Finding inspiration at Warped Tour

MIKE CESSARIO: A couple buddies from high school were roadies for this band that was on the Warped Tour, and they hit me up. “Hey, Mike, we’re going to be in Denver. You should come to the show.”

JEFF BERMAN: This is the summer of 2009. Mike Cessario has backstage passes for the Warped Tour in Denver. The headliners include NOFX and Bad Religion. Pretty much heaven for a guy like Mike who grew up playing in punk rock bands. 

CESSARIO: The way they have the backstage of Warped Tour since it’s outside is all these tour buses are all parked in this one, like, sealed-off area. And the bands are all hanging out on each other’s tour buses, sitting in lawn chairs outside. And these guys, you know, they were drinking like Monster energy cans. And I remember asking them, “You guys just ripping energy drinks out here in the hot sun?”

And they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s water.”

I’m like, “What do you mean?” 

And they’re like, “On the can, it says tour water on the bottom.”

Basically what I find out is as the official sponsor, they don’t want anybody drinking something that’s not their beverage on stage. 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.

BERMAN: Right, because these guys, if they’re pounding energy drinks out in the sun, their hearts are going to explode.

CESSARIO: So these guys are on stage drinking what looks like Monster to all these kids in the crowd, but it was really just water. And I remember thinking that, one, it was interesting. I mean, two, I thought it was a little fucked up. 

BERMAN: Because the trickery of it.

CESSARIO: The trickery, it was trickery. Right? And then it just always stuck in my head, it’s just like a brand marketing thing. And yeah, basically 10 years later, creating Liquid Death.

BERMAN: Liquid Death is the beverage company Mike founded. It’s now valued at $1.4 billion. Mike’s irreverent approach to marketing has made his drinks a cultural phenomenon. In today’s episode, he reveals lessons about scaling a brand — lessons he learned the hard way. 

I’m Jeff Berman, your host. 

Punk & entrepreneurial roots

BERMAN: Liquid Death launched in 2019 selling spring water in a tallboy can. The skull logo looks like something you might see tattooed on the bicep of a roided-out drummer or painted on the deck of a skateboard. So it’s probably not surprising that Mike was into punk rock as a teenager.

CESSARIO: Eighth grade, I’ve started playing guitar and we were in a punk band that we and some friends had.

BERMAN: Where’d you grow up?

CESSARIO: Maybe like 30 minutes outside Philadelphia in like the cornfields. All we did was play music after school. We played shows, we listened to music like that was our thing. But I was always sort of on the creative side. So in the band, I was the guy that was designing the t-shirts and silk screening them, going to Kinko’s with glue and cutting them out to make show flyers. And the guy who was a drummer in our band, his dad was an award-winning Philadelphia graphic designer named Dave Bell. And I would see in his house all this cool design work he was doing for clients. And that was when I was probably 16, 17 when I realized that graphic design was a real job, so ultimately, I decided to go to college for graphic design. But then after a couple of semesters, I switched over to the advertising program. And then my first ad job at a school was for this agency in Boulder called Crispin.

Creating disruptive advertisements for corporate clients

BERMAN: What’s interesting about this is you have these, both punk roots and entrepreneurial roots, right? I mean, you’re silk screening, you’re figuring it out, you’re making the merch.  And so, even the most progressive of creative ad agencies are still Corporate entities. So did you like that? Did you hate it? How did that resonate with you?

CESSARIO: There’s all different kinds of agencies, right? And Kristen Porter was the one that I thought felt the most punk rock in spirit, like they did really disruptive stuff. But the clients are incredibly corporate, right? Like Volkswagen, Domino’s Pizza, Burger King. I mean, these were giant clients they had that were very corporate. And I think that was what I realized in my advertising career is I kind of could fit in with the creative weirdos a bit. But it was still, you know, wanting to do really great creative work that these corporate clients just did not want to buy.

BERMAN: Right, right. They want, they want Don Draper coming in and, and hitting them with something that’s on the nose for them, where you’re creating stuff that is really transgressive.

CESSARIO: I feel like in big corporations, everybody’s just trying to keep their jobs. So it’s like, no one wants to take any risk. Like I remember, you know, working on frozen pizzas and it’s like what they think is the most critical part of their advertising is what they call the cheese pull shot. Where it’s like the shot of the slice being lifted up with the cheese, and they’ll spend half a million dollars just to get that shot. And it’s like, really? Do you think as a frozen pizza company in a world where there’s a pizza shop on every corner that your problem is: ‘oh, if we make it look really good, it’ll change people’s minds about frozen.’ No, but if you think about the context of clinical focus groups and things like that, of course. ‘What makes you hungrier? This or this? That? Oh, see? That’s what we should do.’ But it’s like, that might not actually be the business problem that you need to solve.

BERMAN: And were you pushing the envelope with them? Or was it like, these guys aren’t even going to listen to what I’m saying?

CESSARIO: They’re not going to listen to the small agency creative director too much. How I would try to sell this to folks is ‘look, I want to turn your, whatever it is, million-dollar marketing investment into 20 million dollars in awareness. I want to give you the most insane ROI and make you look like a genius to your bosses. That’s what I want to do.’ To truly kind of entertain people and make something they’ve never seen before to be like, ‘Oh my god, Did you see this? It’s so great, you have to see it,’ and then you have people generating free media for you.

“I need to create my own product”

BERMAN: Mike enjoyed the work at Crispin, but after a couple of years slogging through the intense hours expected there, he moved on to another ad agency. Then another. His paychecks were getting bigger. But … he was bored. Big corporate clients were too timid to try his most innovative ideas.

CESSARIO: So then I started thinking rationally, ‘okay, well if clients are my barrier, I know that I have the ability to make great work, but the clients that I have in these particular work scenarios are controlling what gets made or not made.’ I said, ‘I need to make my own product. Then I can control the marketing for it. If we can sell the product, okay. If I’m going to create my own product, what’s like a stale category where there’s just nothing exciting happening in it?’

So then I found the only alcohol category I could find where there was not a single cool brand was brandy. There was literally dust on the bottles on the shelves. And then I tasted it, and I’m like, ‘wow, this is actually a lot like bourbon.’ Bourbon was the fastest-growing thing at the time. So clearly this is a brand problem, not a taste problem. I can solve a brand problem. So I said, ‘okay, let’s brand this in a way that the masses can connect with what it actually tastes like better because most people perceive brandy to be like sweet liqueur, but it’s not that, so all these people that love bourbon and wanted to like, let’s just make it look like a bourbon.’ And then, you know, I came up with a name that, coming from my background, which was growing up in punk rock, there’s a band called Hot Water Music from Florida. And one of their songs was called Western Grace. So I said, ‘yeah, let’s just name it Western Grace.’ So there was like a nuanced tie to the world of punk rock, but still this very Americana feeling.

BERMAN: Yeah.

CESSARIO: So that was my first real entrepreneurial kind of get thrown into the fire.

Mike Cessario’s first entrepreneurial endeavor

BERMAN: So, I mean, raise money? Like, what’d you do? 

CESSARIO: So, the two people I started with, they were based in Philadelphia. So they said, ‘Hey, if we’re going to do this, you need to move back to Philadelphia. You can’t be in San Francisco,’ in a way. I begrudgingly left the West Coast to go back to Philly, took a whatever day job for an agency that, you know, was not doing cool stuff by my standards

BERMAN: But it pays the bills.

CESSARIO: It pays the bills. We were able to start so small with that. We didn’t have to raise much money. I convinced my parents to loan me five grand so that I could just put something in.

BERMAN: So why are we not here talking about Western Grace? Why are we here having Liquid Death conversation, what happens with Western Grace?

CESSARIO: I mean, again, early on, no idea how to start a company, I mean, alcohol just being so regulated. 

BERMAN: Where did that hold you back?

CESSARIO: So from a brand perspective, right? I mean, my contribution is, ‘Hey, we can make a really cool marketing brand, push this out there.’ But the reality was, ‘Hey, we’re not going to have any money to do that for a long time.’ And there’s all these restrictions against what you can run on social media for alcohol because it’s age-restricted and how you can do that. And you know, the other, probably the bigger part, was I sort of got business married to the wrong two people. Because they both came from the same place, same thinking, it was always two versus one.  Anything I wanted to do that would just get shot down the other tricky part was they’re like, ‘Hey, if you want to maintain equal share in the company as us, you have to work on it for 40 hours a week with no pay.’ And I’m like, well, I can’t do that. Right? So by the time we kind of got to that, I’m just like, ‘you know what? I’ll take my little vested piece that I have. You guys go grow it from here. I’m going to go back to my ad world, and I’m going to figure out what my next thing is.’

BERMAN: And, how did you react to that?

CESSARIO: Yeah. I mean, it was the lowest point for me. My passion has just kind of turned to shit. And then literally the crappy agency I worked at fired me because I think they just saw that I wasn’t in it and didn’t care. So it was like, I’m sitting here, no job, and then I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.

BERMAN: How old are you at this point?

CESSARIO: I’m probably 29.

BERMAN: How did you deal with the depth of that? Because that’s a… I think it’s a moment a lot of people experience, and it’s really hard, and people can go into holes that it’s hard to get out of. So how did you manage that?

CESSARIO: Yeah, I mean, it didn’t help probably like at the time, like my roommate was a bartender in the service industry, and our apartment was just a constant party, you know, like I was like partying and like, I was trying to forget as much as I could,

BERMAN: You were numbing. 

CESSARIO: Numbing. Yeah. So then it happened to be that I saw a guy I worked with in Boulder was starting his own start-up agency in Chattanooga. Once I got this job in Chattanooga, then it kind of woke me out of it. Okay, now I have another opportunity.

BERMAN: Swept the clouds out of the way, sun shining again.

Creating brands for the organic industry

CESSARIO: And I just went full focus again on that. And then that was when we started doing some of the best creative work that I had done in my career. That then led to a big company called Organic Valley. They created the first organic protein shake. Now they had an agency, I think, which was just like pretty sunsets and family farms that they were selling to like Whole Foods moms, right? They knew that this was a different crowd. If we’re going to win with a protein shake, we’re kind of talking to like the gym crowd, probably a bit more male. So they gave us a shot as a small nine-person agency as a one-off project. ‘Hey, can you come up with something to launch this thing?’ So we pitched this idea to them called ‘save the bros.’ Which was like, ‘Hey, if bros keep drinking these chemical protein shakes, they’re not going to be around much longer. And who’s going to bring the beer pong table?’ And it’s like this funny PSA that it’s like to keep bros around you got to get them on an organic protein shake. 

SAVE THE BROS’ AD: At Organic Valley, we have a plan to save the bros. It’s called organic fuel. It’s a recovery shake with 26 grams of the protein that bros love, but none of the synthetic junk. Bros don’t need to know that it’s organic or made from pasture-raised cows. Just tell a bro it has a ton of protein, and he’ll pound the *** out of it.

CESSARIO: Originally Organic Valley was super nervous. Like they liked the idea at first, but then when they saw the final thing, they made the mistake of showing it to some of their family farmers. They’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t get this.’ So they were like, ‘Guys, I don’t think we can run this. Our farmers don’t get it.’ But sure enough, we were able to convince them to run it. We run it, and it goes completely viral. Millions of views, every press outlet, media outlets talking about it. Then they were excited. Then they’re like, ‘Hey, how do we get more bros? We can’t get any bros at trade shows and everything else.’ Like they loved it after that. And then that was about the moment when I started having my next sort of ‘aha moment’ for what my next brand was going to be because I was always thinking about, ‘Hey, I’m an entrepreneur. There is a big gap in the health food world of doing funny, interesting brands.’

BERMAN: After the break: How Mike made water in a can cool. Like, a billion dollars cool.

[Ad break]

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find our full interview with Mike and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Landing on the idea to sell water

So when did the penny drop on water? Was there a moment where you were like, this is the thing?

CESSARIO: Well, when I started with the thought process of, ‘okay, I want to make a healthy beverage,’ also coming from the baggage of alcohol is the most regulated thing ever. I’m like, ‘what has no regulation, no ingredients, and feels very simple?’ So it was like, that was like the way I got to water first. Okay, water is literally the simplest thing and the most—

BERMAN: Right, right. It can’t get simpler than this.

CESSARIO: Yeah. You can market water to a 4-year-old, right? 

BERMAN: It may be expensive to ship. There might be quality control issues. But like, it’s water. 

CESSARIO: It’s water, right, and then I just start going in my deep dive focus mode where I’m Googling and doing research, and all of a sudden I see: ‘Holy crap, bottled water just surpassed carbonated soft drinks as the number one package beverage category in the U.S.’ It was like 20 billion at the time. So it’s like, wow, huge category. And then it was ‘Oh, my God.’ Every single brand looks exactly the same. It’s all in plastic bottles. Nothing’s interesting. But everybody drinks water, you know, and I think that was something that I pulled from my days of being in, you know, punk rock and metal bands. Long before the Whole Foods world, all the vegans were in the punk and metal world. That was a huge movement in punk. And now it’s become such a mainstream thing. So I knew that there was a sentiment of health and positivity in this, like, rebellious world that I came from. And there was nobody making brands for those people. So, how do I take a healthy thing and almost make it just as fun as all the other stuff that’s not then that’s where we started. 

Uncovering the logistics of canned water

BERMAN: So, take us through the two directions from there. One is the brand, right? I mean, okay, the insight that all this kind of looks the same but like, how do we get to what that brand is? What’s that brand identity? What is the name? But then also, like, how do we actually source it? How do we package it? How do we get to market? So let’s start with the brand, but then, then I’d love to hear the logistics of how you figured this out.

CESSARIO: Well, what’s funny is I started with the logistics.

BERMAN: You did. Okay, great. Let’s start there.

CESSARIO: Yeah, because I was kind of like, before I spent too much time on getting attached to a brand and fun thing. Like, let’s make sure the business side of this is doable.

BERMAN: Can I even pull this off?

CESSARIO: Cause I just went through the craziness of trying to produce a barrel age spirit, and I knew that that was so much of the hurdle, not the brand. So I really went deep in looking for, you know, ‘how to can water,’ you know, because I knew I wanted it to be in a can that I did know.

BERMAN: Because for sustainability reasons or for brand reasons?

CESSARIO: It started originally as, ‘Hey. All cool, fun things come in cans.’ Few healthy things come in a tallboy can. So I was like, ‘Hey, I want this to feel like something fun that you’re not supposed to have, but what’s inside it is water.’

BERMAN: Yep.

CESSARIO: So I knew I wanted to be in a can. And then the more I started researching cans, that’s when I started reading the infinite recyclability thing. This was like, you know, 2014, call it. People talking about how bad plastic is, companies getting rid of plastic. Cans are infinitely recyclable. Now it’s like, okay, cans make sense for a lot of reasons, and it turns out, there are no co-packers in North America who can put spring water cans. Zero. 

BERMAN: Zero? How’s that possible?

CESSARIO: Well, the thing is, if you’re doing bottled water or canned water, you basically have to bottle at the source because it’s way too expensive to tanker truck water from a source halfway across the country to a bottler. It was just too cost-prohibitive. So all bottled water, it’s, they have a source. It gets pumped into the facility from whatever spring it is. And then because canned water was not a category, all the sources that had bottling capabilities only had plastic bottles.

BERMAN: Really?

CESSARIO: So canning lines are like, you know, 20, 30, 50 million dollars to install at scale. And then eventually I said, ‘you know what, what if I just start looking outside the U.S.?’ And sure enough, I found a co-packer in Austria who had big canning plants lines and they owned their own mineral water springs, but they also made energy drinks. So that’s why they had the cans.

BERMAN: Okay.

CESSARIO: So they said, ‘Hey, yeah, we can do canned spring water for you here.’ 

BERMAN: And the shipping costs aren’t insane on that? I mean, because the water’s heavy.

CESSARIO: No. Because if you think about it, when you’re shipping a container across the ocean, it’s about the same cost to ship a container from Austria to New York as it is to use an 18 Wheeler — the same thing from across the country. 

Coming up with the name Liquid Death

BERMAN: Okay. So you’ve figured out your sourcing, your packaging, your shipping … brand?

CESSARIO: Yeah. So it was right around that time, we had the name for Liquid Death. 

BERMAN: Was there a moment of inspiration? There was this, you know, like a whiteboard with a hundred names. And this stood out. Like how, how did you get to it?

CESSARIO: Was more like I had a notebook where I was just writing tons of things down and trying to make connections. But what I did know was from my marketing experience, especially with the Western Grace experience, no money for marketing.

BERMAN: Yeah.

CESSARIO: All the shareability and marketing firepower has to be in the product itself. So then it’s like, okay, if the name and product itself has to be something that if someone sees it on the shelf, I’m betting they have to pick it up. And if they do pick it up, the first thing they’re doing is taking out their phone, taking a picture, putting it on social. ‘Is this real? Oh my God.’ Or they want to post a photo of themselves drinking it because look how funny it is. ‘I’m drinking something called Liquid Death.’ It’s almost like you’re giving people a tool to be interesting. So then when I use that as the filter, all the names started dying really quickly. And then it was what would be the craziest thing you could possibly name water, like starting with that. It’s just like an exercise. And I think probably Liquid Death came out of that. So then I have this huge social media following because we made a Facebook page for Liquid Death long before we ever had real product. And we made a $1,500 funny video that got a couple million views. The page had like 80,000 followers. So kind of had this audience that wasn’t sure if this was real or not, like they just thought it was a funny page to follow.

Raising $150K to launch Liquid Death

BERMAN: Phenomenal. Okay. So you’ve, you’ve got your shipping, your packaging all figured out. You’ve got your brand figured out. You probably need some money.

CESSARIO: Yeah. Now it was like, okay, looks like I need to raise at least 150 grand.

BERMAN: Okay. Which in venture is not a lot of money, but in the real world is a lot.

CESSARIO: A lot. Yeah. Especially when I have no money in my bank account still. So then I went out trying to raise just from former bosses I had that were, you know, executive, creative directors, So I kind of just cobbled together five grand, five grand, 10 grand, and then basically just, yeah, put together like 150. And, at that point I knew, okay, I need a co-founder who is the spreadsheet-money-guy; I’m the creative guy. So then, a good buddy I went to high school with named JR Riggins. He was sort of kind of like a career entrepreneur. Like he always had a little hustle kind of going on. And I reached out and said, ‘Hey, I got this traction,’ and he was into it, and he probably started working with me in like 2018. We didn’t actually get the first product produced until October.

BERMAN: Mike soon realized that he could use Amazon to sell and ship orders of Liquid Death. So they launched as a direct-to-consumer brand. One with marketing that was so edgy, it got a LOT of free attention online from its very first video forward.

FIRST LIQUID DEATH AD: For years, a bunch of marketing fuckboys have tricked you into thinking that water is just some girly drink for yoga moms. Just look at all the cute brand names and dainty little bottles. Well, hold on to your hot dogs, because I got news. Water isn’t cute. Water is deadly.

BERMAN: I mean, funny on the one hand, also a little risky on another, right?

CESSARIO: At the time I knew that nobody was writing me a check for the idea of Liquid Death. ‘Hey, I want to put water in a can, put a skull on it, and make it look like beer.’ That’s never going to work. Retail buyers will never take it. People are going to be confused. So I kind of knew I needed to prove out the concept first. And social media is like the ultimate focus group, and then, yeah, once I had millions of views, once we had tons of followers, all these comments, we actually had 7-Eleven franchisees DMing us, ‘hey, how do we get this in stores?’ We had a distributor from New York say, ‘hey, can we talk to a salesperson?’

BERMAN: Wow, demand with no supply.

CESSARIO: Demand with no supply. So then, I used all that to raise the round. Now people believed, ‘Oh, this might really be a thing.’ 

BERMAN: Hell of a proof point. I mean, if 7-Eleven is reaching out to you and saying, ‘how do we get your product?’ That’s a great place to be.

CESSARIO: Right, right.

Scaling Liquid Death with humor

BERMAN: Okay. So, we’ve kind of covered zero to one.  But your scale story for the next few years is epic. I mean you’re into nine figures within a few years. What happens in that time frame that you can achieve such extraordinary scale in such a short period of time? 

CESSARIO: Well, one, I think was the marketing firepower that we had which was always an entertainment-first approach. I know how to be funny. Comedy drives the internet, you know, it makes a ton of sense. So we really think about it not as risky. We just look at it as, ‘Hey, we’re writing Saturday Night Live skits.’ And that’s how we’ve always used the guardrails, ‘if Saturday Night Live would do it, we could probably get away with doing it,’ right? So it’s not about being edgy. It’s about ‘hey, if you want to legitimately entertain people, look where the bar is for comedy entertainment.’ What are the jokes being told in the number one stand-up special on Netflix? What’s the number one comedy influencer that’s got a bajillion followers? What are they doing? That’s where you realize the bar is just for you to even be considered entertainment in comedy. So for us, you know, compared to crappy commercials that no one wants to watch, like, oh yeah, this is extreme, but compared to real entertainment that people want to pay to watch, it’s tame.

Inside Liquid Death’s early distribution strategy

BERMAN: And so what happens that you all of a sudden start showing up on shelves? I mean, I’ll never forget. We were in COVID, driving with my family back from Idaho and we stopped at like a nondescript, unbranded, basically gas station, And like, there’s Liquid Death sitting in the cooler. And I’m like, this is insane that I’m finding this here. So how does your retail distribution start to pick up so that you can really scale the company?

CESSARIO: So the first big retailer that took us on was Whole Foods.

BERMAN: Okay. 

CESSARIO: A lot of the other retailers in year one, even though we were killing it on, you know, direct-to-consumer Amazon, retailers like Target were like, yeah, it’s not really the right fit for moms. So a lot of retailers were too afraid of the brand early, but Whole Foods, they loved our ‘death to plastic’ sort of mission that we had on the cans that we donate a portion of the profits to help kill plastic pollution. They liked that story, and they knew from a brand perspective, there was nothing else in their stores like this. And Whole Foods, you know, they care about sustainability. It’s a whole plastic water section in the store. 

BERMAN: And did Whole Foods pick you up nationally? Because usually, they’ll pick up someone really locally or most regionally?

CESSARIO: Yeah, they took us full national out of the gate.

Diversifying the Liquid Death product line

BERMAN: So, bring us up to today because you’re no longer just still water in a can. Right? You’ve got multiple product lines. How have you decided where to expand and, and how is that expansion going for you all?

CESSARIO: So we’ve always stayed true to the mission, which is we want to make healthy beverages just as fun and funny as unhealthy beverages like alcohol or even candy. So health is always where we start. So then we looked at flavored sparkling water. So it’s like LaCroix, Bubbly, Waterloo, it’s just a sea of like pastel cases.

How can we do something a little different? And we said, ‘well, the problem with LaCroix is it’s almost no flavor.’ There were actually memes on the internet that were like, ‘LaCroix tastes like someone whispered a flavor name in the other room.’

So we said, ‘hey, we know that so many of our consumers, and just people in general, are not hardcore calorie counters.’ So we said, ‘hey, if we just put four grams of sugar in a big can from agave, so something that feels like a little bit more of a premium ingredient, the flavor difference is night and day.’ Just a little bit of sugar goes a long way, and now it just feels way tastier if you’re comparing it side by side.

BERMAN: It’s a lot better than pamplemousse.

CESSARIO: Right, right So, we launched that product, and that was 2022. Within three months, we were like the number two flavored sparkling brand on Amazon. What’s another healthy category that most Americans perceive as healthy? We said iced tea. And now tea has been one of our most successful things that we’ve done. You know, now we have way more retailers under our belt. They like us now. We’re making them a lot of money. They get that like, ‘oh, this brand is not serious.’ We’re funny, like Liquid Death is a sarcastic name. We don’t actually think we’re badass. What we’re doing is making fun of marketing. You don’t have to be into skulls to like Liquid Death. You’re like, ‘I like what they’re doing.’

BERMAN: And Murder Your Thirst is one of the great taglines of recent marketing history because it’s directly on brand, but there’s a wink to it. It’s funny. 

CESSARIO: Yeah, it’s funny.

BERMAN: Mike, was there anything about being in a band as a teenager that has informed how you run Liquid Death?

CESSARIO: I think a lot. I mean, especially back then in like that 90s punk sort of hardcore world. I mean, DIY was what they called it, like do it yourself. Like it was a whole piece of culture. Like kids would make their own zines, you know. So I think just that mentality of doing it yourself, obviously it has a big role in how you think as an entrepreneur. But then yeah, the hardest part about being in a band is managing the personalities. Like the bands that make it are not because they’re the best band but because they found some way to stay together for 10 years, because that’s how long it takes, right? Most in most scenarios. So I think being able to manage personalities, and you have to find a way to make people feel like they can contribute. And how do you take value from other people and make something that’s truly better than what any individual person can do on their own. So like that kind of stuff and thinking about how you build culture and that I think is.

Advice for the entrepreneur who can’t find product market fit

BERMAN: And then for the entrepreneur who’s got a product. And it’s a really good product. There’s no question. It’s a superior product. It’s differentiated, but they haven’t found the market. What do you say to them about how to take that next step, how to find that product market fit, and begin that scaling journey?

CESSARIO: I think it’s, it’s not as hard as you think. You can spend a tiny bit of money to test something. And I think social media is a great testing ground for stuff, you’re not going to get a ton of volume, but you might see, ‘Hey, this one had 10 likes, and this one had one.’ So that’s 10x. So this one might actually be better than this one. So I think, yeah, find low-cost ways to test stuff. Cause I think there’s so many people that have the misconception that someone’s just going to give you money to go figure out your idea. That’s very rare.

BERMAN: Not going to happen.

CESSARIO: It’s like, no, you need to prove out there’s something really there. You gotta get something going and find some cheap way to get some traction before anyone’s going to even take the time, you know, to give you a check.

How Masters of Scale helped Mike Cessario build Liquid Death

BERMAN: Yeah. Amazing. Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you wish we’d talked about here? 

CESSARIO: I mean, one funny thing, it’s like when Liquid Death was still just like the side project, and I knew I wanted to do it, Masters of Scale was the podcast that I listened to, to learn how to be an entrepreneur.

BERMAN: Was there an episode that specifically helped you on the journey?

CESSARIO: I was learning more, I think, from Reid’s point of view, like I’ve used his quote in the early days for a long time that ‘true innovation has to be almost laughable at first.’ It was like such a perfect thing to understand. Liquid Death is like everyone thought it was so ridiculous. Like, ‘Oh, no one’s ever gonna buy water in a can.’ But then you sort of realize, like, when people sort of have a really emotional even if negative reaction to it at first like, 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. 

BERMAN: Well, I’m glad we were able to play a small part in your scaling journey. We’re grateful to have you here. Thanks for spending the time with us.

CESSARIO: Thank you. 

BERMAN: Mike’s success story reinforces so many of the lessons we hear from extraordinary CEOs and founders on this show. He followed his passion, he leveraged his personal network to help him get started, and he focused on learning from his early failures. 

He’s also an example of what happens when you trust your own taste — when it comes to the product, and the tone you use to market it. 

I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.