Why would anyone get excited about a can of water?

1 · The can in the fridge

Picture a store fridge full of water, every bottle calm and blue with a little mountain on it, and right in the middle, one tall can with a melting skull on it.

It's called Liquid Death. Inside is just water, and investors once said that company was worth more than a billion dollars.

Now maybe you sell something kind of boring too, like a spreadsheet, or insurance, or a cleaning service.

Your ads look like everyone else's ads, so people pick whoever is cheapest, and you drop your price, and drop it again, and it never feels like enough.

Liquid Death found a way out of that trap. And the strangest part is that there's one thing they didn't make any better at all. Hold on to that.

2 · Plain water, dressed up

It started at a loud rock festival, where a guy named Mike Cessario, who made ads for a living, watched his friends' band up on stage drinking water out of Monster energy-drink cans, because Monster was paying for the show.

And he got to wondering why all the fun, loud, cool packaging goes to junk food, while the healthy stuff usually looks so polite.

Years later, he did something kind of crazy. He took the most boring drink in the world and dressed it up like a heavy-metal beer.

Go ahead, peel off that plain label and see what he made.

A tall can, a skull, and a slogan that says "Murder your thirst." Yes, really.

Lots of people thought it was a joke. But within a couple of months, more than a hundred thousand people were fans of it on Facebook, which back then was more than a giant water brand like Aquafina had there.

That's the billion I mentioned. It started selling online in January twenty nineteen, and about five years later, investors put it at one point four billion dollars. For water.

3 · The one thing they didn't change

Remember the one thing they didn't make better? The water. It's still just water in a can.

Most of us believe that if what we sell is boring, the only way to win is a lower price.

But when everything looks the same, the price is the only thing left to look at. Give people something else to look at, and the price stops being the whole story.

Think about someone at a party who isn't drinking beer. With a plain bottle, people ask why. With a tall skull can, they just look like part of the party.

4 · Dan's Dragon Hoard

Let me show you how this works for a small online shop. This is Dan, and he sells budget spreadsheets online.

His listing says "Monthly Budget Spreadsheet," just like thousands of others, with the same rows and the same boxes.

Here are four of them. Which one would you buy?

I bet you looked at the price first. When everything looks the same, that's all there is to look at.

So Dan asks a different question: who do my buyers want to be? Not someone cutting back. Someone building a treasure.

So he dresses his spreadsheet up as a dragon's cave and calls it Dragon Hoard, where every dollar you save drops more gold onto your dragon's pile.

And at the end of each month, it makes a little picture of your hoard that's just the right size to post.

Now look at those four listings again.

So people post their dragons, their friends ask, "wait, where'd you get that?", and some of them go get one too.

And the spreadsheet inside? It's still just rows and boxes, the same way the can is still just water.

5 · Your turn

So here's the recipe. One, find who your buyer wants to be. Two, dress your thing up as that. Three, make it easy to show off.

Now it's your turn. Pick your boring thing, or type it in, and pick who your buyer wants to be.

Flip it over. That's piece number two. You get a new one every issue, so you're building your own little collection.

Next time, I'll bring you another outlier, one that broke a rule everybody swore by.