TRIALS AND THE ONE-DOLLAR DOOR

In 2012 a company called Dollar Shave Club launched with a video and an offer that was mostly its name: razor blades delivered for a dollar a month, plus shipping. Four years later Unilever bought it for about $1 billion in cash.

Why the dollar worked

The dollar wasn’t a discount on a razor. It was the price of a club, and the offer’s five decisions (chapter 2) all pointed the same way:

Product: a razor and blades, a category every buyer already understood. No doubt about what it was.
Door: a membership, not a product. You joined something.
Mechanic: a price low enough to make the decision trivial, and a subscription that shipped the next box unless you stopped it.
Promise: stop overpaying for razors at the store.
Next step: built into the mechanic. The second order wasn’t a decision the customer had to make.

It fits chapter 4’s split. The buyer’s uncertainty wasn’t about the product; everyone knows what a razor does. It was about whether this was a better deal than the drugstore. A low price answered exactly that question, which is Anderson and Simester’s catalog, not Lewis’s newspaper.

And what came after

In 2023 Unilever sold a majority of Dollar Shave Club to Nexus Capital Management and kept a 35% stake, as Retail Dive reported. By then the brand was also sold through Walmart and Target, well beyond the subscription it launched with. A subscription door gets a customer in; it doesn’t guarantee that every future customer wants to come in that way.

Four kinds of trial

Trial	Answers	Selects for	Next step to build
Sample or small size, paid	“Will I like it?”	People curious enough to pay a little	A credit for the sample’s price toward the full size
Free plus shipping	“Is it worth trying at all?”	Collectors of free things	A reason to pay for the second order, set up in the first box
Low first month of a subscription	“Is this a better deal?”	Deal-sensitive buyers in known categories	A second-month price that isn’t a shock
Try at home, pay later	“How will it look on me?”	Serious buyers with a fit problem	The purchase itself; retire when stores or tools answer the fit

Every trial selects someone. Decide who before you pick the trial.

The trial-to-full-price cliff

The most common failure is the second invoice. A customer who joined at a dollar meets the real price in month two, and a large share leave. That cliff is the first offer’s fault, not the retention team’s. Two ways to soften it:

Step, don’t jump. A first month low, a second month in between, full price from the third, all shown on the first screen.
Make the full price earn itself in the first box. The first order should include whatever proves the full price is worth it: a result they can feel, a guide, a refill schedule that fits their use.

Anything that renews automatically falls under auto-renewal and negative-option laws that differ by state and change often. Show the renewal terms clearly next to the price, make cancelling easy, and have counsel read the checkout before launch.

Do this

If you run a trial, pull the share of trial customers who pay the full price once. That single rate tells you whether the trial is a door or a giveaway.
Write the second-invoice experience as carefully as the first. Then read The Offer After the Offer.

This is one chapter of The First Offer, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.