GoPro’s stock leapt more than 30 per cent on its first morning of trading on Thursday

Nick Woodman, GoPro’s billionaire founder and chief executive, who still owns almost half of the company, spoke with the FT shortly after ringing the Nasdaq opening bell. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation about how he got here and how he plans to build a media business around millions of people taking photos and videos of themselves.

FT: Did you expect to be floating on Nasdaq when you started GoPro more than a decade ago?
NW: I started the business in 2002 when I moved back into my dad’s house so I wouldn’t have to pay rent and could work seven days a week to get this business off the ground. In 2004 I launched our first camera as a one-man band. Absolutely I had no intention nor frankly desire to grow GoPro into what it is today. I was a bit scarred from my first business which failed and lost $4m, and I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for it. My initial ambition was to grow a nice little family business in the surf industry helping surfers capture photos then videos of themselves.

As the years went on, I grew more and more excited about an expanding vision for GoPro. Every year I was thinking that I’d hit my peak. Then I finally realised that as long as I surrounded myself with people who were smarter than me and more experienced in their respective fields, I could continue to shepherd this thing. Now we are backed up by almost 800 employees.

FT: Is it true you recorded the IPO roadshow with your own cameras?
NW: We did, and we are looking into if there is any reason why we can’t edit that into an experience that we can share with our fans around the world. I walked into every meeting with a whoop and a holler to get the crowd fired up.

FT: How did fund managers respond to that? And what is driving interest in the shares today, especially given that you reserved up to 1.5 per cent of the shares for retail investors through the Loyal3 platform?
NW: As far as how the stock is performing now and how it was influenced by consumer retail investors, I couldn’t say, but one could imagine that having some of the most passionate people on the planet as fans of our brand isn’t hurting.

It was a fabulous roadshow – I don’t think it ever happened where we were in a meeting where there wasn’t at least one GoPro customer in the room. The value proposition is very tangible to everybody, consumer and investor alike. People have an inherent desire to have footage of themselves doing what they love to do.

A GoPro service that makes it easy to get their content off their camera, cloud sync it, view it on any screen, with the tools and services to take two hours of a family weekend and create a two-minute highlights reel to share that experience with other people – that is the business that GoPro is in, the business of enabling great personal content. Everybody in the room raises their hand and says ‘I am a potential customer for that.’

Then it comes down to execution and are we the team to do it? We’re good executors, we are responsible with the business, we have strong insights into what consumers want and our track record is great. On top of that when you consider the opportunity we have when we enable the world to capture the world’s entertainment at scale, to aggregate the best of that content and redistribute it as GoPro programming… That becomes very compelling and is a natural extension of our core business. It’s an easy story [for investors] to understand.

FT: Isn’t executing in hardware and devices very different to running a media business?
NW: We have a track record of executing in both already today. Where we are headed is not that big of an extension. [Customers] are sharing over 6,000 videos to YouTube alone every day, driving 1bn views a quarter, helping GoPro to be the number one brand channel today. That’s already happening, GoPro is already scaling as a media brand.

We are only promoting our own products and brand, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that the content being shared out there forms a media opportunity for GoPro. The only thing we haven’t started to do is sell other people’s corporate messaging or marketing on GoPro.

FT: Who might advertise on a GoPro channel?
NW: Any other brand that wants to engage some of the more active and inspired consumers. For example, BMW just about a week ago announced their support of the GoPro app in their iDrive onboard computer system. They’ve already said there’s some crossover with our audiences there. You can imagine BMW could start their own GoPro channel to capture and share perspectives of the BMW world that consumers never get to see: inside a chassis of a 3-series, of the car being built around the camera then driving off the production line, or being mounted on cars during crash testing. The key is that this is all commercial programming for BMW but the GoPro community doesn’t see it that way, they just want to tune in.

FT: When can investors expect to see meaningful revenues from this media side of the business?
NW: We’re not giving any expectations other than it’s very early days. It’s important for us to point out that this is an organically growing opportunity for us. Tony Bates [former head of Skype at Microsoft] was thrilled enough to come on board and shepherd GoPro into this new era.

FT: How does GoPro maintain that 37 per cent margin and avoid commoditisation?
NW: Truth be told, we’ve had low-cost competitors coming out ofAsiaand even branded competitors since 2008. In more recent times we’ve had some of the larger consumer electronics companies in the world begin to compete with us. We have only grown our market share in this period. We have not felt any competitive pressure even on pricing, even though every competitor is priced lower than GoPro. It speaks to the quality of the brand and our product.

The differentiator is our millions of customers capturing and sharing compelling and engaging experiences, tagged titled and described as GoPro. To compete with GoPro you need to have millions of consumers giving your brand credit, or you don’t have what it is that makes GoPro GoPro. It’s a chicken and egg thing. As we continue to focus on helping our customers create compelling content, as we do so at scale, we expect our competitive advantage to increase.