Compare / Liquid Death vs Pinterest
LIQUID DEATH
A former Netflix creative director put water in a tallboy can, gave it a name that sounds like a heavy metal b…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Liquid Death
BUSINESS MODEL
Liquid Death
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) — Liquid Death sells canned water and flavored beverages through retail stores, Amazon, and DTC. Revenue comes from wholesale to retailers (7-Eleven, Whole Foods, Target, Walmart) and direct online sales.
The aluminum can format commands a premium over plastic water bottles — a single tallboy typically retails for $1.89 to $2.49, significantly more than a bottle of Dasani. The brand licensing and merchandise arm (selling branded t-shirts, hats, and absurd limited-edition products) adds high-margin revenue.
Advertising partnerships and brand collaborations provide additional income. The company has a subscription model called the "Country Club" for DTC recurring orders.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Liquid Death
Mike Cessario was a creative director who had worked at Netflix and various ad agencies. He noticed something at concerts and punk shows: everyone was drinking water out of plastic bottles, but nobody wanted to be seen doing it because water bottles looked lame next to a can of beer.
The branding insight was almost stupidly simple — put water in a tallboy can with aggressive heavy metal aesthetics, give it the most ridiculous name possible, and market it like an energy drink. He made a Facebook ad in 2018 for a product that didn't exist yet.
The ad went viral with 3 million views. He used the viral proof to raise seed funding and actually make the product.
The first cans shipped in 2019. By 2022, Liquid Death was in 60,000 retail locations and valued at over a billion dollars.
All from water in a can.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Liquid Death
Content-first marketing that acts like an entertainment company, not a beverage company. Liquid Death's social media posts, videos, and stunts generate millions of organic views — they've had a witch hex their water, made a real music album from hate comments, and partnered with adult film star Cherie DeVille for a commercial.
Retail distribution expansion from specialty stores to mass market (Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven). The aluminum can itself is a growth strategy — sustainability-minded consumers prefer cans over plastic, giving Liquid Death a values-based selling point beyond the comedy.
Celebrity investors (Tony Hawk, Steve Aoki, Wiz Khalifa) provided credibility and reach. Festival and live event sponsorships position the brand where its core demographic gathers.
The brand's absurdity is the moat — nobody else can copy the tone without looking like they're trying.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Liquid Death
It's still water. The product itself has zero differentiation from any other mountain spring water — the entire value is brand and marketing.
If the comedy stops being funny or the brand loses cultural relevance, there's nothing proprietary underneath. CPG margins are thin and retail shelf space is brutally competitive.
Scaling a premium water brand into mass market means competing on price with Coca-Cola (Dasani) and PepsiCo (Aquafina) who have unlimited distribution muscle. The $1.4 billion valuation requires the company to grow into a full beverage platform, not just a water brand — hence the expansion into iced tea and flavored water.
And there's a real question about whether the ironic marketing can sustain long-term or whether it's a cycle that peaks and fades.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Liquid Death
Mountain Water — still water sourced from the Austrian Alps, sold in 16.9 oz and 19.2 oz tallboy cans. Sparkling Water — same Alpine source, carbonated.
Flavored sparkling water in flavors like Severed Lime, Berry It Alive, and Mango Chainsaw — names that sound like horror movies. Iced tea line expanding beyond water into flavored beverages.
The Country Club subscription for recurring DTC delivery. Merchandise and limited-edition collaborations — from branded caskets to a $50,000 enema kit that sold out.
Every product name and packaging decision is designed to be the opposite of what a water brand would normally do.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Liquid Death
Investors include Science Inc., Velvet Sea Ventures, Live Nation Entertainment, Conviction Partners, and celebrity investors including Tony Hawk, Steve Aoki, and Wiz Khalifa. Series D in 2022 valued the company at $700 million.
By 2023, valuation reached $1.4 billion.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.