Contour Cameras

Mission: Never made one.

The Story

I co-founded this business as my first job right out of school. Two of us, working out of a shared living space, somehow got into recording videos while we skied. Keep in mind at the time the only recording device was a physical camcorder, so we were taking external lenses, battery packs, and connecting them to a physical camcorder you carried in your backpack. And because this was pre-social media, our customers were buying and recording to tapes for home movies.

Fast forward to the internet age and the business took off when we took all of those cables and packed them into the first action camera, all self-contained with memory card storage. It happened to coincide with both the demand for HD AND the growth of YouTube. It was the early days of self-voyeurism…let me see myself.

And at that point is when the business took off and the leadership challenges really started. If the first four years were slow, the next six felt like face-ripping agony.

Go To Market

Contour was a wholesale, channel distribution business. Started in the early days of social media, online marketing was yet to be a thing. Therefore growth came from…

• Retail Doors: We had stock in over 10K doors.

• International Distributors: this was and is still a great way to get off the ground

• Local Events: we used a Red Bull-like event strategy to sample product.

• PR: this was a thing, to get editors and reviewers to write about your products.

Through this I developed a lot of playbooks around….

• Building Sales Orgs: you had to have both a domestic and international sales team.

• Pricing & Incentives: learning how to set up margins, commissions, rebates, etc.

• Channel Marketing: this was a big deal, giving channel partners the tools they needed to succeed.

• Tradeshows: done globally to meet new resellers and demo the products.

• Founder Press: a team that could reach out and provide free samples.

Despite these learnings we missed the big go-to-market pivot. What came toward the end of our time was the organic YouTube approach. But by then we had the wrong founding DNA of the company to ride this wave. I was a product person and YouTube was a content game. The super big growth curve we missed because I didn't know how to pivot our DNA into this space. We were hiring product people when we needed to hire filmmakers.

The Team - My Leadership Journey

What a ride (and a mess). I started this at 20 years old and ended the journey at 30. I essentially spent a decade learning who I was as a leader, trying every combination of team building. Along the way I went through everything you can think of…all while learning how to run a company. Over the years…

• Co-founder Dynamics. Learning to manage that relationship while one of us became the CEO and the other an operator in the business.

• Building Leadership Teams. Hiring people much older and more experienced than me, learning how to lead them, set goals, and get results. This learning curve was very, very steep.

• Creating Culture. From 2 to 50 people, learning how to create a culture. A lot of it I had to borrow and try as I had never worked for or run a company before.

• Managing Boards. Starting with advisory boards into a traditional board with opinionated investors…most of which had never run a company before.

• Getting Fired. I've even gotten to the end of the video game….getting fired by my own board and watching them tank a $30M business.

Through that process I developed my own team building and compensation philosophy.

• Ownership: Setting up your org so every part of your business has clear ownership.

• Leadership Teams: how to hire, manage, and change them.

• Culture: how to define and create one.

• Compensation: how to create a system that can scale without heavy HR.

Funding

I learned the tough lesson of what it means to raise institutional capital from non-Tier-A partners. Short answer is don't do it. Longer answer is we didn't capitalize the business correctly to win the market.

Out of everyone I had met, a 15-minute session with Ben Horowitz was the most revealing. His message was simple…if you can't be #1 you need to sell it.

• Capital Strategy: what is the market you are competing in and how much capital do you need to win the category?

• Correct Investors: which investors can really help you to be #1?

• Debt Capital: if heavy on inventory, how do you fund it?

• AR / AP: how to manage this with your partners.

The End - We Lost The Market

We built a good business, not a great one. I was a first-time founder, running the business like a founder instead of a CEO. And once we lost (#2 in the market), none of us knew how to build a successful #2 brand. We self-justified that for every Coke there was a Pepsi. It turns out no one wants to fund Pepsi when they can see a Coke is in the market (i.e. GoPro).

• We tried to win on the best product. Turns out it wasn't about the product, it was about the idea of what you could capture with the product. Consumers didn't actually care about which camera made action video easier. They cared about which made them look better - resharing their content, putting it in their ads, etc. You see GoPro making that same mistake today - trying to win on the best product even though that is not their founding DNA. Their DNA is great marketing; they need to take their playbook and bring it to other categories.

• We tried to spend like #1 even though we were #2. It turns out the Law of Diminishing Returns means it takes #2 some 3-4x the same spend to get the same ROI as #1 in the market. If you are #2 you have to run a very different playbook. As #2 I didn't have the team or capital that knew how to win as #2 in the market. Everyone wanted growth and the strategy was wrong. We needed to focus on profits.

• We didn't have a cohesive team that knew how to run a small business. Most of the team I hired had all run much bigger businesses. It turns out at sub-50 people you need people that can run sub-50 businesses.

• I didn't know how to be a CEO. I was trying to run a high-growth business with a founder mentality against a competitor that was beating us. The leadership stack was wrong across the board.

All of these mistakes I’d fix in business #2 - Moment.