Recommend This!: Delivering Digital Experiences that People Want to Share

Chapter 2

Digital Changes Everything

While the digital age has done so much to improve our world, it has dramatically changed our social structure, often further isolating us from each other.

—Dean Ornish

With no personal customer relationships to build on and a 100 percent digital business model from day one, Michael Dubin, Dollar Shave Club CEO, needed to quickly attract attention, engage audiences, and convert them to members of his club, who are willing to pay $1 per month to have razors shipped to their homes.

Dubin and his partner, Mark Levine, had packed and shipped razors in his apartment until receiving a million dollars in venture capital seed money to prove their business model. The founders invested a few thousand of that million into an online video to launch their company. Grounded in strong storytelling and humor, and featuring Dubin’s own quirky yet dynamic character declaring his razors “f∗∗king great,” the video instantly grabbed audience attention.1 Dollar Shave Club launched that first online video early on the morning of March 6, 2012. Within hours, Dubin’s website, dollarshaveclub.com, crashed due to an overload of traffic. Overcoming those early technical glitches, Dubin signed up 12,000 club members in two weeks. Eighteen months later, his initial viral video had received over 10 million views. More importantly, in July 2013, Dollar Shave Club shipped about 1 million cartridges to its 300,000 members.

Dubin and his team use the same key elements we discovered ...