Building GoPro’s Developer Program from Zero to 330 Partners

When I joined GoPro in 2014, the company had no developer program, no SDK, no documentation, and no partner ecosystem. By the time the program was running, it had 330+ partner companies, a team of 10, and names like NASA, Google, BMW, and Jaguar Land Rover building on the platform.

This is the story of how that happened, and what I learned about building developer programs from nothing.

Starting from Zero

GoPro in 2014 was a hardware company with massive consumer brand recognition and zero developer infrastructure. There was no public API, no partner portal, no technical documentation. The cameras were everywhere, but the ecosystem around them was entirely closed.

The opportunity was obvious: GoPro cameras were already showing up in professional workflows at media companies, automotive manufacturers, aerospace organizations, and research labs. These organizations were hacking together their own integrations. They wanted official support, and GoPro had no mechanism to provide it.

My job was to build that mechanism from scratch.

The First Year: Making the Internal Case

The hardest part of zero-to-one DevRel isn’t the technical work. It’s the internal alignment. At a hardware company, engineering resources are finite and already committed to the next product cycle. Convincing leadership to invest in a developer platform means showing a credible path to revenue or strategic value that justifies pulling engineers off the roadmap.

I spent the first phase building the business case: which partners would move the needle, what an SDK and documentation package would cost to build, and what the addressable market looked like if we opened the platform. The key insight was framing it not as “developer relations” (which meant nothing to a hardware executive team) but as “strategic moat” in the form of partnerships enabled by technology. Same work, different language.

Scaling to 330+ Partners

Once the SDK shipped and the partner portal launched, growth came from a deliberate strategy of targeting high-visibility partners first. Landing NASA, Google, and BMW as early adopters did two things: it validated the platform technically (if NASA’s JPL can build on it, your startup can too) and it created a marketing flywheel that attracted the next wave of partners.

The engineering team grew to 10 people supporting the ecosystem, handling everything from SDK development to partner integration support. We built the onboarding flow, the documentation, the sample code, and the partner success process that took a company from “interested” to “shipping an integration.”

The program wasn’t just about partner count. It was about ensuring that each integration actually worked and delivered value. A partnership with BMW meant GoPro cameras integrated into vehicle dashboards. A partnership with a sports analytics company meant automatic highlight generation. Every integration had to solve a real problem for a real user.

What I Took Away

Building GoPro’s developer program taught me three things that I still apply to every engagement.

First, developer programs at hardware companies are fundamentally different from software companies. You’re dealing with physical constraints, firmware update cycles, and engineering teams that think in silicon, not APIs.

Second, enterprise partnerships and indie developer communities require completely different approaches. At GoPro, the value was in enterprise partnerships, not a long tail of indie developers. Knowing which model fits your company is the most important strategic decision in early-stage DevRel.

Third, the zero-to-one phase is mostly about internal selling. You spend more time in slide decks and executive meetings than you do writing documentation. That’s normal, and it’s necessary. The program doesn’t exist until the organization believes it should.

GoPro taught me how to build something from nothing at a company that had never invested in developers before. That pattern, making the case internally, shipping the infrastructure, landing the first partners, and scaling the program, is the same one I’ve repeated at BMW and 1Password, and the same one I bring to every fractional engagement today.