How a $1M Beard Shaving Stunt Put His Razors on the Map

Frustrated trying to stand out from competitors with traditional marketing? Serial entrepreneur Phil Masiello, founder of Crunch Growth, woke up one day with an epiphany. He offered $1 million to shave a famous baseball player’s iconic beard using his struggling razor company’s blades.

The outlandish PR move sparked outraged social media debates, global press coverage, and most importantly — sales. Hear how this stunt thrust Phil into the spotlight and laid the brand’s foundations when conventional tactics failed.

Learn his systematic approach to truly understanding your target customer. Find out why he warns startups to nail product-market fit before big vision messaging. Let Phil inspire creative attention-grabbing ideas tailored to your unique niche.

If you need affordable ways to launch an unknown product, don’t miss his scrappy growth hacking wisdom. Takeaways abound for fellow bootstrapping founders tired of being unnoticed.

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Transcript

Jim James (00:00)
Hello and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Now, if you're like me, you started a business or two without necessarily all the resources that you need to do all the marketing, get noticed for all the wonderful things that you can do. Well, my guest today is gonna tell us a great story about a razor, a million dollars and a famous baseball pitcher's beard. He's also gonna tell us about

how you can build a brand without a lot of money by being resourceful and a few other bits and pieces. And he's also gonna share with us about his favorite book, which comes from the Orient, from Asia in fact. Phil Masiello is joining us from Baltimore and he's the founder and CEO of a company called Crunch Growth. Phil, welcome to the show.

Phil Masiello (00:44)
Hi Jim, thank you. Thank you for having me. I enjoy it.

Jim James (00:48)
Me too, because we've got a lot in common, including you shared that you spent time in China, which obviously close to my heart, we both have daughters in fact from China. But we're here today to talk about business and about marketing. Let's start first of all with who you are and where you're from, and then you must tell us all about the million dollar offer for shaving off a beard. Phil over to you.

Phil Masiello (00:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, my pleasure. So I originally a New Yorker born and raised in the Bronx in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. So I grew up as a, as a, as a, uh, you know, as a, uh, a sports, uh, um, enthusiast, but I, I founded my first business when I was 27 years old. It was a total disaster. We'll get it. I'm sure we'll go back and forth on that at some other time. I went on after that business.

I felt I needed more education, so I took the money when I sold it and I went to graduate school at the University of Maryland. That's how I got down to Baltimore. Subsequent to that, I founded a couple of other businesses. One was a food retail stores, which got purchased by a supermarket chain. Then I founded a beauty brand with a supermodel, Raw Beauty with Carol Alt. It was a shopping channel brand all around the world. Then we were in Ulta, Sephora, and all those big chains.

But I had this idea and I built 800razors.com. That was really a struggle because we were doing all the things we understood how to do from a marketing perspective. We were running ads, we were doing search engine optimization, we were doing content, we were doing all these things. And it wasn't working. We were getting some orders

but...

And we didn't have a huge budget. We didn't, we, we couldn't sit there. We were trying to think of all these things to do. We talked about getting an RV and going into downtown New York and shaving people on the street and just things to get noticed because what you're trying to do is get noticed and, and break your brand out from the clutter. And I woke up one morning and again, I'm a, I'm a sports fan. I woke up one morning and Brian Wilson, who was a famous pitcher for the San Francisco giants had gotten traded a year before.

He had Tommy John surgery and they traded him to the Dodgers. And this was the first time he was going to pitch in a year. And he was known, not only was he known for being a pitcher, but he was known for having this epic beard. I mean, it was a beautiful beard. And it was about eight inches, 10 inches long. So I woke up and thought, hey, let's offer him a million dollars to shave that beard with our razor. And we sent a message to his people,

and said, we'd like to offer Brian a million dollars to shave his beard. They said, we'll discuss it with Brian and that's all we needed. We just needed to have that email so we could say, we are now in discussions with Brian Wilson to shave his beard with our razor. And what happened was fantastic because people were outraged at us. They were screaming at us on social media, on email that we would offer a million dollars to an already millionaire to shave.

Jim James (04:02)
Thank you.

Phil Masiello (04:03)
The second part was people were sending us pictures on social media of all the body parts that they would shave with a price tag. I'll shave this for 10,000, I'll shave this for 5,000. And it just became this event and snowballed. And then the press got involved and we were getting interviewed why we would do this, what are we trying to do, you know, all around the world, France, Japan, and this went on for about a week, 10 days. And TMZ caught

Brian Wilson coming out of a gym in LA and they asked him if he was going to shave his beard and he said, "I'm not shaving my beard for anything, any amount of money." Well, it just started it all. Again, people were outraged that he would turn down the million dollars. And so the long and short of it was that all these things that we were doing, these traditional marketing techniques weren't working, but this sort of broke us through the clutter. This is what got

us launched and got our foundation of orders, got customers, got us noticed, really did what we were trying to do.

Jim James (05:07)
Phil, I love that story because it really is out of left field if I can use that expression. And really, as you say, a great example of being resourceful and having an idea rather than going through kind of a standard process. But you woke up one morning and you thought of this idea. Do you now at Crunch Growth help startups and...

Phil Masiello (05:12)
Ahahaha!

Jim James (05:36)
and entrepreneurs to kind of have those kind of ideas in a more regular fashion, because if you're just waiting for inspiration, sometimes you can wait too long. So how are you helping at Crunch Growth with

that?

Phil Masiello (05:51)
Yeah, so at Crunch Growth, we're a full service digital agency. We handle the entire e-commerce ecosystem. But what we're really good at and what we try and focus on, and it doesn't matter what size company you are, start up to half a billion or a billion dollars, we always run into the same problem, which is, do you really understand who your customer is, right? Who your target customer is? Do you really understand that persona? Because when you do, you can sit down and sort of think

where those people are, where that target customer is and how I can get to them, maybe in a unique way. So to answer your question, yes, we work with all kinds of brands and we try and get them to think outside that box and say, okay, you can run a million dollars worth of ads, but what's it gonna get you? It may get you a one-to-one return, but if you could figure out who your customer is, and I'll give you another example.

We had a game company that worked with us for years. And it was a unique product. It was part digital, part physical. And it was really a neat game. And once people got it in their hands, once people started playing it, they really enjoyed it. And so we talked about it a lot. And they were based in New York. So they started going to

places where they knew their customer was a Gen Z millennial. They knew what type of person it was. So they started to go to these hangouts where those people were and playing the game, which evolved into turning it into events at these places and recording them. They would always have somebody there recording it with their iPhone, not a major production, and putting it on social media. So now they know who their customer is. They're showing their customer

their target customer playing the game and enjoying it, and which got people interested to go to the website and buy the product. And that was sort of how they launched. Because they had put all their money, and we see this all the time, they had taken, especially with startups, they had taken all their effort, all their money, into building a great product and not thinking about the marketing of it and getting it out there into people's hands.

Jim James (08:05)
Phil, I think this idea of going out and being with the customer, I had the director of research at a company called Ipsos Mori and he talked about going out and actually watching what people do because often that's different to what they say they do and the importance of being there. But that is really based on knowing who that customer is, isn't it? Because otherwise you don't know where to go.

Many, many people, myself included, struggle with who the customer is because it's the old story that we think, well, if I'm selling to everybody, I'm going to have a bigger business. I'm likely to have more opportunity. Phil, why is it not the case? Why is it that if you're theoretically going after a bigger market, it actually becomes a smaller business?

Phil Masiello (09:03)
Well, you can't please everyone and you can't speak to everyone. The way you speak to somebody who is, say, a 65-year-old retiree versus a 25-year-old are two different methods of talking. And speaking today is video, speaking is text, speaking is all these different mediums that we have. So...

If you're trying to be very broad, and when we were in the razor business, people say, oh, everybody shaves, so you can be very broad, but that's not true. There's always a core customer. And yes, so, let me use Cadillac as a good example. Cadillac is a car really for over 50 people, or people over the age of 50, predominantly men, okay? But when you see a Cadillac commercial, they will never show

a 50 year old man. They show beautiful young women. They show young guys in a nice suit, because that becomes aspirational. The guy that's over 50 doesn't want to believe he's over 50. He wants to believe he's that 40 year old guy who's got this beautiful woman. So what they're trying to do is talk to that group, that 40 year old, to get them to buy the cars. Yes, over 50 is going to buy your car.

Yes, over 60 is going to buy a car. Maybe even a 25 year old will buy your car. But your core customer, the target that you're trying to get is this one. This 35 to 45 year old, let's say. Well, it's the same thing in any business. So if you know who your customer is, you know who your core customer is, the ones who are going to engage with you, you sort of build your persona around that. So now instead of just speaking language, you're speaking to a person.

We're big advocates of building customer personas to say, look, our customer is 35 years old, he's an engineer and he likes to do this, he eats this kind of food. Now I can build, now in the office we can talk about, we can give him a name and we can say that we're going to target to, we're marketing to Joe. And this is how we're gonna market. And so it becomes a different style of thinking and a more effective way.

Because you're always going to get bleed, you're always going to get people younger and older that are going to buy your product, but if you can hone in on who your target is, you're more effective.

Jim James (11:31)
Yeah, I guess those are what we might call outliers, aren't they? Those people that maybe confuse you slightly because they buy something but they're not part of the core demographic. Phil, you yourself, and you and I have something else in common, is that we both have shows. You know, I have a radio show on the local radio station here, Radio Bath, but you have a TV show. So, I'm full of admiration for that. I'd love to hear how you're doing that. What's the…

impact and the strategy behind having your own TV program because that again is being resourceful, isn't it, rather than having resources. So, help us to understand the show and how that came about and what you do with that.

Phil Masiello (12:16)
Yeah. So the show is, it, it airs on E 360 TV, which also airs on Apple TV and Roku and all these other places, fire TV. But what I did was when I, when I built the show, it's really about, it's really about entrepreneurship and being resourceful, right. And I interview entrepreneurs who have started and founded their companies, their brands, large, small.

You know, successful, maybe multiple entrepreneurs, people that have failed once. And what we're trying to do is the target audience is really aspiring entrepreneurs or business people or maybe somebody who's already in it, who's got a business that's three or four years old that they just can't get over the hump. They're just stagnant, don't have a lot of resources, don't have a lot of money. And so they listen to me interview these other entrepreneurs and they hear

how the struggles and what they've done and how they've overcome, because we all have overcome these humps. I don't care. The second reason I built the show is because I think aspiring entrepreneurs or people that are in it, they listen to these high powered entrepreneurs that own these huge businesses and they get a warped sense of reality.

They think that, oh my God, I'm doing something wrong because I didn't go from zero to a billion dollars in four years and I wasn't able to raise $600 million. And so we wanted to show them reality. People that have built businesses that have gone from maybe zero to 500 million, 200 million, 50 million, whatever it is. People that have built businesses for different options. Some people don't want to build a billion dollar business, they just want a lifestyle business, something that gives them

a good income. But what you see throughout, and we've probably done 50 shows already, you see throughout the same thing. An entrepreneur starts a business, his business plan is what he had envisioned or he or her, what they had envisioned, and it's not working that way. So they have to pivot, right? They have to look at something differently, or they don't have the money to market

themselves correctly and so they have to think outside the box. So we give them all these anecdotes and all these, these real life, real life businesses, real life problems, real life struggles. And I think that helps people in a way. And so it certainly helps us because I like listening to the stories.

Jim James (14:57)
Well, Phil, and that's why I have The UnNoticed Entrepreneur as a title as well, because actually most of us are in effect sort of running in local marathons. We're not running in elite, you know, in Olympics. Most of us are, you know, playing sport or achieving in a sort of a balanced way. We're not necessarily all just in that 1% of any pursuit. So that's exactly a similar sort of feeling to the one that I have about this show. But...

Phil Masiello (15:08)
That's right.

Jim James (15:25)
What is the impact on Crunch Growth of having a show? Because it takes your time, takes your energy, it could be a noble cause. But if someone, if we're listening to this right now, going, you know what, I could do a radio show or I could do a TV show. What's the ROI, beyond satisfaction, Phil? What does it give you in Crunch Growth?

Phil Masiello (15:47)
Yeah, that's an excellent question. So what it does is, A, it exposes Crunch Growth to more people. And that target is really business people, right? We're here to help businesses grow. That's what we're called. It's Crunch Growth Revenue Acceleration Agency. So we're trying to figure out how to get you over that hump. So people hear us on the show. They hear the methods that we've employed. They hear us talking to these entrepreneurs,

and then they get in touch with us because maybe they need help. And it's not just startups that have contacted us. It's businesses that have maybe been stuck between $50 and $60 million for three years and can't get over that hump. They've sort of stagnated. They need some fresh ideas. So that really is part of our lead generation strategy if you wanna use that term.

Jim James (16:43)
Yeah, no, I think that's one of a really great example of how you're leveraging a platform because you're getting both from a technological point of view, you're getting a platform, aren't you? And then also you're getting audiences that are already on those platforms being introduced to you. It was a very cost effective way of doing it. Phil Masiello, you and I actually, we both started our first companies at the age of 27. You mentioned the eyesight of mine

by moving to Singapore to start my first company at 27. And also have my fair litany of failures there. But this is about you and not me. But if there's a mistake that you might have made, if I could be so bold that you'd suggest that I don't make from a marketing point of view, what would that be, do you think?

Phil Masiello (17:37)
I've made many, many mistakes, but I'll give you one example when I started. I actually made this mistake twice, both times in the same sort of industry. I started my first business when I was 27 years old, and it was retail store food, specialty food and catering.

I made a mistaking in getting talked into doing a direct mail campaign and producing this beautiful flyer and putting it in mailboxes. And at the time, it was really the dawn of the internet and I allowed this to happen. And it was just a total flop. I spent a tremendous amount of money that I didn't have on this to get,

I think it was a half of a percentage return and really did nothing. It did nothing to expand the brand. It did nothing to get sales. It did nothing. And I actually made the mistake again when I built the Daily Markets in Washington, DC and everybody said, oh, you're in a city and you've got all these apartment buildings. We should do a direct mail. We'll hit the apartment buildings. And I did it again and it got...

It did absolutely nothing for us. And twice I made that same mistake.

Jim James (19:08)
But Phil, I have to ask, what's your analysis? Why did direct mail to the general, into the local area for the store, why did it fail? What was the learning?

Phil Masiello (19:21)
People don't pay attention to what's in their mailbox anymore. They haven't since, I think, the 70s or 80s. When you watch the behavior of people, and I'm guilty of it, we get the mail. We sort through, get the important stuff, and then we put the rest in the recycling bin. And that's exactly the behavior that people do today. It's not when you think about the age group of people...

And again, I broke my own rule from not paying attention to who my target is. You look at the age group of people that are raising families today. They're most of their bills are coming electronically. And this has been going on for the past 20 years. Most of our bills are coming electronically. And if they are getting paper bills, they, they look at their mail. They find the ones that are important and they throw everything else in the, in the, in the garbage. So it's, it's totally ineffective.

Jim James (20:15)
Very, very interesting. Kind of almost the medium has expired in that sense, hasn't it? Not the medium is the message, but in this case, the medium just has expired without message. Phil, you've gone on to build other successful business like 800raises.com and Crunch Growth Revenue Generation Acceleration Agency.

Phil Masiello (20:20)
Yeah.

Jim James (20:40)
Can I ask you to give us your wisdom, your sage wisdom of, what's the one thing that you maybe recommend to all of your clients that they do that's kind of a cornerstone of every successful resourceful strategy?

Phil Masiello (20:57)
Yeah. I'll tell you something that comes up an awful lot. And what we preach is you've got a product and find the people who are going to buy your product and understand who they are. We hear it all the time and I know people are going to say, oh, he's going to say, you know, focus on the customer. It's true. I find I don't care how big of a company it is,

you have to understand your customer and you have to understand their behavior in order to figure out how to market effectively to them. And again, you could be a billion dollar company. I'll tell you the same thing because I guarantee you that if I sat in a room with somebody from a billion dollar company, they would come up with all these different pieces of who their customer is, but they wouldn't be able to put it all together and say, this is our customer. Because everybody thinks, well,

I'm in a supermarket, so I sell to everybody. Well, maybe, maybe not.

Jim James (21:58)
Well, interesting. So really, for all of that, it comes back to who you serve. Right? And that's the basis. I mean, there's a lot of talk about start with why. Just tell me, Phil, there's all this talk about, you know, start with why. And it goes back before Simon Sinek, of course, you know, earlier, marketeers were talking about the need to decide who you're going to sell to and why. Do you tell people to start with why or with who?

Phil Masiello (22:27)
I understand start with why. I understand why I exist. Okay, and I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you something I tell every single startup. I don't care about go out with your minimum viable product and find a customer who wants to buy your product. Find that customer. Because if you can't find a customer to buy your product, then you're dead in the water. I don't care why you exist at that point

because nobody's going to buy it. There's actually a skincare brand, a men's skincare brand that just filed for chapter seven, liquidation. I can't, off the top of my head, I can't remember what it was, but they had a beautiful why. Men want to look younger, eye cream, effective skincare, all those whys, but at the end of the day, they just filed chapter seven and the CEO even admitted, there's just not a big enough market for people who want our product. Well,

Had you done that in the beginning, had you gone out to find who's gonna buy your product, you would have figured that out early on and not wasted your investor dollars, your dollars, et cetera. So again, I'm not discounting why, I like why, but first you have to figure out who's gonna buy your product so that you can figure out the market.

Jim James (23:46)
Yeah, and I'm glad you said that because for all of the sort of esoteric interest in start with why, which is a very appealing message, it's not a very functional one because you can end up serving what you want, not necessarily what the customer wants to give you money for, right? And then although, you know, with the men's cosmetics and so on, if they're looking for liquidation, I could have some of that over here because I'm definitely in the market for ingredients to make me look younger.

Phil, if I can find them, ship them to me.

Phil Masiello, Chapter 11, there's someone's opportunity there. Phil, with all of your expertise, I know you've actually written a number of books yourself, but what would be your book or podcast recommendation, do you think, to me and my fellow unnoticed?

Phil Masiello (24:16)
I'm sorry.

I go back to, this was something I learned in graduate school and one of my marketing professors turned me on to this book, The Art of War. And I continue to go back to it. And it's not about, I know people say, well, there's all different reasons to read that book, but I think about it in terms of strategy. It helps me think about strategy because everything we do,

Jim James (24:49)


Phil Masiello (25:04)
whether it's marketing or whether it's advertising or whether it's business development or whatever, you have to have a strategy. And that book, it's easy to listen to, easy to read. I have it on four different formats. And I just, to me, it's something I keep in my back pocket to continue to go to and get my strategy brain refreshed.

Jim James (25:25)
Yeah, and this is Sun Tzu's Art of War, right, which is fantastic. And also probably ties back into, you know, you having a daughter from China as well, right, and there's a nice symmetry there. But if anyone hasn't read it, it's a brilliant, brilliant treatise, really. And he addresses a number of issues, including not in taking on your competition head on, for example, very interesting strategy about not actually going to battle but winning the war.

Phil Masiello (25:29)
Sun Tzu, yeah.

Yeah.

Jim James (25:53)
Phil, you've taken on many battles and plenty, many wars too. If you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

Phil Masiello (25:59)
Well, you can go to crunchgrowth.com. I also have philmasiello.com, both of them. And you can always contact me at phil@philmasiello.com. I have the TV show, Think Engage Thrive, which is on E360 TV. So I'm easy to find. You can, and I believe me, I'm pretty responsive.

Jim James (26:21)
You're easy to find, easy to chat to. Phil, thank you for joining me so much.

Phil Masiello (26:25)
Thank you, Jim. It was great. I enjoyed it.

Jim James (26:28)
Me too. And just for the record, if you've got a million and you want me to shave my goatee, I am open. I'm open to offers. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a million, I would take a lot less or maybe just a year's supply of free razors. I'm easy to please. Plus, if you can send those lotions my way. Phil, thank you for joining me from Baltimore today.

Phil Masiello (26:34)
haha

Hahaha.

I appreciate that.

That's my pleasure, my pleasure. It was fun.

Jim James (26:54)
Well, it's been great fun and we don't always manage to find guests that have got the depth of experience. Phil and I both started our first businesses when we were 27, which is quite a few years ago. So it's wonderful to have the depth of his experience on the show. So many, many takeaways, but probably the real key one is to start with who. It's not a business until someone's willing to pay you for what you do. So I'm sure you're bearing that in mind, but if you haven't thought of that

today, then just remind yourself who you're selling to. And you've been listening to me, Jim James, over here in Wiltshire today. Phil Masiello in Baltimore has been joining me as my guest. If you've enjoyed this, do please rate the show on your player, it really, really helps. And follow the show because we also love to know that you are getting this and every episode, every Tuesday and Thursday, of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Thank you for listening to this episode with me, Jim James. And a tour of me again encourage you to just

Keep on communicating.