GoPro

Nick Woodman started GoPro in 2002 because he could not film himself surfing. The early version was a wrist-mounted film camera. But once it went digital and small and waterproof and mountable on a helmet or a surfboard, the company stumbled into something most marketers can only dream of: a product whose ordinary use produced footage that sold the product, for free, at a scale no ad budget could match.

For founders and operators, this case sharpens a question worth asking about your own product: when customers use it, do they make anything, share anything, tell anyone? It is about designing the marketing engine into the product itself rather than bolting growth on afterward. How GoPro turned customer behavior into distribution, and how to engineer that path deliberately, is what the app lays out.