for a long time.
mc32 7y ago
One place they haven’t expanded that I know of which may be a nice potential market is vehicle insurance fraud cams (dash cams). This fraud isn’t big enough in the US, but maybe if they market it the right way or get the OEMs to install at the factory even better. Otherwise the will end up like the Cisco flip cameras... a nice niche that can live on if managed well but not going to grow big and should be private.
goatherders 7y ago
Drones have a lot of commercial uses and most of them havent even past their formative stages. From inspecting power lines (which most municipalities mandate every year) to mapping properties and utilities to eventual deliveries of goods, if another consumer drone was never sold I would still be bullish on the drone industry.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
I see drones and gopros following the same adoption arc as DSLRs. The DSLR market size definitely peaked a long time ago but there's enough professionals and enthusiasts who use them that it's a healthy market that's not going anywhere and they are going to be a tool in the toolbox of anyone who creates visual media for the foreseeable future. Drones and gopros seem to fit the same mold because they enable people who want to create visual media (and other people who need the equivalent capability) to do things that you formerly needed a helicopter to do. I don't see those people giving up that capability anytime soon so while the market may shrink, especially for consumer oriented devices, it will be around for the foreseeable future.
jonplackett 7y ago
I remember going snowboarding with a go pro. We were so excited to see the footage. The guy in the Chalet even offered to put it on the big screen so everyone could see. What followed was about 30 minutes of embarrassing slow and inordinately dull snowboarding. The jumps that seemed high were barely off the ground. The speed that seemed potentially deadly was a snails pace. Recording yourself doing sport only makes sense if you are really good!
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  Making appealing video requires thought, knowledge of lighting and how cameras work, and creativity. "Just strap on a camera and go" is definitely not the way to do it, people make amazing videos with mediocre skill in the thing they're doing. It's like any other complex tool, garbage in garbage out.
  - Thriptic 7y ago
    I think it depends on what you are doing. If you are doing something intense enough, it works. Check out on the roofs, the guys who break into sky scraper construction sites and scale the buildings. Go Pros work perfectly for their use case: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gLDYtH1RH-U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gLDYtH1RH-U
    - woobar 7y ago
      I think a 5 minutes clip of a climb that obviously took several hours proves GP's point. No one would watch raw garbage captured by their GoPros, you need heavy editing and a catchy soundtrack.
      - jonplackett 7y ago
        If daft punk had been staying in the chalet with us and offered to put their next unreleased album up next to our snowboard footage, I still don’t think anyone would have stayed to watch it.
  - 7y ago
bluetomcat 7y ago
The main buyers of such products are bored people "without a life" and with a sizeable discretionary income. It's a way to relieve boredom in the short term - capture a few videos, spend a few hours editing them, share them, get bored again and forget the thing in some drawer. Call it unsustainable techno consumerism if you like.
komali2 7y ago
Youtubers and other content creators use it, and buy up a lot of the ancillaries equipment (microphone, lights etc). I've bumped tons of fellow travelers that use them just for raw convenience when making travel videos. I.e. I don't just use it that one time a year I snowboard, it also comes with me to the beach, when I try kayaking, trying to get cool sakura shots, etc. Then there's bicyclists and motorcyclists (again, me) that use it as a "dash cam." Thing is I'm all of the above... and I'll probably never buy another gopro. I have a gopro. It works extremely well. Best in class. The only time I'll buy another is if I lose this one or it breaks. Sometimes I buy batteries and the like but those are maybe 30, 40 bucks. And I have no interest in their moonshot cloud whatever bullshit. So I'm not sure how businesses like that continue to make money.
- Retric 7y ago
  Every year you get millions of new customers who start adventuring for the first time. Things also get lost or break etc so it seems to be a viable long term business. This is common for durable goods. You get a spike of initial sales and steady stream after that, the difference is microwaves spiked decades ago and GoPros’s peaked more recently.
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  This is a good point, and the new accessories that make GoPro 8 so much better for content creators just landed at the same time as the coronavirus, so that's unfortunate timing from a business standpoint.
leetcrew 7y ago
I bought a DJI spark last year and had a lot of fun for a few months flying it in my backyard. it got stale kinda fast though. it basically flies itself, so just flying around in a field gets boring. on the other hand, at $400, it was a little too expensive for me to feel comfortable trying any daring shots with it. I made some cool aerial panoramas, but the camera isn't really good enough to make anything worth sharing. if you want to get decent pictures, you have to spring for one of the $1200 models, which are still only about as good as a high-end smartphone camera. I did find one killer use-case for it though: cleaning gutters. the house I was living in at the time was designed in a way that made cleaning gutters very dangerous. I used the drone to see which parts actually needed cleaning, then my roommate would clear them using a long pole with a hook while looking at the camera feed. awkward, but much safer.
- tibbydudeza 7y ago
  We are on a 4 week country wide Covid-19 lockdown stay @ home and as part of the regulations they banned all alcohol sales. Some entrepreneurial person now does drone deliveries of booze within a 5km radius of his home.
  - RankingMember 7y ago
    That's gotta be a pretty powerful drone- booze isn't light!
    - leetcrew 7y ago
      involves a lot of trust, too. I imagine the customer has to detach the shipment by hand. a drone capable of delivering a fifth of liquor must be worth at least $1-2k. considering the whole operation is likely illegal for several reasons, I doubt the owner would have much recourse if someone just stole it.
      - s1t5 7y ago
        But then no more fly-in alcohol. The booze-drone is like a 21st century golden-egg goose.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
izacus 7y ago
> Obviously the current situation is a big factor but I can't help but wonder to what degree things like GoPros and drones are something of a fad outside of a fairly niche market. I see these comments a lot here but... what exactly is wrong with companies that cater to highly specialized niche markets? E.g. your Hegels, Ferraris, Tag Heuers, etc.? Companies that specialize to fit some people exactly as opposed to mass appeal companies that make products that try to appeal to everyone but then slightly suck for everyone as well? Can someone explain this viewpoint?
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Absolutely nothing wrong with it, IMHO. But our business culture in the United States looks down on these sorts of companies. Growth is king. But I fully agree with you. It doesn't have to be this way, and it's (IMHO) incredibly harmful.
- sarora27 7y ago
  I dont think there's anything wrong with companies that cater to highly specialized niche markets. I think the reason people knock on GoPro is because they raised VC money and went to market. By taking on VC, they signaled (imo) that there was a huge market opportunity ($XXB) for them beyond a highly specialized niche market.
- ThrowAway83774 7y ago
  These Americans you witness see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires looking for moonshots to catch their big break which will never come.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Many of the companies that are in focus here have simply grown too big to be sustainable in the niche they cater for, either through aggressive funding or by riding a finite hype wave (e.g. Gopro, no idea if they also suffer from overfunding)
- ghaff 7y ago
  Absolutely nothing. But GoPro obviously had much larger ambitions than being an action camera for people who jump off cliffs even though they used that tie-in to try to pull is a larger audience. Climbing equipment is relatively niche as well. But manufacturers don't really try to pull in a broader audience. (Though climbing gyms do, in part, aim for casual climbers.)
xemdetia 7y ago
The drones have always felt like a quixotic adventure for GoPro that seemed like a weird distraction for other product improvements. I don't even think that GoPro should be classified as part of the adventure usage category anymore, as most of the GoPro usage I have seen has more to do with the fact that it's a compact camera that's relatively durable or sacrificial depending on your application. What I've been seeing over the last few years is that GoPro cameras are less handy than a smartphones whose recording capabilities just keep enhancing from the last few generations of improvements seemingly primarily focused on that, especially as more people have been streaming video directly to viewers from their phone compared to a recording, edit, and then upload workflow. A few years ago I felt like I saw GoPro's being used for most of the content in a particular edited video but nowadays I see them used for one or two shots where the camera was more at risk. If anything I just see them getting pushed from mass appeal to a niche compact camera market because there's just better competition in this space and the middle to high end of the GoPro line competes with some of the entry level/second hand Canon and Nikon cameras for recording video and unless you have those space and durability requirements in the niche where GoPro shines.
GuardianCaveman 7y ago
My two cents: I own one and bring it to family gatherings to record family. It’s small and non threatening and people don’t react defensively the same way they do with iPhones. I also take iPhone pictures and video but I like the video I get from the GoPro also. I’ve also carried it with me when documenting something like going for a walk in my daily spot and going to mundane places. I usually do this before I move to a new place to capture those simple things I want to remember about the old one. Again no one reacts the same way as if you’re walking towards them holding a phone in the record position and I like the video I get from it. But I also used it on a hiking trip to big bend and it was nice to capture the hike passively and enjoy it without feeling the need to constantly stop and take pictures.
hrktb 7y ago
On of the appeal of a GoPro is the simplicity and ruggedness. When planning to go on vacation for instance, a GoPro is ideal for kids to shoot whatever they want without having to borrow parent's phone/camera or some expensive point and shoot. Same for people playing Pokemon GO, a super small side camera that is completely point and shoot, can take some rough handling and is mostly weather proof is ideal.
cossatot 7y ago
Another component to the disappointment with GoPros is that the camera perspective and flattening reduces the dramatic impact of what may have in fact been a challenging endeavor. I've seen footage of hard mountain bike trails and class V kayak runs that I have done, and also seen non-first-person footage of the same drops, and it's pretty impressive how much the GoPro footage makes a 25 foot waterfall seem inconsequential relative to a 3rd person perspective (i.e. someone on the bank). I wonder if having a stereoscopic camera could improve this situation. I pay no attention to VR or whatever so I don't know if this is the venue in which stereoscopic/3D movies would be viewed but it could be cool. Harder to share I suppose, and if your goal is to impress others on social media then it probably wouldn't work unless people start bringing those helmets to look at their phones while they poop.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  Watching first person action sports in VR doesn't work unfortunately, it's extremely nauseating.
amerkhalid 7y ago
This is probably not what GoPro execs had in mind but I find GoPro is perfect camera for my 2 years old. I know there are cheaper rugged water-proof cameras that would work just as well for kids but I already got GoPro. I bought GoPro thinking that I'll use it for my "adventures", however, it is mostly unused at home. So we just let our son play with it. However, on travels, we really love having GoPro with us as it is small enough, and easier to use than phones. With phones, if we are out all day, we are a bit worried about battery life. We also have a bigger camera, X100F, but that is a bit too big to carry all the time on a vacation. So we leave it in the hotel unless we plan to do a photography. So most of our vacation photos and videos are evenly split between GoPro and phone cameras.
- p1esk 7y ago
  How does he play with it?
  - amerkhalid 7y ago
    Sometimes he pretends like he is taking photos or making videos. He also chases our dog as if he is recording him. He probably learned that from us as that's how we use it. Sometimes, he may use camera as a toy car or a block. The button is too hard for him to push but that's where voice commands come in. I can say "GoPro take a photo" while he is holding it. We have captured some fun shots like this.
    - p1esk 7y ago
      Ah ok, that's what I was expecting. I'd be surprised if a 2yo could consciously take photos.
      - FireBeyond 7y ago
        I remember arguing with someone here a few years ago talking about "intuitive" interfaces and arguing that his 3-6 month old "understood the iPad". No.
mgolawala 7y ago
This is exactly their strategy, and it works to some extent. Their aspirational marketing works quite well. The people acquiring their product are aspiring to be outdoorsy, fit, and adventurous. I bought a GoPro several years back as well, after using it on one of my camping trips and a trip to a water park with the kids, I realized I don't really have the kind of adventurous, outdoorsy life I was aspiring to. The GoPro sits in a drawer. You actually have to be pursuing activities that you think are worth capturing on a GoPro or a drone, and then you have to have an interest in capturing/editing those pursuits. Longer term, there is a legitimate niche for their products. It is the intersection of people interested (personally or professionally) in photography/videography who have adventurous/outdoorsy pursuits and hobbies. Whether that niche is large enough to support a company of their size (and their competitors) is still an open question.
- vidanay 7y ago
  Kind of like those annoying watch commercials showing everyone free climbing when in reality your adventure watch is only going to be telling you how late the 4:18 BART is.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Seems like TV producers (and of course YouTubers) also use them, e.g. to mount them on and in a car for a car review video shoot.
- KeepTalking 7y ago
  For me, the aspiration to own a GoPro was to capture footage in wet / water conditions. With an iP68 rating for the iPhone to makes sense for light use-cases, an iPhone is sufficient for me. 1. I think the underlying problem has been the lack of innovation from GoPro. I find that while the number of cameras in our daily life has increased, the use-case for something like a GoPro is marginal at best. Apple and other vendors have done an excellent job of improving camera technology on the iphone11 that today, I no longer carry a GoPro or even an SLR camera on holidays. 2. Another amazing shenanigan from GoPro was their accessories business. When I got my only go-pro in 2014, it required me to spend another $200-300 on some really basic accessories like an LCD screen. It just felt like the company added barriers that stopped you from actually using the product. 2a. Minor nitpick - Their packaging in 2015 was a piece of work. It took me forever to get it unpacked and even get hold of the device. 3. Mgmt focus - I live in San Mateo and the stink of constant GoPro layoffs made it an undesirable company to even consider working for. The people I knew that worked there all quickly bailed and went to work for Google or Apple. It also didn't help that I only remembered about my GoPro when I saw Mr Woodman show-up on Shark-Tank. I just felt he didn't focus on a struggling company and wanted to find other things to do.
hugey010 7y ago
GoPros are a fad or niche market, only because they market it that way. Even if you're not doing anything "extreme" it's really nice to have a running video of even the most mundane canoeing trip just to get still pictures and laugh at those people who kept flipping their canoe. It's the least interrupting way to record an event. I'm surprised GoPro hasn't formed partnerships for success in other markets. High school sports, and even younger, are often filming competitions and performing automated or manual analysis to rank players and provide feedback. Schools and Boosters are paying crazy amounts of money for these services, but it could be so much better aggregating videos of ~10 mounted GoPros together to get "on the field" perspectives. Then there's the whole professional sports media market. People LOVE hearing audio from NFL quarterbacks, imagine a first person view.
- michaelt 7y ago
  > Then there's the whole professional sports media market. GoPro have made some efforts in that area - including employees working on special products for the professional broadcast market, "a partnership to enable GoPro HERO4 cameras with a professional grade, live, HD wireless broadcast solution" [1] and a partnership with the NHL [2] with the players wearing helmet cams. They laid off the people working on it internally and it's gone from their product pages (although you can still buy a kit... for $7,500 [3]) so I'm guessing they didn't find the market as lucrative as they'd hoped. [1] https://gopro.com/en/us/news/gopro-partners-with-vislink-for-live-wireless-hd-broadcast https://gopro.com/en/us/news/gopro-partners-with-vislink-for... [2] https://gopro.com/en/lu/news/gopro-and-nhl-new-partnership-will-change-the-way-you-watch-hockey https://gopro.com/en/lu/news/gopro-and-nhl-new-partnership-w... [3] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1198311-REG/vislink_9014867_herocast_wireless_transmitter_kit.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1198311-REG/vislink_9...
Krasnol 7y ago
I'd buy one to do Mapillary streetview "films" because the ones I did with my phone are not really good and the area I live in is not very covered. But it's too expansive for such a hobby and I'd feel stupid with it on my ski helmet ;)
pilom 7y ago
As a guy who kayaks off waterfalls and stopped using his GoPro a few years ago, most waterfall drops don't look that cool from a helmet view either.
- wil421 7y ago
  Kayak fishing is the same. Either you need 3-5 cameras covering all angles or it’s not very dramatic. Most of the time it’s videos of me fumbling with my gear until my battery runs out. When I did some white water kayaking and rafting my camera would have water spots or a terrible angle.
ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
> a fad outside of a fairly niche market Sometimes I feel like for HN everything that is not in the bubble is a fad. Go Pro has a market, and that's why it's a company of this size that has released many instance of their product.
- jerf 7y ago
  "niche" and "fad" are two very different things. They clearly have a niche. The "fad" part, only time can tell. Evidence is currently mixed.
myself248 7y ago
I bought a GoPro after sticking my old cellphone inside a running CNC machine to get video of the milling process. It was all well and good until the cutter started heating up and we decided we needed to turn on flood coolant after all. Phone's not waterproof, so that was the end of that. When you start pondering the optical clarity of Tupperware, perhaps it's time to just buy a proper camera. So I did. Since then, it's been stuck to CNC machines, laser cutters, car bumpers, car wheelwells, car suspensions, toy cars, Power Wheels cars, drones, rockets, and kites. It's been nestled into the sand between the launcher tubes of a fireworks show. It's produced documentation of countless projects, produced a record of machine assembly in case of warranty problems, and taken timelapses of packing and moving several houses and offices. I've used the wifi viewfinder as a "periscope" to keep an eye on the birthday boy's arrival for a surprise party. I'm about to buy my fourth battery for it, because those do wear out. People who buy a camera and let it gather dust lack imagination.
Syntonicles 7y ago
As a full-time skydiver & coach, I would say that's exactly who needs a GoPro the most. When we jump everybody wears at least one camera and often someone jumps outside to get a better angle. The video is not taken to capture an epic moment, it's to review and improve. After every jump the group breaks down every part of the skydive and tries to take a lesson from it. I have to wade through thousands of videos before I find something interesting enough to post online, but each of those videos has value. The worse the performance the higher the value.

mft_ 7y ago

GoPro has long baffled me as a company. 1. On the face of it, their main products in 2020 (i.e. action cameras) are barely innovative, and seem to have nothing to attract and lock customers in other than brand recognition built on expensive marketing campaigns. Essentially, they're selling commodity equipment at a large mark-up. Why haven't they been totally displaced by a manufacturer with a cheaper clone, also offering a good enough brand and ecosystem to compete? 2. Where they have innovated, they've hugely missed the target. In particular, their drone release was just an awful, awful misjudgement. Not just because it fell out of the sky. Not just because it came out at the same time as a superior competitor from DJI. But because it totally missed that GoPro is/was seen as a provider of action cameras - things that can be started and then forgotten about as they record your activities. They released a fairly generic drone, which required constant operator interaction. Had they released a drone with a tether, which could be started and then forgotten about as you ride your MTB, or your snowboard, they'd have likely had a hit, aligned with their brand identity (assuming it didn't drop out of the sky).

cm2012 7y ago
See: Beats by Dr Dre for a comparable company. Brands matter.
- some_random 7y ago
  I don't think fashion headphones meant to be worn frequently compare well with an action camera that has limited branding on it which is meant to be used when you're already doing something cool
  - cm2012 7y ago
    GoPro invests an insane amount into branding. https://www.enrichmybrand.com/blog/branding-at-its-finestcult-brand-gopro https://www.enrichmybrand.com/blog/branding-at-its-finestcul...
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

kayoone 7y ago

> GoPro Inc. said it will cut more than 200 jobs > The operational changes, staff reductions of more than 20% and cuts to office space will save $100 million in 2020 That must be a very high average salary considering the office space is probably the cheaper part of that.

serverQuestion 7y ago
that line makes it sound they just killed off an expensive office somewhere + the people working there
jiveturkey 7y ago
if they can just cut off office space like that they must be renting flex space ... which is expensive. but yeah, 200 * 300,000 still only comes to $60MM.
zimpenfish 7y ago
Or "the operational changes" will save a fair chunk - but those aren't really gone into (other than "will direct serve consumers", I suppose.)

akssri 7y ago

I heard that GoPro hasn't been doing well in the past couple years [1]. Did they ever transition out of their "badge re-engineering" approach to products ? [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qa1tGmi5g4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qa1tGmi5g4

for_i_in_range 7y ago

> ‘We have a clear opportunity to super-serve consumers’... Chief Executive Officer Nick Woodman said in the statement. Anyone fluent in CEO-Speak able to translate?

parsimo2010 7y ago
I'm not 100% sure, but in this context I think he means direct to consumer sales. Woodman might be trying to pitch it as a way to keep customers happy, but I have a hard time believing that anyone had an issue buying a GoPro at BestBuy or REI. It's pretty clear that this is just a way for GoPro to make bigger profits by taking profits from the full retail price, rather than only taking profits from the wholesale price. He might also be alluding to their subscription services, which make money for GoPro after a cameara sale, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. And honestly, they are doomed if they rely on their subscription services at all, because they suck. Anyone that wants to edit and share their videos is better served by other tools, and I don't think they make much money from subscriptions.
wmeredith 7y ago
"My head has been stuck up our company monoculture so long that I can no longer communicate effectively with normal people outside their group of yes-men." Super-serve? Come ON, man.

code4tee 7y ago

GoPro has been struggling for a while but like a lot of companies they will likely use the present situation as cover to make some changes. It’s a lot easier for executives to say “there was this terrible Coronavirus thing that forced us to downsize” vs “the business strategy I was in charge of wasn’t performing well and we have to downsize.” That’s happening a lot at the moment.

esel2k 7y ago
This! Exactly this was done already in 2008 crisis and it is just so weak and simple for management to blame anything else than themselves. For me I think we moved toward of a more connected society in feedback we give on companies. A company that would let me go with such a ridiculous argument I would not join or give a very bad review online... and more and more I will join companies that treat their employees good. After corona - people will jump and consider companies that treated their employees right in crisis time...

heyflyguy 7y ago

I would love insider knowledge on their innovation tract. I'm sure they are licking wounds after the karma fiasco but it's like they went back to vanilla action cams, and that market is seeming nascent. What's happening?

mgh2 7y ago

Here is a non-paywalled link: https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/20/04/15814828/gopro-to-lay-off-20-of-employees-and-shift-to-direct-sales-strategy https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/20/04/15814828/gopro-...

kube-system 7y ago

They are so close to being a premium product but they're having trouble getting there. I prefer to drop premium dollars on equipment that "just works" but my experience with their products is that every one of them has some kind of annoying issue. They need to figure out what kind of company they are. Are they producing cheap consumer toys, or are they making reliable prosumer equipment?

mhh__ 7y ago
I feel like their days are somewhat numbered anyway. At least as a hardware company - Chinese GoPro style cameras are getting really good now, as in you can get an action camera that is "good enough" (TM) for anything you are going to shoot for $100 at most these days. There's definitely a market for overpriced cameras that just work but they might have to widen their horizons to grow.
ratfaced-guy 7y ago
Exactly, I was expecting an Apple-like experience so I was very disappointed in that sense. The hardware was great (for me at least), but the UX was just too annoying that it soured the overall experience. I wish now that Apple would build an action camera.

andreyk 7y ago

I'm an owner of a GoPro and also of a nice digital camera (Sony Alpha 6000) and have done a decent deal of photography, so maybe I can comment on the appeal of GoPro: the interface and software on their device is excellent (far better than my Sony), and their app to interact with the camera is also excellent (far better than the barely functional one for my Sony), the form factor and built in smoothing makes it great for documenting outdoors stuff, AND their app has an excellent do-most-of-the-work for you video editor. For doing videos of hikes, vacations, etc (see eg this example https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E7a5-yH01JCxJcf1-35YiRAcOHBS_lDC https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E7a5-yH01JCxJcf1-35YiRAcOH...) it's really a game changer, so I quite like it. But of course it's only really useful for people who like making videos in the first place.

ww520 7y ago

A "personal dashcam" or bodycam product direction would be good for GoPro or some other companies.

jonahhorowitz 7y ago

There's a lot of negative comments here, so let me add my positive experience. I love my GoPro. I started with a "Hero3+" and have upgraded twice. I now have a Hero7 that I use a few times a week. I took five different GoPros on a rafting trip down the grand canyon and came out with some great footage. The advantage of GoPros from the beginning is that they're a small durable camera that takes good footage. With the image stabilization that they have now, you can get smooth footage even when you're mountain biking down a rough trail. The downsides are: they take a while to get used to using (although the newer ones have a much better interface), and you have to spend time editing the videos before sharing them. Also, it turns out a lot of what we do is pretty boring. As to why no other camera manufacturer has taken the market from GoPro, it turns out it's hard to build a compact camera that's durable and produces good footage. The $150 knockoffs just don't have the same quality or durability. I still see a bunch of them on the slopes though (particularly on kids, which makes sense). Still, it's a limited market, and phones have gotten better (and waterproof), so people don't feel like they need a dedicated camera, so it's going to suffer the same that most of the camera industry does.

car 7y ago
Second that. I've taken excellent videos freediving with a GoPro HERO7. It is color corrected for underwater lighting and waterproof down to 10 meters/33 feet.

davio 7y ago

They should do a quick pivot to high-end webcams.

cyberpanther 7y ago

They've always made it hard to use their devices as webcams. If they had that feature, they would be selling like gangbusters now. Wyze did a firmware update and bam, you have a webcam. It hurts you in the long term to always upsell and partition your features into different levels. That complexity in your business, translates into your code and processes and makes it harder to pivot.

knolan 7y ago

I was gifted a Hero 2018 when I left my last job. I use it for recording my cycle commute because I guess my death at the hands of a homicidal taxi driver should at least be recorded. It comes with a basic set of features. 1080p video and some simple time lapse options. Pretty barebones. Anyway it occasionally freezes when disconnected from the charger so I went and checked if there was a firmware update and it turns out that the Hero 2018 is the previous year's high end Hero 5 Black crippled by software. Someone put together a tool to load that camera's firmware onto it and now I have a 4K camera with GPS, a wide range of time-lapse and high frame rate features, stabilisation, wind noise reduction... https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero-is-actually-a-gopro-hero5 https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero-is-...

sergiotapia 7y ago
I won't ever buy a gopro if this is true. Why the hell would they do this?
- somebodythere 7y ago
  Market segmentation? The same way Tesla limits its car battery capacity in software.
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    Can you hack your battery to use its full capacity?
    - bdamm 7y ago
      It is unclear if anyone has broken through the crypto on the battery pack firmware (at least for newer cars, Model 3 and Model Y). Similar for the motor controller firmware.
  - throwaway1777 7y ago
    Was gonna give the same example. It’s common industry practice sadly. Tesla and gopro are hardly the only two offenders. It used to be a common tactic among cpu manufacturers also.

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/mrDnY https://archive.md/mrDnY

StillBored 7y ago

Back when gopro first introduced 4k video on their cameras, it was an impressive feat for the price compared with the many thousand+ dollar cameras available at the time. Most midrange+ phones these days can do 4k video. Sure they don't have a wide angle lense, but that is something like a $30 purchase on your favorite eretailer. The problem is that gopro is still selling the same midrange sony sensors, and expecting a premium. If they were doing 8k@60 FPS, then they would have something that could command the price premium vs the dozens of competitors that have discovered sony sensor+cheap SOC+battery = action cam. Or for that matter, they could move into the mirrorless camera market, but they are only releasing gimicky UI upgrades and drones to attach your camera while wondering why a lot of people are just buying cellphone mounts for their bikes/etc. So why exactly are the gopro's so darn expensive given its just using an off the shelf Sony IMX277 sensor (https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/gopro-hero7-teardown https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/gopro-hero7-teardown) and a super low-end SOC?

ProAm 7y ago
This is a great comment if you switch out GoPro for Apple. Every market has it's people.

russellbeattie 7y ago

I bought a GoPro Hero 8 a month ago, and for what it is, it works well enough. But I've been really disappointed in GoPro's attitude towards openness. They've locked down the USB port, WiFi and the OS pretty much completely. I think this is the type of company that would really benefit from an excited and engaged hacker community. The GoPro could be a camera-centric IoT device, used for a ton of things from webcams to 3D imaging to a bunch more. But there's no support at all for developers. It seems like they were going in that direction early on, then changed their strategy and killed their SDK and dev program. It's too bad. This will definitely be my last GoPro as a result.

Asuchug4 7y ago
Before buying Hero 7, I watched a lot of reviews and tried to decide between older but still powerful Sony action camera. The quality was great, but sometimes GoPro decided to freeze. It is very annoying to find that your camera stopped recording 20 minutes ago. I thought that my model might be just a bit faulty. Then comes the GoPro 8, and the improvement noted by few tech reviewers was that it no longer freezes. Totally destroyed any trust in reviewers I had left. No one told a thing about freezes in Hero 7.
mackrevinack 7y ago
car dash cam is something I would like to do with my gopro when I'm not using it

dvcrn 7y ago

GoPro is lacking innovation, each camera sounds identical to the previous one with only very small changes. They were still the market leader in action cams so for a while it was the only real viable option. Nowadays there are a lot more companies that innovate in this field. DJI released the Osmo Action with dual screen and fantastic stabilization, Xoami has the Mi Action Camera for cheap, and just recently Insta360 released the modular "One R" that allows to quickly swap the camera module for 360, 1" or 4k action. I was in the market for a action cam and went for the Insta360. GoPro created the market but nowadays I just don't see a reason to get a GoPro when there are arguably better options with more innovation out there.

mackrevinack 7y ago
well in fairness the hyperlapse feature they released a few years back was fairly innovative. and the stablisation was/is better than your find in some phones. but yea apart from that, most models seem pretty much the same to me

justlexi93 7y ago

It is so sad to see that even big companies cut their workforce. I am so glad that the company(4wheelonline) that I am associated with did not terminate any employees.