What Dogs of Instagram Can Teach You About Marketing
The user-generated feed of dog photos has become a hashtag and, in a way, an online movement. The couple behind ‘Dogs of Instagram’ started it as a pet project and now have four million followers and a very successful ecommerce business.
The founders used a formula they don’t teach in business school:
1. Start an Instagram account about something you love
2. Lovingly build a community around that shared passion and watch the numbers grow
3. Translate that community into a growing media & a retail business beloved by customers
Oh, and along the way, find the love of your life. This is the story of Dogs of Instagram, an immensely popular Instagram account, and Lucy & Co, the business that grew out of it.
When husband-and-wife duo Ahmed El Shourbagy and Ashley Paguyo El Shourbagy met in July 2011, Ahmed had been posting photos to his new Instagram account, @dogsofinstagram, for a week and a half. Ahmed had an interest in social media and an itch to do something entrepreneurial. When he posted a photo of his Boston terrier, Lucy, to Instagram, he noticed that it got a lot more likes and comments than some of his other early photos. This aligned with his observation that many of the most popular photos on the platform at any given time were photos of dogs.
One of their first dates was a brainstorming session for the account.
“We didn’t have hopes or aspirations of it becoming our full-time job or monetization, but we knew that we were onto something. It was really fun, in the very early days, to sit down and say, ‘Where do we want to see this grow? What are our goals and our objectives? What are some of the values that @dogsofinstagram stands by?” – Ashley Paguyo El Shourbagy, Co-Founder Lucy & Co.
Now, more than six years in, @dogsofinstagram has 4 million followers and they’ve spun off a ecommerce business built on Shopify that sells dog products, called Lucy & Co. named after their terrier.
@Dogsofinstagram is powered by followers submitting content. When Ahmed created the account, he was just posting generic dog pictures to the account to get it started, but from the outset, he specified an email address in the bio where people could submit their photos. He received his first submission when he had only 70 followers. Today, the Twin-Cities-based couple receives between 100 to 300 submissions per day.
“ It wasn’t like having a million followers on Instagram meant that we could just open any ecommerce company and make a ton of sales. That’s what people think, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. We really had to work hard at product. We had to do everything that any other ecommerce startup would have to do. We have to be very thoughtful about what we’re making and we have to market it in a way that resonates with people.
The only difference is, we had sort of this free and organic marketing channel to use. But if your stuff’s not good, if it’s not priced right, if you can’t get it to the customer, you can’t have good customer service, it still won’t work. So, it’s been a slow process growing Lucy & Co., but I think that’s the right way to do it. ” – Ahmed El Shourbagy, Co-Founder Lucy & Co.
