1/ David vs. Goliath? How can an SMB compete with industry goliath?

Case study of Dollar Shave Club vs. Gillette & how they eventually sold for $1B to Unilever

2/ P&G just a few years ago had spent $57B for Gillette & immediately starting applying their tried/ true formula...

Develop New Features --> Make People aware of New Features --> Run through retail distribution channels

P&G applied a "more razor for more money" formula

3/ The Mach 3 easily cleared a $750M development budget because you charge a premium price for new features!! (this is where a lot of SMB's fail in my opinion)

Every new Gillette launch they premium price +40% over the older models. Eventually razors become silly expensive

4/ This led to biggest problem facing Gillette --> adding 40% every 3 yrs made these little boxes of razors very expensive, thus tempting to steal. Retailers solution? let's secure it with a lock & key. How many of us hated waiting for a cashier to go grab that key?

5/ Enter Dollar Shave Club & utilizing a new tool, Youtube

6/ P&G still to this day run very predictable commercials that are really just apart of the background noise. Dollar Shave Club was able to build awareness off solutions to high costs & poor retail experience while cultivating a cool lifestyle brand

7/ P&G can't chase them for one big reason - their "tried & true" philosophy costs a lot of money. they need to show an ROI on those massive investments to shareholders. This is why a $0.25 cartridge needs to be sold at +$4.00 for P&G to profit.

8/ What I loved about Dollar Shave Club story & what we can all learn is not to fight Goliath on their home turf, where they thrive. Find new channels while solving the problems that customers get annoyed about while dealing with Gillette.

9/ Dollar Shave Club built a billion dollar business while never having more than 5% of the market. They took advantage of the incumbents inability to move quickly, try new tech tools and need for high margin to pay for all of that

10/ In closing I look forward in the future to sharing how we plan on disrupting another one of Goliath channels by using these same principles (using new brand awareness tools, don't fight them on their home turf, don't overcharge) . Stay tuned