Why has Harry’s – the DTC men’s grooming brand – been so successful?
The secret is… 77,000 free email addresses.
Disappointed?
Okay, wait. We actually do have a little bit more to add to that…
Let’s build some context first
Harry’s UVP (unique value proposition) will get you an idea of what they sell:
“Quality Shaving & Grooming Products, at a Fair Price”.
The company was launched in 2013. In 2019, it was acquired by Edgewell Personal Care for $1.4B. (Not bad.)
Below we give an overview of how Harry’s had a successful launch that helped them gain that initial traction necessary to become a 10-figure mammoth in just 6 years.
The pre-launch period
The week right before their launch, Harry’s collected 100,000 emails.
According to their co-founder, Jeff Raider, 77% of those emails were acquired at no cost to them.
How did it happen?
Most companies use a funnel to generate customers.
However, the problem is that to get more leads and customers you need more traffic.
Instead, Harry’s used a growth loop
Think of a growth loop like a closed ecosystem; it feeds itself.
In Harry’s case, the growth loop was a referral system kind of like Robinhood did in its early days.
It worked like this:
Ads → Squeeze page to get an email subscriber → Referral page to get the new subscribers to invite new people
This makes the growth exponential rather than proportionate to the traffic you generate.
With this method, every new subscriber brought Harry’s 2 new additional subscribers, reducing their overall cost per lead three-fold.
Why was the referral system so successful?
Gamification!
Harry’s did a few things to help incentivize their subscribers:
– Each new subscriber was told that he could get Harry’s goods for every new subscriber he referred.
– There was a progress bar on the referral page showing how many points one generated.
– With enough referrals, subscribers could start shaving with Harry’s products for free.
They also made it easy for subscribers to refer other people by using ready-to-share referral links and a pre-populated message subscribers could share on social media.
This is kind of like Robinhood and other stock trading apps with respect to how they offer free stocks for referring new members.
Users didn’t even have to think about what to tell their friends.
Harry’s did it for them. They even tagged themselves in the message to help build popularity on social platforms.
