YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Cessario

lines on the record: 101
first: 2024-01-22
most recent: 2024-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Help me make the right decisions. And then again, just the hunger of all this failure. I think it just all lattered up. And then the fact that it could be a brand that was truly a reflection of myself in the brand. It's not like some MBA business guy who's like, what are the kids into? Here's what they're into. When it all starts with me as the CEO, it just kind of trickles through the rest of the company and decisions get to be a lot easier. It's a lot simpler to have a unified voice and know what to say yes to and what to say no to. I think it's all sort of, I think, come together to make it the success.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's always luck involved. I mean, I think back on so many moments where it's like, man, so good thing we did this and not that. This might not even be around right now. But I think, to your point, a 25 year in the making overnight success, I think all of my previous experiences all kind of helped ladder up”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hungry and feeling this could end at any moment and how does that change the way you think if you know it could end at any moment? Like how do you approach things differently? How do you take more precaution? How do you not take too big of risks? Because I think that is a fatal flaw is like the bigger companies get you start trying to act more and more like a big company. And it can go south pretty quick.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I wouldn't have because I think with all the things that I've gone through in so long, it's like I think I had a cynical view of man every good thing I try something fucking happens. So I think I try not to let myself get too excited about things too early. So I kind of just wanted to like play out. So I take everything with a grain of salt. And I've sort of always have that approach. And I still have that approach now. It's like I don't want to ever like get too carried away or too comfortable. I think it's so important that you're always.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're just going to burn through your money before you ever get to the finish line because now you're trying to play the same game as the big guys without anywhere near the resources and you'll lose.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yeah. You have a product that generates Money to help fund cool things that people want to see in the world that is not more crappy marketing that people are willing to literally spend $10 a month and not have to watch or that they can skip. We're in the attention game. We need to generate outsized attention for our budgets that allows us to swing way above our weight class really where we can generate similar amounts of attention as let's say Coke or Pepsi type brands can, but we can do it with like one fiftieth of the budget. That's the game we're playing. Like if we start trying to play the same game as the big guys where it's like, oh, let's go sign a $2 million athlete endorsement deal or let's go wrap a NASCAR for a million dollars. Like that stuff is not going to move the needle for you.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that was an interesting scenario because they had hard seltzer was a new category that had this massive spike during COVID. Was kind of unprecedented, and now it is just kind of settled down to what is still a huge category. It's just not that in the outer space level that it was during a very particular cultural period.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at Whiteclaw. I mean, that was a brand that didn't exist. And then all of a sudden, in five years, they were doing, you know, whatever it was, like over a billion in sales.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean I do think that the era of brands lasting fifty years are no more because of the internet and technology. Look at Coca Cola, like of their whatever it was 120 year stint. Hundred of those years did not have the internet. And I think because of the internet and the hyperspeed digital culture, the other difference is you can make as a brand now with digital and virality and the democratization of media and attention in five years, you could be a brand that's literally doing billions of dollars in sales. Well, that used to take 50 years to get there.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fraction of the cost that you're going to get cans for. So if you're a canned water brand marketing it as can water aluminum infinitely recyclable, that's your whole brand. You're just, yeah, you're just educating people on why cans are great. So then now Coke can just put it in a can and you've just helped them, you know, break in. So that's why we always led with brand and what we could own first, which is funny, irreverent brand making people laugh, murder your thirst, debt the plastic was always the second thing because at the end of the day, we knew we can't own aluminum cans as a brand.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How could Coca-Cola fail at creating an energy drink brand? And it's just like it shows that giant companies are really bad at creating brands. There's just too much bureaucracy. There's too many focus groups. I'm sure Coke Energy, it probably passed the focus groups. It probably passed all the layers of test and everything. And then in market, it just totally fails. Think about the other things people in Beverage try to use as a moat. What is your functional ingredient? You can't own that ingredient. Coke can buy that ingredient for way less than you can. There's real much like you can't own cans. Coke gets cans for”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and I think that brand is the moat. And I think it's hard for people to wrap their head around what that means. But there's a lot of Sort of historical precedence to show that that's the case. I mean, you've seen that there was a great example Coca-Cola, the biggest company in the world with all the resources and shelf space in the world, tried to take share in the energy category by creating Coke energy. And it was a two year experiment that was a massive failure, and hundreds of millions of wasted dollars. And you would think, hey”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2021, I think we, you know, we did. I think it was like 45 million in like gross top line revenue. That is tiny for a beverage company. Like, you're not even a blip on anybody's radar at that level. I mean, and I think, you know, people had reactions to, you know, whatever it is, over a half a billion valuation for water. Like, what's wrong with the world? It's like, did you know that smart water, plastic bottles of municipal tap water sells a billion dollars a year of it? Same thing with Aquafina, same thing with Poland Springs. These are massive categories. This isn't, you know.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think I was excited at how fast it was growing because I think we built the team the right way to be able to sustain the growth. I think even as an organization, we've taken a very Almost top heavy approach where it's like we want seasoned gangsters in every position, you know, where they've done things at a much higher level so that right now they can do this level of stuff in their sleep versus like you start with, I don't know, a lot cheaper labor to kind of try to save money, but it's less experience and less, you know, talent. And then there's more risk that if you're growing that fast, that they don't even know how to deal with that kind of growth and it breaks. So I think we built the team the right way to be able to sustain that level of growth we were at because yes, it was fast growth for us as a company, but even in 2020.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two, three grams. Yeah, four grams. Yeah, it was like three or four grams of sugar, 20 calories. So that opened up some of our co-packing abilities once we started having a ton of success in our flavored sparkling.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of a sudden, we started getting killed on ocean freight costs in the back half of 2021, where we might have been spending $3,500 to ship a container from Austria to the US. And now all of a sudden, it was $12,000. And then 2022, everyone's saying, oh, it's going to come down, it's going to come down. Never went down. And then like midway through 2022, it went up again. We kind of knew eventually we would move to co-packing in the US once there was a good partner for us that could do all the things we needed them to do. So we got connected with a great source in the mountains of western Virginia, not West Virginia, but like western Virginia. And then we also at that time, you know, we had launched flavored sparkling, which again is more like a healthy soda. Than it is”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it just completely halted so much. It was such a, like it kind of started this chain reaction of the ocean freight costs, literally over the course of two months, ocean freight costs went up like five X or something insane.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So we definitely had issues where our containers were held up for like a month at a port and we had to wait on product. There was a ton of stuff to kind of battle. And then the real pain point was in spring of 2021. If people remember there was that container ship that ended up blocking the Panama Canal.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, there was some issue. Yeah, we definitely dealt with some issues where things were held up at the ports. I mean, we had things where some of the first shipments of liquid death were held up by customs because they see something called liquid death and they want to make sure it's not like a terrorist thing.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now we can tell everyone hey, you can go get it at Whole Foods now for a lot less money so we were able to kind of drive a lot of existing customers that we had from Amazon into Whole Foods. So that definitely helped.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then because of all how expensive it was to ship a heavy case of water. Now when it was in Whole Foods They could actually sell it for $14.99.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, just under 3 million in revenue. In revenue, yeah. And again, remember, we were selling those cases for like 20 bucks on Amazon.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, luckily, by the time we had launched in Whole Foods in the late spring of 2020 We had already built a pretty Large Amazon indirect consumer business.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that is a very, I think, limited genre of entertainment. Like, yeah, it's really cool to watch skateboarders and snowboarders and skydivers do crazy stunt-like stuff, but there's a lot more entertainment in the world that people consume. So for us, we're like, hey, our entertainment is comedy. Like that's what we're really good at. We're really good at making people laugh and making funny videos. And not a lot of companies are. A lot of companies struggle to deliver humor. But that's our unique strength that we have.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, I think it's an interesting topic, and I talk about it so much. Like, everyone uses the word edgy, like, oh, you guys do edgy marketing. All we are doing is we just want to make legitimate entertainment not marketing. And it's a tried and true Approach that Red Bull was very successful with, Monster was very successful with, where they blur the lines between an entertainment company and a beverage company. Now their specific type of entertainment is action sports.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and in a way it was the only retailer who would even give us a chance. I mean, we had talked to, I don't know, like a broker for Target, and they were like, yeah, guys, we don't think this is the right fit for mom. Any of these other big retailers wouldn't really give us the time of day because it says death on it. But at least Whole Foods, what they really identified with was our whole death the plastic messaging.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was always targeting who are the people that don't care about healthy brands, that are drinking soda and energy drinks and beer most of the time. How do you get them to actually resonate with a healthy brand and actually want to make more healthier decisions based on, it's more fun to have this brand walking around than it is? A Fiji or something else. So it's like you get a lot of overlap in terms of yes, we bring new people into the category where it's like, hey, these construction workers who shop at 7-Eleven who are buying two energy drinks for the first time ever are coming over and buying a premium bottled water just because But then you're also getting the people who did buy Fiji and Voss were like, oh, I like premium water, and this is just a more interesting brand. Like, yeah, I'll try that. And yeah, it's good.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Significantly more capital, which actually enabled me to quit my freelance job I was doing full-time to pay the bills to actually go full-time to liquid death at a huge, huge salary cut. So then I was able to just kind of quit my job and spend for the first time ever like full-time, full-time focus on liquid death in like late 2018. And I worked with science to kind of help me figure out the tech and digital aspect of making this like a true D2C brand to start. And you know, we had a strategy for paid social promotion. But again, I think the first month, we only spent maybe $2,500 in paid media to generate $100,000 in sales.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so just before we launched, we had real product that was. Getting ready to be shipped to the US from Austria in October of 2018. At that same time, that's when I met our first kind of venture capital investor science, who, like he said, was behind Dollar Shave Club. They put in.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, we had a little bit of a built-in audience. And again, so many of those people didn't even believe it was real. Like they still just thought this was a funny page to follow. And then once we were like, hey, look guys, it's real. You can buy it. It generated a different level of buzz, I think, you know.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was through Amazon, and you have your product as a page on Amazon. People can buy it. Amazon ships and fulfills the product for you. And then Amazon charges you a fee for every case that they ship and fulfill. And it was very expensive. That's why, you know, we had to charge $20 a 12-pack in the beginning to even get anywhere into the black in terms of making money on a case, which was so expensive. because it was so expensive to ship a heavy case of water that weighed 13 pounds. Like that's not cheap to ship. Like if you try to go to FedEx right now and ship a 12-pound case of liquid death, they're going to probably charge you $20 just to ship it.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intuitively. You could talk to average person, hey, what do you think is more premium water from a city or water from a mountain? Yeah, okay. Got it. It's not rocket math.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think it was just you could kind of just, you could look at the brands out there and it's pretty easy. I think like...”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it needed to be what people perceived as at least a premium product, which what we found is like source did matter to people. So that's why it was like, hey, as long as we have a good. Source story like hey, this is mountain water, like this is from a mountain, that's enough to make people feel like, okay, this is a premium product. I don't need to get into the weeds beyond that.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be the same factory, but you can more easily understand why brand matters and why that is still successful. Because I think for me, that's the definition of brand.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that was always part of my pitch, like, as a marketing guy who really understands the nuance of brand, that's what I could make clear for people the reality is that in most things, it is brand why things win, not functional differences. Like Nike doesn't market because they say, hey, our commercials, our shoes use this type of material that lasts 37 days longer than Adidas. Like, no, no, no. It's all brand. Or why someone's buying a... seven hundred dollars Gucci t shirt that has the same functionality and thread or whatever it is as like a $20 target t-shirt and”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The brand was already figured out. The Facebook page was already going. I already raised most of the money. It was just like, okay, now I have all the pieces. Now I need you to kind of help me execute all this stuff and do the stuff that I'm not good at. And he was very cool with that arrangement. And that's what I think works so well with us in the beginning was we never stepped on each other's toes”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at that time, I was already raising the capital because I had the one source ready to go in pricing. So I knew what it would cost. But then when I started, you know, the money started coming in. And at that time, once I was raising money, I am not a finance guy at all. So a good buddy of mine, JR, who I went to high school with, he was kind of like a serial entrepreneur ever since he graduated high school. He went to college for finance. So then he came on board with me as like a co-founder. But again, at that point, so much of it was already like.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God, I didn't, but so I still kind of knew okay. I've talked to the experts now, and literally now they're telling me there's no really nowhere they can do this. So then I'm like, okay. I'm going to start Google searching outside of the US. I'm going to start Googling Europe. Canning, water, co-packing in Europe, and sure enough, I found this place in Austria that said they own for their own spring water springs, they had canning capabilities Email them, they're like, Oh, yeah, we can definitely make this for you. I'm like, really? So then it was, yeah, so then.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so before we actually started raising the round, I did have a couple different leads on who could produce it and roughly what it would cost. So there was, you know, there was one place that was, I think, like outside of Las Vegas that said, hey, we can do it, but it wouldn't be spring water. It would be kind of like more of the city water. I wasn't that excited about. And the guy was basically like, oh, yeah, did you know that like you're not going to be allowed to call it Liquid Death? Like the FDA won't let you do that And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, no, no, no. Yeah, it's death. Like you're saying, you know, it's false advertising. I'm like, really? And again, I trust some of these people, but...”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big marketing executives that I had good relationships with who maybe like, you know, them writing a $5,000 check for something wasn't a big deal. So I basically cobbled together all these like, you know, 2,000 to, I think the biggest two checks I got were each like 20 grand, but everything else was small and I kind of put together this round of like 150K.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I knew that the only way to get the capital was to really kind of prove out and de-risk the concept. So when I had all of a sudden early 2018, I had Facebook page with a lot of followers. I had a video with millions of views. I had tons of comments of people seeming generally interested. I literally had a 7-Eleven franchisee from Michigan who said, hey, I own three 7-Elevens. How do I get this in my stores? I had the biggest non-ALC distributor in New York called Big Geyser. One of their people reached out saying, hey, can I talk to a sales rep about carrying your product? So, I use all of that to then say, okay, maybe I can actually now go raise a friends and family kind of round. You know, my family was not wealthy, so it was not like I could just go get money from my family. But it was like, hey, former bosses that were...”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I had none of that And I knew that the one thing I did know, if I did want that or if there was going to be a way to produce it, it was going to be probably at least $150,000. It's going to be a really expensive.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, didn't have a product to sell. And then eventually I made a pre-order page where it's like, oh, you could still pre-quote unquote give your email and pre-order this.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was like we set out to raise $150K, and I think we raised like $1,500. So now I'm like, okay, now I'm just gonna put it on social media. Like I'm gonna make a Facebook page for Liquid Death, make it seem like it's a real company. I'm gonna put this video on there. I'm gonna make a couple funny social posts about it. So I put maybe a couple thousand dollars in paid media behind the video and behind some of these little social posts over the course of like four months or so. So then, like, after four months, the video had almost 3 million views. It was like two and a half million views. The page had like 50, 60,000 followers. I have hundreds and hundreds of comments from people that range anywhere from like, this is the greatest thing ever. How do I buy this to this is the dumbest?”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we made this whole thing for $1,500. My wife, Carly, edited the whole thing. She actually edited almost all of the early liquid death video stuff”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indie Made this video that you probably saw where it's the woman who's pouring out a can of liquid death the entire time. She's kind of giving this monologue about water has been like misbranded and people think that water is some, you know yoga thing when really water is deadly. Like, you know, it kills. Surfers and whatever.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm like, okay, I don't have anywhere near that kind of cash, and there's nobody who's going to write me a check for the idea at that time. Oh, I want to put water in a can and call it liquid debt. They're like, that's the dumbest idea ever. No retailer will carry it. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to make a funny kind of commercial for this that feels like it could be viral, like the stuff we had done at Humanod. To be like a Kickstarter or Indiegogo thing.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah Well, what they call that, it's called German blackletter font. And that's why so much beer, because beer came from Germany really to the US. All these old brands, they use that very German inspired look and feel. So then I started thinking of, okay, we don't have any money. It is going to cost a lot of money to produce. Like you can't make, I mean, because I knew a little bit about what it cost to make aluminum cans because I think I got a quote from one of the ball or one of these aluminum can manufacturers like, hey, what does it cost to produce, you know? 16 ounce cans or 24 ounce cans. And it's like, oh, wow, the minimum, minimum you can produce is like 200,000. And so you're talking about a quarter million dollars or 150 grand, something like that, just to do the bare minimum run of a canned product.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, I worked with The buddy of mine I mentioned a while ago who was like the intern Crispin years ago who was a designer, he kind of helped me out because he's way more of a designer, I think than I was. So he kind of helped throw together some can designs. Based on some kind of clear direction I had, like, hey, I kind of want this color, it's this thing. I actually kind of made the type, like I found the typeface for Liquid Death and kind of did that.”
2024-01-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Liquid Death: Mike Cessario · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT