$1B in 4 Years, How Dollar Shave Club Launched An Empire With One Video

Watch the video below:

Four years ago Dollar Shave Club made a viral ad and this week they sold for $1B.

The video was made for $4,500, the founder, Michael, wrote the first round of the script, he hired Lucia Aniello, a very talented comedian and writer in Hollywood, who's now working on Jump Street with Sony. Within 2 days they had 32,000 customers, which was over a half million dollars in revenue set in motion, and they did that with no paid media, which is a very rare happening. 

By year 2 they had 330,000 customers and they scaled radio and TV and the rest is history. So the question is, what did they get right with the video, and what is replicable and actionable from it? As someone who's made similar types of videos to this before, in designing distribution strategy for Kobe vs Messi with Turkish Airlines (CP+B) which has 140M+ views and 2M+ social shares and having created multiple videos that are in the multiples of millions for trackable and attributable sales, Dollar Shave Club hit any of the best practices that we're still using four years later.

We call it "Scalable Social Video," everyone calls it something different, but that's what we call it at Chamber.Media. Many articles have come out this week about Dollar Shave Club and what we can learn and a lot of them have tried to analyze the creative but what they haven't quite understood is the conversion architecture of the video and it's actually very simple. 

There's a hook that happens within the first 7 seconds and he used the 'f' word along with brilliant copy to get people to stay around, then he did problem/solution/problem/solution, his credibility statements and then his call to action, and that's really it. The length does matter, being anywhere from 2 minutes to 3.5 minutes for us at least has converted the best, there is some psychology behind what someone's attention span is and keeping their attention as long as you can so you can sell them during that period. Ironically, it's a similar length to a pop song you'd hear on the radio.

Another interesting insight is that they started their paid ad spend shortly after they had that viral success and even though it was only a $4,500 production they've spent million and millions of dollars in ad spend around the video and subsequent videos as well.

I'm overwhelmed by the fact that they went from zero to a billion in four years and that this strategy is at the core, at the beginning of that. What I want to share with all of you is that this is a viable strategy that they used, they did get lucky, but they did the same types of things we're doing now. There is some science to it, it is a predictable strategy and it's replicable. If you have the right script, distribution, velocity, test videos before launch to make sure they convert with all the best practices that come along with this. We have two of these types of videos coming out in the fall. 

I'll leave you with the statistic that by year 2020 two-thirds of all content online will be video and this is a strategy you should be looking into, if you're interested, contact me here and connect with me on LinkedIn. Whether you're a $1M Series A company or you're a $500M growth phase company this strategy can work very well for you and you're going to start seeing it happen a lot more often now that Dollar Shave Club has cracked the billion mark.