<story><title>Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disruption-of-everything/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AznHisoka</author><text>The article seems to imply Dollar Dhave Club succeeded with the help of AWS. I don&amp;#x27;t get it. These guys aren&amp;#x27;t Google. It&amp;#x27;s a simple static site with a few dynamic forms. Anyone could&amp;#x27;ve built that easily in 1998, let alone 2006.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ripberge</author><text>Agreed regarding AWS being a non-factor. If any tech service gets credit here it&amp;#x27;s YouTube. They also leveraged ad-tech for precise targeting, re-targeting that was not possible in a pre-Internet era. Once they were doing very well online they were able to jump in with the big boys like P&amp;amp;G doing traditional media buys in TV, radio, etc.&lt;p&gt;I think that is the key here, Internet media helped them disseminate their message very rapidly.&lt;p&gt;I would also argue, easy access to capital was very important. Once that original video went viral, they had to really pour on the online ad-spend to acquire customers. Seeing as how their customer acquisition costs are high, the more customers they got, the more money they lost every month! Capital is key!&lt;p&gt;They were wildly successful before they were on AWS. I believe they started off on magento, then drupal before writing their own software (once they were having a lot of success).&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t use Amazon for fulfillment. They used some other 3PL&amp;#x27;s and are now leasing and running their own distribution centers. In the beginning, Dubin was packing those razors up in his living room!&lt;p&gt;Source: founder a close personal friend.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disruption-of-everything/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AznHisoka</author><text>The article seems to imply Dollar Dhave Club succeeded with the help of AWS. I don&amp;#x27;t get it. These guys aren&amp;#x27;t Google. It&amp;#x27;s a simple static site with a few dynamic forms. Anyone could&amp;#x27;ve built that easily in 1998, let alone 2006.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akie</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; static site, and I&amp;#x27;d be very surprised if it was &amp;quot;static&amp;quot; either, because there is guaranteed to be a database backend (how else would you track orders?). The frontend is written in EmberJS, probably with some fancy javascript backend.</text></comment>