“This is the cosmic moment where I point to the deeper meaning behind what it is that we’re doing for people with Quik, because I think we’re really going to help people develop a stronger sense of self-esteem, self-worth, and ultimately happiness.
But damn it, man, you can get a lot of inspiration from just looking at what you’ve been doing with your life. “Not to bash on social feeds, like there’s a lot of good from them, we get a lot of inspiration from what other people are doing. “I think that what we’re solving for people is like a very relatable and widespread problem” But with Quik, Woodman sees not just a great business opportunity or a chance to reach new customers.
GoPro has carved out a decent supplemental business so far with its Plus subscription service, with nearly 800,000 paying subscribers as of the end of 2020 (the equivalent of just shy of roughly $40 million of annual revenue). “I think that what we’re solving for people is like a very relatable and widespread problem: I don’t have a convenient, private place to put content that matters most to me, and you know what, sharing it to your Instagram feed ain’t working because there’s that tension of, ‘Well, this matters to me, but I know it’s not going to really matter to anybody that I would socialize it with.’” “It can be all of those things,” he says. Others will just use it for their GoPro footage and photos and nothing else. That said, Woodman thinks people may use the feed in all sorts of ways, like saving images that inspire them or for planning a project, a la Pinterest. The more attractive option, in Woodman’s eyes, is to add photos and videos you take on the fly using the share sheet every time you capture a “keeper.” (Users can also text or email photos to the mural feed.) One is fairly straightforward: after you open the Quik app and give it access to your camera roll, you can scroll through and add photos to the mural feed or to “events” (not albums, of course) on the feed. Users can build out the mural feed in the Quik app a few different ways.
Hey honey, let’s AirPlay our album to the TV and kick back and reminisce.’ You don’t do that.” “You don’t go into albums ‘This is going to be a super awesome experience. Albums are just miniature camera rolls,” he says. While he doesn’t expect all of those users to pony up for the paid version of the new app, he thinks many will appreciate the mural feature because he still doesn’t see any good solutions to that camera roll clutter problem - especially not albums. And it worked: Woodman says that app still had “roughly eight million monthly active users” despite having been essentially abandoned by the company. In fact, that was the strategy with the original Quik app, which let users mash together photos and videos from their camera roll without requiring the use of a GoPro. And by gearing the app at a wider audience, not just GoPro users, he thinks there’s great opportunity to be had.
Woodman sees the new Quik app as something of a culmination of a yearslong effort at GoPro to diversify away from hardware that started around 20. Customers who already pay for GoPro’s Plus subscription service (which includes unlimited cloud storage, live-streaming functionality, and camera replacement) will get Quik’s features for free.
GoPro is charging $1.99 per month or $9.99 per year for those features, though the basic camera connection and control side the app will remain free to use for people who don’t want to pay for the new stuff. It also has a few other features like a video editing suite (including a speed adjustment tool), themes and filters, and unlimited original quality cloud backup of everything posted to the mural feed.
The auto-editing feature will live on in the new app, which launches on iOS and Android today. Camera control, video editing, and a private social media-style feed all in one place