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 one of my old bosses I used to work I was the crib director at vaynermedia so Gary Vaynerchuk was like my boss essentially what’s up Sam and we have a guest Mike Cesario welcome welcome to the podcast thanks guys there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on right now this well we’ll have this hour to be a little bit of an escape we talked about everything going on last podcast I think let’s we’ll try to make this like just say at least a 45 minute 50 minute escape for people we could kind of talk about yeah exactly it does kind of feel silly to be like oh here’s some business ideas when like you know the whole world is it’s really you know you know tilt whether it’s true coronavirus or the different protests that are going on but like you said I think you know for me I’m like glued to Twitter and the muse and all this stuff all day then you know by 7 8 p.m. I just need a break I go walk my dog and I go listen to some mindless stuff about sports or whatever else just you know just to calm my mind and so hopefully we could be that for some people we’re a bit of a diversion or a bit of an escape from the heaviness that’s going on so you know Mike I’m glad you’re here we you have a product that we’ve talked about on the podcast before which is liquid death so if somebody doesn’t know what liquid death has given the what is liquid death and then we’re gonna talk about how you started that and then we’re gonna brainstorm some cool ideas and spaces around around what did you do sure so I mean I guess at the heart of what liquid death really is we’re really just completely trying to change the way healthy food and beverages are marketed at the end of the day most of the most hilarious memorable ad campaigns that you ask most people about it the last 10 years they’ll tell you Bud Light don’t know SEC East Snickers Doritos skittles like all junk food and alcohol that’s the funniest most memorable kind of youth culture owning and energy drinks like Red Bull that’s like let’s not leave old spice out well it’s not really a food or beverage but but yeah it’s like all it’s all junk food and alcohol that does all the Escalus youth culture marketing whereas healthy food is traditionally marketed to like mom and it’s quiet and it’s responsible or it’s like look better where you know show you you know fitness models you know drinking bottles of water like it’s a very different they don’t use fun to market whereas unhealthy beverages stuff like that like they want to own fun so we’re basically doing that with water so we want to be able to take the healthiest thing you can drink that most people don’t drink enough of and brand it and build you know a cool you know thing around it where it’s something that you feel totally comfortable drinking a liquid death in a bar or at a house party right at a music festival or at work or in the gym and just making it more fun to walk around and have a lot right and that’s you definitely made headlines when you raised all that money cuz everyone was like this is such a silly idea and they raised all this money I didn’t it’s a stupid reason I mean it was it seemed like an awesome company and totally worthy of going big but so it kind of worked right like you you definitely uh you definitely ruffled some feathers and I think that’s good no yeah I think you know I always bring up I one of the you know I listen to the Reid Hoffman podcast a lot master scale yeah and it’s like I loved it he always pushes he’s like truly innovative ideas are almost comical at first because if it seems like it makes a lot of sense right now it probably means there’s four other companies that have been working on it for five years already it’s like the things that are truly unique and innovative like almost don’t make any sense at first or seem laughable and I think like that’s kind of the case of liquid death I think it’s like we’re really trying to disrupt a category in a way that’s not just disruption for the sake of disruption you know I think it’s like we strongly believe that and I don’t think it’s something hard to understand you know in a category where almost all the products themselves are perceived as the same you know people are assuming I only drink Fiji because it’s got 0.75 more electrolytes than smart water which has 0.5 the pH is 7 point 7 said said it’s like most people assume water is the same it’s more of a brand play and we believe if we can make you laugh we have a way better chance that you giving us your dollar 69 then the faceless brand next to us who’s trying to shout at you electrolyte so let you know they’re like guys this all seems like snake oil to me like I feel like there’s real human beings behind liquid depth and I’d want to have a beer with so I’d rather give you my dollar 60 grand and let’s talk a little bit about the form factor so is it’s a it’s a tall cam as what I’ve seen are there other form factors or no no it’s just the talking it’s all kin which is cool the branding of it is sort of like you know almost like heavy metal or punk rock how do you describe yeah yeah yeah I mean yeah I think at the end of the day you would you would say we’re like alternative punk metal inspired design and and vibe I think the way I like to think about our brand is like we’re a professional wrestler like it’s all theater and fun and everyone thinks it’s trying to be real like no one thinks the Undertaker is really an evil guy from the dead who likes metal no it’s a character and it’s fun to like buy a character yeah and that’s kind of that’s how we think about it like we’re just playing this fun sorry second we’re just playing this fun character it’s fun to choose to believe that yeah this is what it is and not take it too seriously and you write like you know if you’re at a bar or a music festival and you choose water you feel like you’re choosing you’re opting out of the fun and in fact they’ll sort of you know it’ll make you feel that way you know you’ll get the small plastic rinky-dink Cup with a baby straw right versus if you ordered a you know alcoholic drink or something else it’s kind of that’s actually a good point I mean I don’t drink and I still go to bars and I always felt like I used to order sprites with lime in it because I was like looks like a gin and tonic yeah my god one being people feel uncomfortable what so I’ll just even though I don’t like to drink soda like I’ll drink it anyway and I don’t have an O’Doul’s because I’m like uh then everyone’s just kind of like it’s just gonna come up and so it’s it is a great alternative to that and so Mike I’m curious where does this idea come from so I think this was really just like a culmination of all my passions and experience sort of like converged into one you know it’s like I grew up in high school playing in punk rock and metal bands and skateboarding and you know I would do all the show flyers and album art and stuff for our bands which kind of got like the entrepreneurial probably side of things cuz like you know we’re booking shows and we’re selling merch and like we’re pressing records and doing all that kind of stuff then I got into a career of like graphic design which led into advertising so then I was like an advertising creative director for a long time and I worked on big brands like Nestle and Toyota and Volkswagen and Naked Juice and all this kind of stuff so I think I got a good sense of where I think big companies screw up I guess like where I think they’re short-sighted like I can’t tell you how many boardrooms I’ve been in where I’m trying to convince people that social media isn’t some like niche little thing you add on to your business like it is the Internet when you say I’m going on the Internet nine times out of 10 you’re going on social media you know it’s like I think a lot of brands are just way behind the ball to understand what it really takes to be successful in the social environment like your little social posts aren’t just competing against other beverages you’re competing against influencers who are uncensored and can do crate easy on the wall stuff you’re again trash you’re competing against everything awesome on the internet when you’re scrolling through your feed that’s what your marketing is competing against so when you really think about it that way do you really think your little ad that seems like a typical beverage thing is gonna actually stand out in someone’s quick scrolling feed amongst all this other amazing stuff probably not so I think the bar for what stuff needs to be is way higher and I think that’s what I built liquid death around like we think about marketing like entertainment I don’t ever want to put something in your feed that feels like marketing I wanted to feel like actual entertainment that made you laugh or it was the funniest thing that you may be stall that morning that you want to share with your friends or whatever that like we’re never just sticking marketing in your face like it’s always going to entertain you or it’s gonna do something of value that it gives you I’ve got a question I’m gonna check Sam I’m looking at their Facebook ads right now and what you’re saying is true so here’s the two ads I see I wish I could show this through a podcast so I’m gonna show this to your ears but there’s a giant can of liquid death in front of a mountain and says this is dumb don’t buy this there’s another one that’s like I don’t know what you’d call this it’s like a it’s like the mountain from Game of Thrones but instead of his head is a can a liquid death erupting from his muscular body and he’s standing in a grocery store aisle grocery store aisle holding an axe and it just says like this is a bill nationwide in Whole Foods I’m gonna I want to ask a question about that but first is there any indication is there anything you can give me the shows or the listeners how big this business is like what what what size you guys are yeah why should we why should we care about what you say is the other thing or not I want you to like impress people yeah I mean I can’t get into like specific kind of sales numbers but since we launched national and Whole Foods basically we launched the day the pandemic started so we what we went into Whole Foods March 15 and basically even even though we’ve been in a pandemic where they’ve had like 80% decreased store traffic and everything else going on we’ve had insane growth in Whole Foods and we’re now the fastest growing water bread in Whole Foods right and you’ve raised like how much money to make the safari grand total since the very beginning of everything I think we’ve raised around 12 total right now so great ok so we kind of have an idea a little bit about sizing when you look at when you are looking at this business and what and what to start was that your perspective which is what is something that I mean it sounds like you’re into health and in that type of stuff what is something that is like good for you but has [ ] marketing and how can I build a business around that was that your perspective in a nutshell I think it really came from you know you know where I grew up playing in punk bands and and metal bands and stuff like that I was still and a lot of my friends in that world we’re very much into health like I was a vegetarian at age 16 a lot of my friends in that scene were more my friends were even vegan a lot of them like you know didn’t drink alcohol I do and I think that’s one thing that we’ve been like misbranded is like liquid death its water for the straightedge crowd that is not what we’re trying to do I think it’s something that’s been adopted by them for you know the reasons of yeah it is more fun to walk around in a bar if you don’t want drink than something like this but I think another thing that the health food industry does I don’t think we want to do is we don’t want to be preachy to people we don’t want to say you should be doing this and I shouldn’t be drinking this and you shouldn’t be doing that like we’re like hey you want to go rip some shots in a bar fine but maybe take a break and have a water for an hour you know or like hey you want to smoke weed or whatever it’s like great like maybe hydrate while you’re doing it right even if like hey you want to go buy a monster energy drink or whatever great maybe buy water too and have a water after you just pound a bunch of sugar I’m happy that’s the good news anybody who does any lifestyle also drinks water and spray compared to any lifestyle that you want it sounds like you guys trying to do that let me ask you like you’ve said some kind of abstract ways like you know we felt this was missing about what but I want you to like rewind and make it real so like take us back to the moment you have the idea what’s going on where are you where does the idea come from who are you talking to and then like how did it turn into something sure so as as you know in the world of rock and roll punk metal whatever the only brands that have invested in trying to own that culture have been energy drinks primarily Monster so Monster was sponsoring the Vans Warped Tour with all the punk bands they sponsor all these different metal bands like you don’t see that with many other brand doing that now so I graduated high school in 2000 so that’s what I think you’re really starting to see that swell up and a lot of my friends were in bands we were at the Vans Warped Tour that was sponsored by monster back in I think it was like around 2007 somewhere around there I was in Denver working for an agency there went and hung out at the work toward with my friends you know they took me backstage we’re hanging out with like all the bands you know the bands tour buses and I saw that they had like huge stacks of monster that these guys are all drinking and I was like how are you guys pounding energy drinks right now like in the hot Sun like it’s like 98 degrees and they’re like no dude it’s water and was like monster gives all the bands they look like monster cancer at the bottom it says tour water because they know that none of these bands are gonna drink this stuff in the Sun so bands on stage are pounding what looked like energy drinks to all these kids but it’s really just water that’s what I remember thinking like that’s so [ ] up like you know like you know and I think that was the moment where I where it kind of started me down the path of Oh like why is it stuff like water like marketed in a cool way like this and it was like when you actually had a freezing cold can of water it’s just more refreshing to you psychologically right there’s actually a popular science I think it was they did a study where they showed that temperature was the number one quencher of thirst neurologically which is why like if you’re really thirsty and you suck on an ice cube it actually kind of quenches your thirst a little bit even though no water is actually absorbing into your body right so I think there was just like that was sort of the aha moment for me where I started thinking about why isn’t it healthier things because none of us none of my friends hang out one to actually drink energy drinks like we just wanted to drink water or beer you know but it’s like of course you’re banned you got to make money you’re touring so of course you got to take the checks from these companies and and you know they they they play ball to a certain extent but that’s where I think the idea really started and what other verticals did you explore that you think would also work for this did you explore any other products that you think like so it’s definitely there’s definitely opportunity here if you do what we’re doing but in this this thing or that thing so 21x so that so that worked or thing happened yeah like around 2007-2008 where I started thinking about that but then it was a couple like maybe two years later I was living in San Francisco and I actually developed the spirits brand on my own called Western grace and it was basically brandy so it was like hey how do we make brandy cool because I had brandy it was why don’t people drink more it’s just like whiskey without the bird but every brandy bottle literally in the in the liquor store had dust on it it was like what your grandfather drank or some trying to be replica of French luxury with cursive golden text on the bottle but it was more similar per taste profile wise to a whiskey which was the biggest fastest growing spirit so I had this idea to create a brandy that felt more like a whiskey and felt cool and sure enough like I found a brandy distillery in Northern California who were like oh my god we’ve been waiting for someone to try to make brandy like mass and cool for like 20 years so they were like hey we’ll make the brandy for you then I went and found some spirit industry folks who helped create Hendrix Jain and Sailor Jerry rum to kind of come on board they thought it was really interesting and then all of a sudden we have a brandy company and I moved back to my hometown of Philadelphia where my partners were and we basically like I was only a couple years out of AD school no entrepreneurial experience no liquor industry experience and we started building this brandy company and it’s still around today there in probably 80 bars in LA they’re all over Austin they’re in Nashville they’re Florida but I left the brand a little bit early on because I just me and our spirits folks we brought in kind of like didn’t see eye to eye on a couple things from a marketing level so I said hey you guys keep growing it from here I’m gonna kind of go do my own thing and you know I’ll keep my little chunk of vested equity and best of luck to you guys like no hard feelings I’m sure you’ll do great with it and then went to work for an agency in Tennessee that a friend of mine started called human eye where I started doing a bunch of well human eye and eye we did a bunch of funny work for the organic world we did this campaign called save the bras the first organic protein shake and we did this funny viral video that just went bananas and it was like the first time that like humor had really been done like in the world of organic and that was like the reinforcement the warp tour thing where it’s like right like why aren’t more health brands like playing with the kind of humor and irreverent internet stuff that these other you know unhealthy things are doing and then that’s really where I started building the nuts and bolts of liquid death and figuring out the production and coming up with the branding and then it was I think maybe two years after that was when we officially kind of launched it that’s that’s pretty cool do you do you think that there’s still opportunity for that I mean because when you go to 7-eleven I mean I live in San Francisco I’m in Austin right now there’s 7-elevens everywhere is and it’s only muscle milk is the only that’s the only protein based drink and that is similar to your analogy of like a net that’s like an Evian or a Fiji or something like a mass brand well if I’m if I’m not wrong I think it’d be more like taking cottage cheese and making cottage cheese fun than it is Muscle Milk or the kind of protein shakes which are already kind of like trying to mass market and get in with a sort of different lifestyles whereas you know some random product category where it is only trying to play it safe non internet-based marketing those are the ones that you’re talking about right Mike where you think those have the sort of larger Delta between what’s out there and what could be out there yeah I want to hear which which of which if there are any others that do have that Delta that’s what I’m getting at yeah it’s tricky and I think that’s where it’s a so protein shake let’s use that as an example protein shakes if you think about who the protein shake consumer is probably predominantly male like dude strike you know bulking up a lot of the time you know at least in that world and that’s why organic valley when they came to the agency they knew that like all the ads they’ve been running cuz most of all organic Valley’s products are milk and cheese and stuff that they sell at Whole Foods all their commercials are like picturesque sunsets over family farms and our family farmers they just care more than anyone but they knew that when they launched an organic protein shake it’s a very different customer than the mom who shot Whole Foods through their other products so they wanted us to come in and say hey we know that it’s like a muscle dude that we’re selling this to who’s typically not in organic you know the big-time organic shopper maybe they are buying two tubs of you know protein powder at GNC or they’re buying you know muscle milk so they’re like we still want to appeal to that audience with this very you know a protein shake that’s made by family farmers so we did this whole funny video that’s like you know if Bros liked all the chemical crazy [ ] that’s in protein shakes if bros keep drinking them they might not last much longer and they’ll go extinct and like who’s gonna bring the beer pong table when they’re gone and like you know like this whole idea of like save a bro get them on an organic protein ship that was sort of like the funny idea that we had that went really really well and it’s because the product even though it was healthy is still a liquid that wants to be drank by a consumer who identifies with the marketing it’s like if you just try to say all right we’re gonna make an oat milk brand that feels you know badass and rock and roll the oat milk customer probably isn’t guys who ride Harley Davidsons like they’re not drinking oat milk but you’re trying to market to them so it’s like that’s probably not gonna work as well because you’ve got way more marketing education to do to try to convert new customers into something that they’ve never drank before water is different for us because everybody drinks water we don’t have to explain how to drink water how to use it like everybody drinks water from Harley dudes to metal dudes to yoga moms to everybody and now it’s just about from a from a demographic or psychographic standpoint who just thinks this is a cool thing could be a part of their day with you’re not trying to convince them why they should drink water right gotcha and so you also went through science or how did science get involved because this when I first heard about this was like oh this is coming out of science labs is that did you bring the idea to them did you meet them and incubate the idea how did that happen in this room for people who don’t know what we’re talking about science science science is like this weird quasi venture capital firm but also like a weird incubator they launched Dollar Shave Club and a variety of things or helped correct weird combo of like company builder and investor based out of LA yep yeah so we launched liquid death in a bit of a backwards way than most I think beverage brands launched 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 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 who would ever buy this it’s a negative name it says that retailers will never carry it yadda 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 D risking this thing a bit to actually raise so we designed the can to look like a 3d realistic can we shot a fifteen hundred dollar video and then we just put it on Facebook no Twitter no Instagram just Facebook we put maybe I don’t know three grand and 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 for no idea of how we were even going to really make it so then I use all of 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 what 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 is a quarter million a quarter of a million of product what would that call I mean if you’re just starting what would that cost I mean it all depends what you’re filling 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 doing cans so yeah once we once we then kind of raised a little bit we started producing cans we we bottle or should they be can and source our water in Austria in the Alps once we had physical cans that people let me ask you 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 Matt like phase is true B does that matter 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 you watered 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 go find taste test Fiji versus Avion versus whatever can they really tell the difference probably not right but I’ve done this test many times as an Evian drinker Evian versus so Evian and Fiji are taste similar to me Evian versus Crystal Geyser like it tastes different I’ve bet money and I’ve got it right before 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 camp 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 mouthfeel 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 US whether that smart water essentia Aquafina Dasani most of those brands they’re zinc unit is tap from the that then they reverse osmosis which strips everything out along 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’s kind of how we think about it everything we have in our water is natural that’s how it comes off the mountain 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 right now that’s that’s okay and you know I’ve never actually had liquid death is 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 as a you sorry just to sort of finish it so you you took that you know you’ve raised a little bit you do the social media to prove hey we can build a fun brand that people resonate with then you figure it 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 that was from science or afterwards science came about and they wrote a bigger check we raised the friends and family around just to basically cover like a super limited you know the smallest run a product we could do right and then once I finally had a physical can of liquid death for the first time which was probably around October of 2018 we had a guy that we knew who knew someone at science she 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 them a 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’s 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 D to C launch where we launched online in January of last year and do you think this will be mostly D to C you think this will be retail how do you think about that obviously you’re doing both where do you think is the kind of bulk of the business gonna come from I think we’ve always known it was going to be retail from the beginning we just didn’t know how soon do you start really pushing into Rico water is something that you don’t want to just order on the internet like you want to be able to buy a water when you’re thirsty somewhere right so it’s just naturally a retail play versus like you know something like maybe like a Soylent it’s like a meal replacement thing you could order those to your front door because right not like you just randomly deciding to go get one of those but now they’re pushing into retail as well what your pitch on how big this gets and the way I like these pitches is kind of like bottoms up so it’s like you know rather than saying you know well vitamin order sold for this much so maybe we can get that much or more cuz blah but like bottoms up being like you know there’s this mini grocery store I don’t know if you think that way but like do you do you have that sort of analysis of like I think this gets this big because I can say that there’s this many venues or this many grocery stores or this much do you see demand of this so I think we can you know when we grow up we can become this big do you think that way or how do you approach that yeah I think it’s a combination of things I mean one you can obviously start what is the size of the bottled water market which in 2019 the bottled water market in the US alone was twenty billion dollars bottled water still water made up a little under fifteen billion of that twenty and sparkling is about three and a half billion of that twenty so it’s a massive market and what’s the result labored Oh like private label okay okay yeah and flavored stuff in there the biggest retail in terms of doors channel is convenience stores there’s like over a hundred and fifty thousand convenience stores and then I think there’s maybe I don’t know I think there’s maybe thirty thousand grocery stores or something like that and then Shenron and on premise like restaurants and bars there’s about a million in the US so you can start looking at you know velocities of what certain water brands do in convenience stores we can look at some of our velocities that we’re seeing and what they could grow to and yeah you can really start to like forecast out how big this gets but it’s like you know well-performing water brands just in 7/11 can be doing 50 million in sales just in 7-eleven in scan sales for like you know you know a decent water brand and that’s just 7-eleven who are the top three the top water brands in terms of six scale are as you can probably imagine like Aquafina and Dasani they’re both over a billion dollars and it’s those are owned by Nestle and or who those owned by Pepsi aquafina of Pepsi the Sonia’s cook okay Wow okay that’s and then Nestle’s the other big one Nestle has a couple brands like Nestle Pure Life and kind of the more budget value water and yeah they’re another they’re over a billion as well who owns at how owns and how much so Fiji’s owned by wonderful brands they’re down near you in LA right or I don’t know if you’re in LA but in LA how much how much revenue do you think Fiji and Evian does I think Fiji’s a privately owned company is a bien public I don’t know the exact numbers I’ve seen a couple things so I can’t really comment if they’re if they’re accurate or not but I assume that Fiji Evian they’re probably somewhere around like five hundred million a year something like that I guess what would the margin on that be so is it as big as I would think it’s not as big as you think really because the retailers they want the most margin on bottled water like they want to mark out bottled water higher than almost any other beverage that they have in the store so the retailer wants a lot of margin then you’ve got a distributors that need their margin so it’s like you really get down it’s not like bottled water and some like insane margin for suppliers than other products like like energy drinks probably getting more margin than water which I think the conception is dude they’re just bottling water that’s like you know you’re like selling air yeah but in reality the margin is probably I would guess sub you know sub 30% not above 30% it’s kind of my my guess I think most in most beverage they say like you know a target like really solid margin for beverage would be like 40% that’s like 50% is like you’re killing it right and then it’s like I think you get down like 230 is probably like on the low end of so when I used to own a train a hotdog stands in Nashville and when it was really was called southern Sam sweeteners as big as a baby’s arm and and I would crush it on bottled water in the daytime bottled water would cost two or three dollars and at nighttime when everyone’s drunk you definitely add a little bit more to it I think from Restaurant Depot I think a bottled water was 14 cents or like or good it was like stupid and so I like the hotdogs would like make a little bit of money I would make it after you can make 1,000 a day off bottled water that was where the money was that was the bottled water yeah that's a sales guy you got Sam here yeah man I was talking water like crazy that was where I was that we had this question which was if you had to make a thousand dollars tomorrow but I stripped you of all your kind of like current income streams and your current business how would you go try to make a thousand bucks in a week or whatever and I think Sam's was I go to a hot place I've buy water for 14 cents and go sell them in front of a stadium or something like that in a corner like at the at the stoplight like yeah because like people don't care about the water they more so care about the convenience like a [ __ ] it's right here it's and I totally over thought it and I was like well I guess I would create this online store and I was like nah it's too slow too complicated dude I would I would be like a bender and a like a concert series like the summer concert series that cities has I swear to God I would make a thousand dollars a day in bottled water sales you just you know that's not every day but you crush it at those concerts just selling bottled water that was where I where I would make a killing what other opportunities have you seen that if you weren't starting this business you would be very interested in like things that you've discovered along the way there's two questions right because our audience the listeners for this right we got hundreds of thousands of listeners who are gonna hear this and they're all entrepreneurial types but really you know it's not like they're gonna go and do one of these things but they just love to hear different perspectives it's like you are right in the world few of us even think about on a daily basis so you're seeing thing wasn't seeing unity thinking about things that we don't see which is why you came up with this idea to begin with and so they really do love to hear kind of like you know I've always thought you could do this I said it doesn't have to be a great idea it could be a you know I just noticed that these things really crushes it or these are kind of backwards I think it might be fun to try this do you have anything that that's in that could complete that sentence yeah I mean that is a tough one like I mean I guess obviously like you're always looking for white space right I think where I was really inspired most by my point of view on business and branding is from Bergeon like Richard Branson what you know early in my advertising career when I worked in San Francisco the main account that I worked on was Virgin America the airline so I got like super deep into virgin and and I read you know Richard Branson books and I just would be loved that their model was like we go and try to find a stale category and we make the one really cool fun brand within that category where it almost changes the category where the rest of the category almost has to start adapting like Airlines like nobody was excited to get on an airplane we eat airplane food or anything and then they were the first ones to make planes look like neon blue lighting and like you know TVs in every seat which now is like a common thing in every time right so it was like that really inspired my way of looking at where I would look for things that were like what is something that like you said like cottage cheese like what is something that is extremely boring or like what's a category that just nobody cares about where you can't think of one cool brand in and obviously like if it's something that seems like it could still have appeal it's just a victim of poor brands not getting it and you know just not innovating or whatever it might be and you see an opportunity hey this actually could be a thing that people really would love but it's just been stuck in this like doldrums of branding for so long that it needs something because at the end of the day with especially with packaged goods like branding is so much more important than most suppliers or the core companies think right you know because most companies are started by business people in the most part it's like someone with an MBA someone who understands the nuts and bolts of building a business it's rare that businesses are started by creative people like artists and people that are you know graphic designers and stuff like it's it's two different things and usually what happens is the business folks think really rationally like okay my product contains this so the name of the product should be about that and I should list all the rational reasons why someone should buy this yeah it's like and then that gets them a certain part of the way but then they end up hiring a creative agency to get all these creative thinkers in to build a story around this boring thing to make people actually care about so what I think is interesting is when you have creative people at the very beginning of the process where it's like just considering what the company should be what the name should be what the product should even look like will someone even care about whatever it is you're selling because I think the creative people do have a good sense of culturally what's going on what's cool what do people care about what's the climate business people not so much I feel like they're more in like the nuts and bolts and weaves of like numbers and affection which is hugely important which is why there's so many brands that never get the creative side but still they just become these logistical Swiss Army knives that still get acquired right but it's like just imagine if they had great creative - you might be a two billion dollar brand right you know I'm speaking of water I'm good friends with this guy Scott Harrison from charity:water have you ever met Scott yeah I've never met him I've ever heard of the brand and so so you've heard of the brand because I think they've done a phenomenal job with the brand and so this is just a like we were thinking when we're just brainstorming oh what's another category in a grocery store that you could do this which is definitely a totally legit brainstorm we can do but this is a very different analogy but I think you did the same thing so Scott was a party promoter like you came from a punk-rock background then ads yeah and you went into this CPG space which not that maybe the most conventional path he's a you know party promoter club promoter in New York for ten years you know convincing dudes to buy you know three thousand bottle and three thousand dollar bottles of Grey Goose that they know you know you could go back fifty dollars across the street to get table service right and so then he goes and he you know has a come-to-jesus moment go goes to act si I'm paid the neck I'm giving back and but he's all he knows is how to promote parties all he knows is cool and so he reinvented charity as a cool brand and he has this quote he does when he like tells his story which is it's a quote from someone talking about philanthropy and they say man imagine if we could sell charity with one tenth of the finesse that brand sell toothpaste like imagine if we had one tenth of their marketing power that they do they use on toothpaste imagine how much food we could do in the world and so that's basically what he did where he was alright I'm gonna make a brand that actually stands for these three things and I'm gonna have awesome design because every charity website sucks and you know it looks like they hired their eighth grade cousin till I build it for them and I'm gonna do these with influencers I'm gonna do these print campaigns etc etc and you know he's now been raising you know over a hundred fifty million dollars for the cause he's one of the fastest growing and best charities out there because he did what you did which is he applied cool to a category that was totally uncool before ya know totally and I think there's so many different places where you can think about you know I think cool is a weird word because it's like it can be taken so anyways I think it's like it's less about cool but it's like how do you make it interesting or how do you make it like desirable like I have to have this writing you know but that's what I want to know I mean I want to go back to that first question that Sean kind of dismissed a little whereas like what else is in that category because I think that's that's really that's intriguing to me I mean our there things that you've explored or you're like you know this actually is one of those categories I'm busy now but that would be interesting for someone to change that category I think we're even thinking about that with liquid yeah to like I think liquid death you know is so much bigger than just a water company like at the end of the day like I think we think about ourselves as like a pop culture Factory like we just made we released a liquid death vinyl record recently I don't know if you guys saw that but it was like in less than two weeks we sold 700 vinyl records which is like more than most metal bands actually sell when they release a record on a major metal label and it was like this money idea where we took social media hate comments and made them the lyrics to this metal album and it's like wow a water company now just became a record label for a minute and it's like I think about all these other places where there could be innovation that tied our general mission of like health that's like do we like what if liquid death creates like a chain of heavy-metal yoga studios you know where it's like people who want to do yoga but they don't want to listen to Yanni when they're doing it like is there some room for like some kind of cool like how do you make it a totally new you could do like this experience you could do like tough-guy multi-vitamins if you need to write a healthy product multi-vitamins and be like okay cool actually you know rainbows and Care Bears like maybe we could just make this form factor a little different brand a little different right to speak to a different audience who's you know so you you guys have raised let's say 10 I forget the number 10 or 12 million dollars you're not huge yet you're definitely still getting going how do you decide so like at my company we have a brand that people know and people just if we make stuff people will buy it but in my head I'm always like I don't want to make other stuff let's just like focus on what we're doing and kick ass at that and then maybe eventually expand whereas you've done these little experiments like the vinyl record inmate so maybe you're also trying to uh maybe you weren't joking with your heavy metal yoga thing in my head I'm like no no no [ __ ] that focus what uh do you have like a like logistically how do you decide where to throw a bunch of that and throw money at in order to so let me ask you that so this is what I mean all these other products that we could potentially make that actually sell or actually succeed they double as marketing for the water yeah this marketing that it's profitable it's profitable exactly it's like we made a vinyl record I can't tell you how many eyeballs that got liquid death on from people reposting the album sharing the album talking about it and that album for us to execute including printing the vinyl cost us 12,000 and we’ve already made do you have work on that how much stat who worked on it but you know did you we hired a guy that we knew that was a friend of a friend who’s an incredible metal musician who wrote the whole album his name’s Gus Rios he wrote and recorded the whole album his buddy mixed the whole album and his buddy mix stuff for Justin Bieber and all these other guys so we got the whole album recorded we made a commercial for maybe 2 grand on stock footage and my wife edited the video so I was like you know that’s all that’s all we launched with it was a little launch video made with stock footage and we pressed records and sold the records in our merch store and it’s like all that stuff adds together that’s why it’s like what would it cost to to start let’s call it a chain of five looks small heavy metal yoga studios in LA like small little studios not a lot going on you find some you know some instructors like maybe you could actually build that out for call it 500 grand let’s just say like you can make you could build a 5 change Ogas to do heavy metal yoga studio chain for a 500 grand what does 500 gram buy you if you try to run one TV spot right during the [ ] Oscars like maybe you get a 30-second spot and what’s gonna see more lifts and brand evangelism for your brand running one 700 I think it was and he sold he sold like million shit-ton I think it was ten millions of dollars and the whole thing is basically just being like you know feeding the evangelism like you said of the cult of you on of yeah life should be a little more badass we need a little more fire a little more speed and a little more like you know rocketry to in our in our lives and so it’s the brand you know when you curate your own new experiences or whatever for the brand you can also control what goes on there so it all plays yoga studios it’s going to be coolers of liquid death as the waters act right you know it’s like it all kind of my takeaway from this whole podcasts is I’m gonna do I’m gonna do a handful of I’m not gonna launch a yoga studio but a $12,000 vinyl release or something like of that scale is super interesting I need to do more of that do you have one person on your in your team who like does these odd things or is this just like a product like a project that you lead and coordinate so we work with you know we do have like creative agencies that we work with like most of which are run by my friends who I use I knew from the industry they’ve got small little startups and what’s nice about liquid death is because we want to do such cool different things people are willing to kind of work at a nice homey rate because like they want that thing up for their real we’re not just ask them to make some you’re crazy enough to be willing you’re open enough to like try that necessary and say hey look at this amazing thing we did with liquid death and they want the nestle check not the liquid death well they’re doing the same thing that you’re they’re doing they’re doing the same thing what you’re doing with the vinyl they’re like maybe pay for itself but it’s also marketing right right exactly so yeah I mean we get a lot of you know smart creative people that are throwing ideas into the mix but you know at the end of the day like you know I’m a very creative focus CEO I think we built like a nice team around us that like is really smart with operations and supply chain and that kind of stuff it’s not so much my strong suit and I can you know focus more on the brand and creative side which you know liquid death it’s really a brand play you know like and that it’s so important and I think building out all these fun things we’re talking about of like how do you build this brand that has such an evangelist audience to it and it continues to grow like that’s not that’s really the focus this is great we’re coming up on the hour Sam did you have anything else you know I’m taking notes I’m gonna write down you know to my team and I’m like cuz I have I’m also creative but I definitely am like fiscally conservative and I’m like no no we got to focus and focus on the cash cow but I’m like you’re right this dumb [ __ ] that seems dumb but it’s awesome you can do that for way cheaper than you think yeah I guess it’s just like always think like one of my old bosses I used to work I was the crib director at vaynermedia so Gary Vaynerchuk was like not my boss essentially you know I learned a lot from him in terms of like marketing is really just about day trading attention like marketing is all about attention and it can mission to it or price the price for a billboard you’re paying so much per eyeballed it sees it it’s like yes it could be effective but you’re overpaying for it versus create a yoga studio in LA you might generate even more eyeballs and attention at a way WAY lower spend I think it’s just always thinking about who how do I get attention for my brand and what are all the different possible ways that you can get attention what’s like the most cost efficient ways to get that and I have to ask was it awesome or not awesome working for him is the guy the real deal or what I love Gary I think he’s like an incredible human being like you know I’ve worked for a lot of corporate folks and I think there’s there’s a lot of egos there’s people who don’t care and I think Gary like truly cares like even if you’re gonna tell him you’re you’re quitting like he’s gonna be like Oh awesome like do you need any help finding your next thing you know like he’s just like he cares and I think that’s what he’s built his whole company on is like you can build a massive company with like a compassionate point of view on your people and not just being some like tyrant kind of do you think there’s any anything about Gary cuz he’s a very public presence right he’s personally out there a lot and you know anytime you personally put yourself out there because it’s putting a part of you out there not the whole thing is there anything that either people don’t really know about him or is a misconception that you’ve seen about him is there anything like that I would say that like just talking like just talking with him normally one-to-one is obviously the volume isn’t as loud as it is when he’s on camera you know very like he’s an entertainer to a degree right now he’s an educational business entertainer but he’s entertaining to watch like the way he talks like how his passion is like how he’s smart like there’s plenty of business people who say smart things but not maybe as many that are like it’s like in a way he’s kind of playing you know a bit of his character but it’s like off camera like he’s way more mellow I would say then most people think like you know he’s I was on I was I was on his podcast or like I forget whatever it’s called and he was very nice and I had we he turned it up slowly but yeah he had he wasn’t on right away yeah he had to get amped a little that’s awesome alright well Mike we’ll wrap it up where should people follow you find you if they want to hear more thoughts or slick with death you know give people shout out where people can get more of what they got today yeah I mean most everything happened in with liquid death is on instagram so follow us it’s at liquid death on Instagram you know athlete with death on Twitter and liquid death comms or say and yeah that’s that’s it awesome this is awesome I’m looking at it right now thanks for taking the time I’m in this bad ass sorry if my typing is something you hear on the podcast kids while he was talking well he was talking I was like I am to write this down I had three ideas while you were talking about exactly what you said but you inspired something while you were talking I was like I got to write this down cuz we’re gonna do this and if you don’t do this like I’m gonna regret it so all these everyone here’s typing and yeah I do the same thing I’m like looking up everything you’re saying that’s a that’s a sign of a good podcast though and it’s all about speed like that’s one thing I always push it’s like the idea shelf life these days is very short they give you have a cool idea right now you don’t make it tomorrow someone else is probably making it you know it’s like right on guys thank you thank you so much for coming on all right thanks guys take care thank you [Music] you