How Shopify & DollarShaveClub got more views than the Super Bowl for under $10K

The Super Bowl is the best place to get in front of customers—if you have $10M to spend. Which means for virtually all startups, it’s 100% useless. So I decided to look into some of the best campaigns early-stage startups used to drive millions of leads.

Shopify used a $100K Build A Business Competition in 2010  when it was a bootstrapped business. The campaign drove 1350 new businesses and was paid back in under a month.

https://shawngraham.me/blog/shopifys-kickass-build-a-business-contest

DollarShaveClub launched with a YouTube video about its $1/mo razors. The video was everything a GIlette ad was not. The company was ultimately acquired for $1B.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI&t=1s

Purple had the famous Raw Egg Goldilocks video that compared its mattress to others by seeing which one broke raw eggs. For less than $10K it got 200M views, more than the Super Bowl itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BvwpjaGZCQ

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So for most of the world, yesterday was just a normal Sunday. An average Sunday, but , uh, for most Americans, and , and I guess Canadians yesterday was the Super Bowl , which is now the biggest, most popular TV program of all time in the US 115 million viewers. And it cost six to $7 million to get a 32nd ad on there. So the thing I was thinking about was, you know, obviously I'm coming at it from the perspective of early stage startups and frankly from their perspective , um, well it's a hundred percent irrelevant because with those budgets you can't even touch it. And then a friend of mine shared this post that actually it's from last year. It's from last Super Bowl , and it's, it's the post, many of you might have seen it about DK Metcalf jumping like extremely high and catching the football. And that post went viral and got like 300 million views. And so the thing I was thinking about was like, you know, big brands will spend big dollars, big budgets be frankly very not imaginative about the way to reach an audience and they go on the Super Bowl . Startups have to be smarter, they have to do a lot more with a lot less. And so what I thought is, okay, let me look through some of the best kind of viral campaigns that startups did in the very early days. Things that, and trying to pull from there, I guess like lessons that founders could actually use to get views, to get leads. Because I think this is important for everybody. Obviously if you're a consumer, this is the way that you sell. You just can't, you know, pick up the phone and dial, but across the entire board, like even at enterprise inbound has become so important over the last decade. If you can take $10,000, even $5,000 and create something that goes viral, you're likely to get incredible. ROI. Welcome to the product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistrial , a seat stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo, I'm a founder turned vc. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. So with that said, let's jump in. I've got a few different examples I wanna go through. The first one is Shopify. So Shopify, we're talking right now , uh, 2009, 2010. And at this point, Shopify was effectively a bootstrap business. So Toby had started his snowboard store in 2004. He shifted to Shopify in 2006. He raised like a combined $400,000 between 2006 and 2009. So he did not have a lot of money to spend on marketing at all. One of the ideas he comes up with is what if we did a build a business competition? He's obviously well suited for his audience, so he's selling , uh, e-commerce software to mainly like small and medium businesses at this point. But, you know, to, to entrepreneurs worldwide who want to build a store and sell online. And so build a business competition obviously suits that audience. And that was his idea. He had a very important advisor at the time, Tim Ferris, who obviously everybody knows. And even back then in 2009, many many people knew he was already extremely famous. He had put out the four hour work week , which, you know, took kind of the world by storm. And Toby and Tim had met at a conference kind of haphazardly. And Tim, I guess because he was in the world of partially of e-commerce, right? But certainly in this kind of, how do you create these hide hustles had heard about Shopify and was constantly told that Shopify was the best e-commerce platform. So anyways, when he meets Toby , uh, they start chatting and , and they start kind of working, not necessarily closely together, but I guess Tim becomes an advisor to the company. So anyways, Toby is, is on a call with , uh, with Tim and tells him, you know, I wanna do this, build a business competition. And I think we could maybe gift the winner like an, I dunno if it was an iPad or a Mac. I don't , I think the iPad is just coming out. So, you know, we can gift the, the , um, the winner a Mac and Tim's like, you know, this is a great idea, but, but that's a terrible prize that's gonna go nowhere. I mean, nobody cares about, you know, building a business just to get a computer like, doesn't make any sense. You gotta put some money on the table. And so Toby thinks about it and you know, they go back and forth and he's like , you know what, that makes sense. Let's do $10,000. So the winner's gonna get $10,000 big dollars for Shopify at the time. Again, like when you raise , you know, half a million bucks , um, we're talking about an actual percentage of all the money that you've raised, let alone what you actually have in the bank. And Tim Bush is back on that. He's like, you know, $10,000 again doesn't really move the needle. It doesn't really, it's not this wow effect. It's not gonna get you all the buzz, all the pr, let's go bigger, let's go higher . It convinces Toby to do a $100,000 build a business competition. This was all of the money that Shopify had in their bank balance. And Toby goes for it. And this tells you two things. One is just like Toby is, you know, I think seeing as this product type tech type , you know, introvert, but he takes bold bets. Like he takes big risks. That was a huge risk. And it paid off. It paid off. The reason it paid off now, now we can dissect it a little bit, is because a hundred thousand dollars build a business competition was the biggest business competition at that time. And so what happens is, naturally when you tell the media about this, they're gonna write about it for free because it is an interesting story in of its own right? Hey, here's this company doing e-commerce, launching a build a business competition. You can win a hundred thousand dollars. It's the biggest business competition of all time. That's a huge kind of news event. And so that gets published, that gets tons of pr when it's all said and done, 1,350 new businesses come on Shopify as a result, if you know their business model, they charge about a hundred dollars a month, let's just round it out. A hundred dollars a month times 1,350 new businesses means that they make $130,500 on month one <laugh> . That's a one month payback period. And of course those businesses, many of them stick for years. So the ROIs tremendous, $3.5 million in gross sales generated by those businesses and priceless, priceless pr. In fact, it was so successful that Shopify still runs this business competition today, right? We're talking 14 years later and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger every year. So what did they do right? I mean, they found something that was simple. Build a business competition, you get it right away. I don't need to tell you anymore. You already understand. Now there's criteria around it. You gotta , you have six months to build it, it's based on revenue, whatever. But it get the idea right off the bat. The second thing is it was engaging a hundred thousand dollars makes you want to talk about it. If you hear about it, you probably tell somebody else. 'cause a hundred thousand dollars, wow, that's a lot of money. And then the third piece, this might be a bit of a stretch, but it's relatable. What I mean by that is, if you think about the audience, the audience of founders who are building businesses, guess what they want? They wanna make money <laugh> like, yeah, many of these are passion projects, but at the end of the day, these are entrepreneurs, they want to make money. So when you offer them money, real money, that's a big deal that makes you want to go. And so, and Toby talked about this, a lot of people are on the edge. A lot of people are thinking, you know what, I think maybe one day I wanna start a business. And then they see this thing a hundred thousand dollars. If you do it now you've got six months. Okay, let's go. And so, so many people who are on the fence all of a sudden trickle over. That's why that was a great PR campaign. The second one I want to talk about is Purple Mattress. So many of you probably know this brand. It's a very popular , uh, mattress brand that sold on online, direct to consumer. And when they launched, they had this YouTube video called the Raw Egg Test. What they did was to compare their mattress to two other or three other mattresses, right? One that was firm, one that was soft and one that was medium. And they had this raw egg concept. What they do is they literally have this, and , and I'll , I'll share the link so you can actually watch the video, but they have this piece of glass that's the size of the bed, and on the bottom of the piece of glass, they put four eggs and then they drop that piece of glass onto the mattress. And the question is, do the eggs break? The idea being that a good mattress can actually cradle the egg and soften just right so that the egg doesn't break. Of course, when they do this with every other type of mattress, so whether it's the soft one or the hard one or the medium one, all of the eggs just explode as soon as they hit that mattress, right? And then when they do this with their own mattress, the eggs don't break at all. They just kind of get cradled, right? You know, the reality is I actually don't know whether that's a real test of mattress quality, like <laugh> , you know, whether an egg breaks upon impact. Does that mean that that's gonna be good for your back? That that's gonna be comfortable? I have no idea, but I'll tell you what, it's impressive. And again, if you just think about the three things that matter, the first thing is it's simple. Everybody gets it. It's like, hey, look at this mattress where if you drop, drop eggs on it, it doesn't, the eggs don't break. Okay, that makes sense to me. The second thing is, it was definitely entertaining. And if you watch the video again, the way that they did it, they had this like Goldilocks kind of character. So they tied into, into that fiction story that, that, you know, everybody knows and you just like, you're just naturally inclined to want to keep watching because you wanna know like, are the eggs going to break? And the last piece is, it's relatable. Everybody has a mattress. And for the people that purple is targeting, which are people that are not happy with their mattress and are actually thinking about switching, you know, whether it's pain or discomfort or whatever it is, and they can kind of relate to this sort of egg problem . Again, they don't necessarily, they're not mattress experts. They don't know if this is a fair test, but it just kind of intuitively makes sense. So this video here got 200 million views. And when you look at the video, this is not an expensive video to make. You have one character, you have one room, you need I guess four different mattresses. And the most expensive thing would be like this piece of glass that you have to somehow get from somewhere. This is not an expensive video to make and it's still getting views today, 200 million views. So this actually gets more views than the Super Bowl . The other video that um, just took the World by Storm was the one that , uh, helped a Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club was ultimately acquired for a billion dollars. And it really all started with this ad that's 11 years old now, got 28 million views, and it is everything that a razor blade ad is not, right? Like if you think about Gillette and you think about what their ads are like mock three, right? It's all about sophistication. It's all about complexity. It's this blade that they spin around and they show you just how perfect it is. And it's got three or four or five different blades and all this stuff on the outside and it's hyper and it just looks expensive and and complicated. And so what Dollar Shave clip does is the exact opposite. They're like, they start the ad, it's like for a dollar a month you can get this blade right? And it's super simple and is it good and blah, blah, blah. It's one long continuous like scene of this dude walking around and just showing you the blade and whatever that went viral, right? It's called our blades are effing great <laugh>. Like that's what the ad is called. I'm sure you've heard of it or seen it, but you know, again, I have the link here, you can check it out. Three, same reasons that it worked , right? It's simple, it's entertaining and it's relatable. When you start buying blades, you realize how expensive they are. The fact that you can get one for a dollar, that's relatable. And because everybody's seen those other ads, this just has that kind of juxtaposition that makes you wanna keep watching. The last one, maybe just for one that's that's a little bit maybe smaller because the reality is , uh, even if you do a perfect ad, like the , the odds that you get, you know, 20 million, a hundred million views is very low. I mean, you have to have blowout success. Just two weeks ago I spoke with the founder of Walnut and they literally, they sell software for businesses to help them in their demo environment. So this is literally software that helps salespeople at B2B software businesses create demos more easily and present demos more easily. I mean, it couldn't be more boring than that, but they have this ad that they launched with that costs 'em under $10,000 that went viral. It's a very simple ad, like what you have is, it starts off with this woman who gets like coffee on her shirt. And so she goes to a store to buy a new shirt and then the, the salesperson walks her through what's very common in B2B SaaS, right? So all of these different friction points, he's like, okay, cool, like here you go. Fill out a form. Oh, how did you find us? Okay, cool, why don't you watch a demo here? You can book a call over here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And again, for people who've bought B2B SaaS, which is definitely, you know, walnut's audience, this was, you know, relatable, like this is a pain point that they have personally gone through. And that's another thing that's common here is that all of these ads, they, they actually don't really focus on the solution. They don't focus on why their product is so great, they focus on the pain point. Even Shopify, which isn't , isn't really an ad if you think about it. The pain point is that people are just on the edge of wanting to start a business. They're saying to themselves, I wanna start a business one day and this kicks them right over the edge and just goes right at that pane of kind of that, that difficulty of just getting started and just gives them that push. If you think about the Purple Mattress hat , it starts with the pain point of pain , <laugh>, for lack of a better word. And then if you look at the dollar SHA Club ad , it starts with a pain point of price. So they start off with $1, you can get this thing right? And so it's like, well , $1, that's like nothing. My blades cost 10 times that, right? So it starts off with that pain point. The Walnut ad does that too. The whole ad is just about how painful the experience of buying B2B SaaS software is, how broken it is. And that ad gets 365 re-shares all organic, 2 million views. So it was an incredible ad to get them started. Actually Walnut, because of that ad, not only got their first customers, they also frankly got their first few rounds. I mean, JOA from Walnut raised $15 million series a a year after incorporating. And that ad was a huge reason why. And then, you know, on a totally different tangent , uh, you know, I gotta be honest, I , uh, I don't really like football. Like I don't really watch football. Actually. I watch , uh, the other football, the real football, which, which many people might call soccer <laugh>. And so a few days ago I was watching highlights of messy playing soccer and one of the things that came to my mind was like, this guy is so much better than everyone else. And it boggles my mind because if you think about soccer, right? There's 4 billion fans worldwide. There are hundreds of millions of people who play this sport. It is by far the most popular sport in the world, which means it's also the most competitive. And what bothers my mind is that in such a competitive setting, someone can still be so much better than everybody else. You would think that because there's so much competition, so many people playing that sport and trying to be the best at it, that at most the best player could have only a tiny little edge over the second one. By the way, like if you don't watch soccer, you can obviously think about this in the context of football. If you look at Patrick Mahomes and just how much better he is than everyone else, right? He's a number one ranked , uh, football quarterback. He's only 28 years old, so maybe he becomes better than Tom Brady one day, who knows? But the point is, if you look at him play, and I don't, but maybe you do <laugh> , he's probably way better than the next best quarterback I can tell you about Messi , he's so much better than the next best players. I mean, maybe MB MBAs there or whatever, but like in general, when you watch him play at the professional level, maybe even at the world club level, he's so much better than everybody else. What that made me think about was just competition at a higher level, right? Like what, you know, I studied economics. One of the things you've taught Econ 1 0 1 is that competition erodes all profits. And if you go into a market where you can have some kind of monopoly, you can never make excess profits. But then I, and , and that, and I think that that concept has gone super ingrained at all levels of venture capital investing, right? Like, just like we talk a lot about market size as a concept that maybe is a little overhyped, competition is another one of those, right? One of the first questions you're gonna get as a founder is what's your mode ? What's your mode , right? Everybody's thinking about the competitive landscape, the competitive matrix. I get it. Like it makes sense to a point because go back to actually like who's the king of moats, right? Like who made even the word moat be so popular in business? Not only then the best investor in the world, Warren Buffet right now, go and look at some of the companies that he invested into, sees candies, Nebraska Furniture Mart , even one of his bigger, biggest kind of investments of all time, Coca-Cola. Now today, those companies all have moats . Their moats is the brand. And actually that's what Warren Buffett specifically pays a lot of attention to. Brand moats , right? Sees candies known as some of the best chocolate period by the people who buy them. And therefore, even if somebody else copies the quality chocolate, the association between high quality and sea candies is just so hard to break. You look at Coca-Cola again today. The brand is really the moat. But for a startup founder, starting off, what was the moat of Coca-Cola on day one? What was the moat of seas candies on day one? There was no moat. And that's kind of my point. Like even in these hyper competitive markets, the market for chocolate, the market for drinks, right? Sure, there wasn't other Coke like products when Coca-Cola came out, but people were drinking something. So you gotta get 'em to drink something else. Even in those hyper competitive markets, a product can come out and be so much better than everything else, that it gets more demand, more pricing power, and then long, long time builds A brand. Like today, obviously Messi has a quote unquote brand. I mean, he's known to be so much better that he's getting offered a billion dollars for two years, right? By the way, just to compare, and I don't wanna , uh, you know, necessarily put football down, but you know, Patrick Mahomes, he's making four $50 million in 10 years. Messi gets offered a billion dollars for two years. But anyways, that's another tangent. My point is that over time that better product drives more demand, drives more pricing power. But in the very early days in the pre-product market fit days, how much time do you need to devote to competition, to competitive strategy, to long-term modes ? Guess what? You're not gonna have a long-term mode if you don't have a long-term business. You're not gonna have a long-term business if you don't get product market fit. And we go back to that same concept because it really is the end all , be all . The only thing that really matters, going back to these examples, you look at seas candies, what seas candies needed to do was just be better than everyone else. What Coca-Cola needed to do was be better than anyone else. And if you look at more modern products, look at Notion, right? Look at Canva. $25 billion company. Look at Shopify. A hundred billion dollar company today has a moat . When Shopify started, what Mo did it have? What mode did it have relative to Wix, relative to Yahoo stores, relative to whatever other companies were around at the time? None. If you really think about it, it was just such a better product. That's the key to success in the early days, is just execution. That is so much better. And the number one thing you can do as a founder when it comes to that is hiring the right people, getting the right people on the bus. In fact, one of the other things is the number one network effect. Everybody wants network effects because network effects is supposed to be a moat . And yes, it can be of course if you're looking at like Facebook, Instagram, any social media network, social networks are a huge moat and many different other companies benefit from network effects. But you wanna know the one network effect that every single founder has access to, has the potential to build regardless of the business model. And that's people, network effects. The people you get on the bus drive, who else you get on the bus next, if you put okay people on that bus, you're going to attract, okay, people in the future. I know this is cliche, but it couldn't be more true for two reasons. Number one, people know people. So if you hire somebody who is truly amazing, guess what? They probably know other amazing people. And the second thing is, even if you get some amazing person to come to your company and a few months in they realize that other people around the table are not amazing, they're not going to stay. They're going to churn . So for those two reasons, it's so important, especially at the beginning, to get the right people on the bus in order to out execute , out, deliver and build a product that is truly so much better. Like a Canva. Again, like Canva has no modes at the beginning. They just build a better product. <laugh> truly like this, 10 x better product can be that important. Again, it depends how you're selling and all these sort of things. Product matters a lot more. For example, if you're selling into a user who is also the buyer of your product, right? If the user also pays, then if your product is 10 times better, that's gonna matter. If you sell to like the VP of X, but it's somebody down the chain that actually uses the product, well the quality of the product's not gonna matter that much. You've gotta out execute somewhere else. Maybe you've gotta out execute in terms of bd, in terms of relationships to enterprise sales. But the point is, is that don't worry so much in the early days about competition, worry about out executing period. If you do that, then competition might matter at some point in the future, then you , you buy yourself a shot at even being relevant enough that competition actually matters. But in the early days, you don't need to have like patented IP or some very clear like competitive defense or strategy or whatever. You just need to out execute everyone else. And the way that I've heard this put best, we had him on the show last week. I kind of told the story, I'll , I'll tell it again. I was 24. Uh , me and my co-founder Lee, we were 24 years old, maybe even younger, maybe 20, I guess we were probably 23 years old. And we get introduced to this founder in , uh, in Ottawa who's a successful founder. And we're two like young business dudes trying to build gym track , which is not just a tech company. He had like hardware, AI software, like way too much tech. We just were not like the right people on paper to build that at all. And Nazeem , who we had here on the show last time, he the successful founder, gives us one piece of advice. He looks at us and he just says, be so sick. They can't deny you. And I don't know why that stuck. It just stuck, right? Like be so sick they can't deny you. That's what you have to do for every single startup founder. That's really what you have to do. You have to be so sick they can't deny you. Whether that means an exceptional product, it certainly means an exceptional team. Maybe it means exceptional marketing or exceptional sales, whatever it is, it's gotta truly out execute . It's not about the competitive matrix, it's just about being so sick they can't deny you. I just gave you content that you liked so much, you actually listened to the end. And guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face, right? So you just got a bunch of content for free. And now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple Podcasts, open Spotify, open, whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button, it's actually gonna help you because it's gonna help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.