Liquid Death founder and CEO Mike Cessario explains how contrarian ideas that initially seem ridiculous or trigger negative reactions are often the strongest business concepts.
“When you kind of know you're on to something, when people sort of have a really emotional, even if negative reaction to it at first, you know that you're probably in good territory. The stuff when you come up with something and people you talk to say, oh yeah, that's genius. It probably means there's a lot of other people already doing something similar. Like it makes too much sense, you know.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mike Cessario
Insight
Cessario: Many people from big success stories just take credit for one genius
“How many times do you realize that like all the people that work on stuff, there's maybe one evil genius that's doing kind of everything and everybody else sort of takes the credit. Then you put them on their own. And it's like, cause I remember the first pres…”
Mike CessarioJul 11, 2024▶ 23:35How Liquid Death built a $1.4 BILLION brand around water (founder Mike Cessario) | Masters of Scale
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Liquid Death outsells Monster's canned water 4-to-1 in a major southern chain
“And, you know, we just looked in a recent in a convenience store, a big chain in the south, and like, even at more money, Liquid Debt is out selling it like four to one.”
Mike CessarioJul 11, 2024▶ 1:08:53How Liquid Death built a $1.4 BILLION brand around water (founder Mike Cessario) | Masters of Scale
What-if
Cessario: Liquid Death would have died in every traditional focus group
“Clinical focus groups, I don't think really work. Like you can learn a little bit from them, but it's, liquid death would have died in every focus group.”
Mike CessarioJul 11, 2024▶ 55:08How Liquid Death built a $1.4 BILLION brand around water (founder Mike Cessario) | Masters of Scale
AssertionContradicted
Cessario: Liquid Death reached #1 flavored sparkling brand in convenience store channel
“And then by the end of last year, so that was like not even, maybe a year and a half of the, of that product being on the market, we were the number one flavored sparkling brand in total dollars in the entire convenience store channel.”
Mike CessarioJul 11, 2024▶ 1:07:58How Liquid Death built a $1.4 BILLION brand around water (founder Mike Cessario) | Masters of Scale
AssertionSupported
Monster manufactured fake energy cans filled with water for Warped Tour bands
“So they were never going to force bands to drink energy drinks that they didn't want to drink. So they had to manufacture this special product for the bands that was water, but it looked like their product on stage.”
Mike CessarioJul 11, 2024▶ 1:27How Liquid Death built a $1.4 BILLION brand around water (founder Mike Cessario) | Masters of Scale
Insight
Cessario: Healthy Products Are Rarely Marketed in a Funny, Cool Way
“Healthy products are really never marketed in a funny, cool way. It's always unhealthy stuff that's really funny, like beer and candy and junk food and all of that.”
Mike CessarioJul 11, 2024▶ 2:23How Liquid Death built a $1.4 BILLION brand around water (founder Mike Cessario) | Masters of Scale
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, about 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.