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Meet Mike Cessario. This ex-Netflix employee built a $700M empire by selling a free commodity; WATER. Today, Liquid Death is equivalent to the Air Jordans of the beverage industry. Here's how Mike Cessario engineered virality and made Liquid Death an internet sensation: 🧵 Mike started Liquid Death as an experiment. He used to work as a Creative Director at brands like Netflix, Nestle, and Apple. But he hated the corporate advertising world. He wanted to do interesting things that had never been done before. But you know how it is, right? MNCs are generally risk-averse. Mike never felt he had the luxury to be truly creative. This is a massive relate btw (at least for me). So he decided to launch a product of his own. Richard Branson (the founder of Virgin Group) was Mike's inspiration. He loved how Richard picked unsexy industries and dominated them with marketing stunts. He set out to do the same with WATER. He spent $1,500 to shoot a funny launch video and another $3,000 to run ads. In 4 months, he had... - 3M+ views on the launch video - 80,000+ followers on the Facebook page - got bigger than Acquafina on social media That's when he knew he was onto something. Until this point, he didn't even have a real product. It was just a concept on a video. In January 2019, Mike raised a small round of funding to manufacture the Tallboy beer can. In the same month, he sold his first batch. Initially, it was hard to place the cans in the stores. Retailers didn't think it would work. But in a month, the bars went from "We can't sell water" to "I sell 5 cases of this every week". Whole Foods was the first major breakthrough. The company has gone on to raise - $1.6M in seed round in January '19 - $9M in Series A in February '20 - $23M in Series B in September '20 - $75M in Series C in December '21 In October '22, the company raised $70M at a massive $700M valuation. Mike did not try to build a billion-dollar brand. He just wanted to create something that would make his friends laugh. But his creative tactics ended up making hydration cool and sustainability punk. He made people feel excited about WATER. With a single tallboy can, priced at $1.89, - the brand has garnered 2.8M+ followers on Instagram and 4.9M+ on TikTok. - the sales have skyrocketed from $2.8m in 2019 to $45m in 2021 and $250m in 2023.