MICHAEL DUBIN IS THE founder of Dollar Shave Club, the Venice, California, razor-delivery service that got its first big boost from a 2012 YouTube video in which Dubin stars.
The video, which went supernova-viral in seventy-two hours, took a day to shoot and cost about $4,500. It helped that Dubin used to do improv and sketch comedy in New York before founding Dollar Shave Club in 2011.
“I know humor is a very powerful device in telling a story,” he says. The video features Dubin, among other things, dancing with a giant bear, riding with an “employee” in a tiny red wagon, and blowing dollar bills with a leaf blower. “I was just really trying to find a fun, resonant way to tell the story of what our business did and why it existed.”
Dollar Shave Club was strategic in releasing the video, timing it to an announcement that the company had secured $1 million in seed money and that it had relaunched its site. “All the usual suspects [such as niche sites like TechCrunch] covered the three events,” Dubin says. “From there, the mainstream media picked up on them, and the video took off.”
The events were also designed to coincide with South by Southwest, the major festival in Austin, Texas, that draws thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, and startups. “Everyone was talking about the video while they were in Austin, so strategically it ended up being a pretty smart move,” he says.
By 2017, the video had been viewed about 25 million times. And Dollar Shave Club? It was purchased by Unilever for $1 billion in 2016.