Growing Your Business

Sean Schedit/Washington Post

Consumers have plenty of options for bottled water, but Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario saw an opportunity to make plain water exciting.

Before founding Liquid Death in 2017, Cessario worked in advertising, where he learned how brands could break through the noise. He spent his early days playing guitar in punk and metal bands, where he noticed that most products marketed to the crowds were energy drinks, sodas, and other junk food, according to publicist Jake Tredo.

These insights became Liquid Death, a canned beverage company known for its aggressive branding, irreverent humor, and heavy metal-inspired aesthetic that, according to the company, was valued at $1.4 billion in 2024.

Initially the company’s biggest challenge was creating demand for a product that, while essential to human survival, is difficult to differentiate from brand to brand.

“We came up with the crazy name that felt provocative, and then you start using marketing to, in a funny way, rationalize it,” Cessario told Founder Brew. “Water is the healthiest thing you could drink. Why is it called Liquid Death? And it’s like, ‘Well, because it murders your thirst,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, got it.’ You start finding ways to make the crazy thing all of a sudden actually seem reasonable. That’s where you start creating the brand and the marketing and everything else.”

The company has since expanded its beverage offerings, with iced tea and flavored seltzers available with the same irreverent messaging. “My marketing goal for Liquid Death is like, I want to be the funniest brand in the world,” Cessario admitted.

Cessario views that humor as Liquid Death’s competitive advantage.

“Comedy is really hard, and when something’s hard, it means it’s more rare, and something more rare intrinsically has more value to people,” Cessario said.

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Cessario explains how Liquid Death built demand for a commodity product, and why laughs became its secret weapon.

Water is one of the most commoditized products in the world. Why did you believe there was an opportunity to build a brand around something people traditionally don’t get excited about?

Brand and marketing is more important than maybe people think…We didn’t want to be in a plastic bottle...and that in the early days became what sort of our differentiator was. There was really no other aluminum canned water brands at that time.

We always wanted to lean with what makes Liquid Death an interesting, almost uncopyable brand first—the comedy, the irreverent humor, the reason you want to walk around with the can and give your money to this company.

Read more about Liquid Death’s comedic approach.—JH

      

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Founder Leadership

Jobber

The typical startup advice is to find a co-founder you know and trust. Jobber co-founders Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler found an advantage in doing the opposite: Starting as strangers forced them to build trust intentionally, challenge each other’s ideas, and have difficult conversations early.

The two software developers were freelancing and often working out of the same coffee shop in Edmonton, Canada. What started as a casual conversation about their work turned into a deeper discussion about how to solve the same problem: helping businesses operate more efficiently.

Together, they built Jobber, a software platform they launched in 2011 that helps service businesses manage their daily operations

“A lot of people are fooled by the connections they have outside of the work environment into thinking that that would just automatically apply into the work environment,” Zeisler said.In a conversation with Founder Brew, Pillar and Zeisler discuss how starting as strangers shaped their partnership, the importance of productive conflict, and what foundations support the strongest co-founder relationships.

You’ve said not being friends before starting Jobber was actually an advantage. What’s something that would have been harder if you’d been close friends first?

Sam Pillar: The huge value for Forrest and me was building our relationship business first. It meant that, very early on, we could have really tough conversations and debate issues in the spirit of productive conflict. If we had been friends, you might think, “I don’t want to have this tough conversation and have the friendship be weird for a couple of weeks while we process it,” and therefore we won’t have the conversation—and therefore the business doesn’t benefit.

Forrest Zeisler: A lot of the reasons that people become friends, in some ways, it short-circuits trust. But those are bad proxies for whether you’re actually going to work well together.

Read more about the benefits of starting a company with a stranger.—JH

      

How Petite Plume’s hero product strategy is driving growth (Revenue Brew)

The luxury sleepwear brand has found success with its Olivia pajamas style

Inside cardiovascular biotech Kardigan’s June IPO (CFO Brew)

The investors that the three-year-old company wanted to attract “live in the public markets,” CFO Brianne Puglisi said.

Software operators are shipping AI features that customers don’t use (IT Brew)

Around 51% of business software operators saw fewer than one in four customers use the AI features they’ve added

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Stat: 27%. That’s the percentage omelette sales surged inside a 20-mile radius of Taylor Swift’s Miami concert in 2024 for restaurants using Toast software. That’s just one hyper-specific stat from the radically different, data-dense restaurant business these days. (The Economist)

Quote: “All our neighbors worked for those firms—Facebook, Google, and Apple. None of them would let their children interact with any screens.”—Mara Fath, a San Francisco resident, on the irony of tech execs and their no-screen parenting styles (the New York Times)

Read: If anyone can use Claude’s design tools, what happens when everyone does? A look at the new age of “Claudian sameness.” (The New Yorker)

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