Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en there’s nobody who’s writing me a check for the idea of liquid death they’re like you’re this is stupid you’re crazy like we launched liquid death in a bit of a backwards way than most i think beverage brands launch which was we launched a year before we met science we launched liquid death on social media before we ever had product because we knew that with such a crazy idea like liquid death for the idea of liquid death they’re like you’re this is stupid you’re crazy like who would ever buy this it’s a negative name it says death retailers will never carry it yadda yadda so i knew that i had to prove it out as a concept on social first before i could actually make people feel like i’m de-risking this thing a bit to actually raise so we designed the can to look like a 3d realistic can we shot a 1500 video and then we just put it on facebook no twitter no instagram just facebook we put maybe um i don’t know three grand in paid media behind the video and then cut to three months later we have more facebook followers than aquafina the video has three million views we’ve got a range of dms from hi i am a 7-eleven franchisee in the midwest how do i get this in my stores or hi i’m the biggest non-out beverage distributor in new york city called big geyser how do we talk to a sales representative to distribute this and we didn’t even have product yet right no idea of how we were even going to really make it so then i use all that social traction and distributor interest and retailer interest to then start raising a small friends and family round so we can actually produce physical product because with cans the minimums are really really high like quarter million cans is the lowest you can actually produce with a can manufacturer so it’s a little bit capital intensive just to even start playing the game how much does a quarter million how much a quarter of a million a product what would that cost i mean if you’re just starting with that cost i mean it all depends what you’re feeling in there but i mean i mean yeah i mean you’re you’re talking you know 150 200 250 grand just to like kind of get started probably you know doing cans um so yeah once we once we then kind of raised a little bit we started producing cans we we bottle oh well we can and source our water in austria in the alps um once we had physical cans the people what does that mean whenever people are like oh this is you know spring water from this mountain it’s like you know my head is always like this is bs what does this mean does that mat like a is this true b does that matter um so like why do you go get your water from austria in the alps like what is that is that is that branding is that like is there something about water that i don’t know like why do you have to go there to get your water so what i mean let’s be totally honest water for the most point part i should say for most people is water yeah like if you had people try to even even water snobs if you had them blind taste test fiji versus evian versus whatever can they really tell the difference probably not right but i’ve done this test many times as an avion drinker epione versus so evian and fiji are tastes similar to me evian versus crystal geisler like it tastes different i’ve i’ve bet money and i’ve got it right before that’s interesting but yeah i think the things that make water that affect the taste of water are the natural minerals and how much of them there are in the water and the ph of the water is it more acidic is it more basic and what those minerals are affect how acidic or how basic it is so when you for us our water comes from the alps and it literally goes right from the mountain into the can obviously it goes through filters and things that filter out debris and all that and then we put it through like a pasteurization process that makes sure everything you know it’s all clean and good to go but everything in that water is that’s the natural mineral profile of the water that has been built up over probably hundreds of years in the mountain and it’s like you know naturally alkaline at 7.8 or 7.9 ph it’s got a nice mineral level nice mouth feel when you’re drinking it because of the level of minerals so that comes right off that way it’s all everything’s natural about it almost every major water brand in the u.s whether that’s smart water essentia aquafina dasani most of those brands they’re using you just tap from the that then they reverse osmosis which strips everything out of water all the natural minerals all the bad stuff everything so it’s literally just like empty water then they have to add in minerals back in to kind of make it taste good so they’ll add in the natural things that occur in water but just kind of artificially with just doing it at the factory to kind of make something that has a decent ph and a decent mineral profile that tastes good so those are kind of the two options when you say something is spring water it’s very strict from the fda of what that has to be like to call it spring water you cannot alter the original mineral profile of the water so even if you take it off the mountain if you put it through reverse osmosis and it strips out the natural minerals and you add them back in you can’t call it spring water anymore because you’ve altered the original thing so you know our water like i said that that’s kind of how we think about it um everything we have in our water is natural that’s how it comes off the it’s kind of its own perfect thing we don’t have to go through the whole process of like using municipal tap water from the factory stripping everything out adding stuff in and kind of like creating a water right now that that’s great okay and you know i’ve never actually had liquid death um it’s flat water though right it’s not sparkling and it’s not flavored we have a sparkling version but we have a still and a sparkling yeah and um and so you uh sorry just to sort of finish it so you you took that you know you raised a little bit you did the social media to prove hey we can build a fun brand that people resonate with then you figured out okay to produce the minimum run i’m gonna need a couple hundred grand to get this thing off the ground and you raise kind of the friends and family round uh that was from science or afterwards science came about and they wrote a bigger check we raised the friends and family round just to basically cover like a super limited you know the smallest run of product we could do right and then once i finally had a physical can of liquid that for the first time which was probably around october of 2018. we had a a guy that we knew who knew someone at science who said hey you guys should really talk to science like they’d probably be all over this so we went and met with science and brought down the physical can and once someone could really hold it and it wasn’t just like us showing digital images from social it made it way different it just like they understood the magic of it and how cool this would be walking around with this or how you know how into this people would be so then we that’s when we kind of decided to do a deal with science and over the next two months after that they helped us gear up our d2c launch where we launched online in january of last year