Dollar Shave Club

A founder with roughly $4,500 in production budget filmed himself walking through a warehouse cracking jokes about razors. Within 48 hours the video had millions of views, the website had crashed, and 12,000 orders had landed. Michael Dubin started Dollar Shave Club in 2011 on a premise everyone already suspected: Gillette's cartridges were overpriced, and men kept paying anyway. Five years later, Unilever bought the company for about $1 billion.

For founders and operators, this is the case that proves cheap content can beat a war chest, and it pins down exactly why. The video did not win on production value or a celebrity face. It won on something sharper. The case sharpens the decision of how to define who you are for and who you are against so clearly that a single shareable asset does the work of a multimillion-dollar campaign.