The article seems to imply Dollar Dhave Club succeeded with the help of AWS. I don't get it. These guys aren't Google. It's a simple static site with a few dynamic forms. Anyone could've built that easily in 1998, let alone 2006.
I think that is the key here, Internet media helped them disseminate their message very rapidly.
I would also argue, easy access to capital was very important. Once that original video went viral, they had to really pour on the online ad-spend to acquire customers. Seeing as how their customer acquisition costs are high, the more customers they got, the more money they lost every month! Capital is key!
They were wildly successful before they were on AWS. I believe they started off on magento, then drupal before writing their own software (once they were having a lot of success).
They don't use Amazon for fulfillment. They used some other 3PL's and are now leasing and running their own distribution centers. In the beginning, Dubin was packing those razors up in his living room!
Source: founder a close personal friend.
I suspect what he meant was that it's not a site that requires or makes use of any client side wizardry. Even if it does, it certainly doesn't need to - it's a web fronted database; a CRUD app.
Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace, and other good hosts have been around way before AWS and offer very good VPS services that one can scale with ease. Auto scaling is not unique to Amazon. It isn't a cloud thing either. One could scale quite flexibly for at least 20 years now.
Unfortunately all the misinformed boot camp coding hipsters don't know their history but love to be plenty opinionated about technology as an artistic movement. And you get these wide reaching grabs for whimsical awe, full of misinformation.
Dollar Shave Club was nothing but a marketing success. The tech has absolutely nothing to do with it. Cute narrative attempt, I guess.
EC2 was game changing for certain reasons but what you mention sbout 'enterprise' was never an issue.
Edit: other guy beat me to this. Either way I agree that AWS wasn't integral to DSC's success.
Is this not how it usually plays out?
I thought the same when I read AWS in the article.
The author's point about AWS was not really well articulated, but the above is his main point. All that's "changed" is the distribution model for retail - also known as E-Commerce.