By DARREN DAHL | Published: April 10, 2013
In March 2012, a video promoting a razor-blade business called Dollar Shave Club took YouTube by storm. It featured the company’s founder, Michael Dubin, who had spent the bulk of his career in digital media and marketing and had performed improvisational comedy as a hobby, walking briskly through a warehouse as he issued off-color wisecracks and encouraged men to buy his razor blades on a subscription basis for as little as $2 a month.
The traffic attracted by the video, which has now been watched almost 10 million times, crashed the company’s server in the first hour. Frantic, Mr. Dubin placed calls to his hosting company and almost every programmer he had ever met. Once he got the server back up, he enlisted a team of friends and contractors to help him print labels and pack boxes by hand in a warehouse in Gardena, Calif., in an effort to fulfill the 12,000 orders that arrived in the first 48 hours.
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