How do you reach a billion dollars in retail sales? Mike Keech says it’s simple: focus.

Keech is the CEO of Liquid I.V., which sells hydration powders that people mix into water. When he joined the brand five years ago, it was a 30-person startup with around $100 million in revenue. Today, it is Unilever’s largest health-and-wellbeing brand. Keech attributes that to steady focus: Instead of launching a wide range of products, Liquid I.V. has remained laser-focused on its plan — to develop powders that work and get them into more people’s hands.

“I’ve worked on several big consumer businesses where they chased a lot of new shiny toys,” he says. “And a massive learning for me has been to ask: What are we great at? What’s our wheelhouse? The power of focus is really, really important. When you’ve got something good, keep working on it.”

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Here, Keech shares his playbook for building a fast-growing consumer brand while staying focused on what matters most.

How do you take a product like Liquid I.V. to market? It’s in a hypercompetitive space, and you need to convince people that the product really works.
Community, community, community. We started at a really grassroots level, with a playbook that the beauty industry had been using for maybe five or 10 years before — which was influencers. We started with a very large army of micro-influencers who were real, everyday consumers—people who were relatable and speaking on our behalf. That was one of the biggest and most cost-effective ways of seeding that message. 

How did you identify which influencers to work with?
The art of segmentation. When we first started the brand, the biggest insight that drove us is that roughly 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. They just don’t know it. That’s a massive opportunity. So we did some early studies to segment the market, and identified four big occasions we thought were really important. 

We had the nightlife occasion; that’s people having a good time, waking up the next morning, maybe not feeling so great. We have the exercise occasion; that’s people sweating and needing to be rehydrated. We had travel; you’re traveling at 35,000 feet in a tin can. It’s dry as the Sahara up there. And then we had heat-related dehydration.

That allowed us to be much more segmented and targeted in our approach.

What’s your approach to consumer research? How do you really understand what people want?
There are three main ways we do it. One is off-the-shelf research. We buy continuous tracking data, which allows us to understand movement over time and the big insights. We’re periodically doing deeper studies ahead of big launches where we’re entering new demand spaces.

The second is through social media. You will find very quickly that you have some “superusers” that are incredibly passionate. We have a small group where we basically have a one-to-one relationship. We’re sharing ideas with them, we’re asking them things that are on our minds, and we treat them no differently than a member of the team.

And last, but by no means least, go and spend real time with consumers one-to-one. Some of my most powerful insights and connections to marketing have come from spending time with consumers. You can only glean so much from a document with a chart and a graph, but when you meet the real consumer one to one, that’s when it really connects with you and the aha moments happen.

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What’s an example of how consumer research led to a specific product decision at Liquid I.V.?
We recently entered the sugar-free energy space, and it’s been a fascinating journey. 

When we look at the total market of beverages and functional hydration, the biggest slice of the pie is energy drinks. So as we got into the consumer research, we talked to a whole bunch of people, and the number-one thing people said about energy drinks was, “Oh, my God, I get the jitters and feel terrible afterwards.” 

We always want to zig where others zag. We don’t want to do a “me-too” product. So we asked ourselves, how could we deliver a better-quality energy? Then we designed a formula to deliver a gentler, more consistent, sustainable lift that does not crash.

In other words, you started with the problem before building the product. That way, when you come to market, you know it’s something people already want.
Absolutely, 100%.

Many consumer-packaged goods brands start in one format and then expand into others. You’ve been successful with powders, but there are many other formats you could explore, like gels or liquids. How do you think about expansion? 
My vision for Liquid I.V. is that it will be a global mega brand. If I look at our growth road map, less than 20% of Americans have bought Liquid I.V., consumer awareness is less than 40%, and we are selling over $1 billion worth of retail sales. So my job is really simple: If I just keep communicating why to buy Liquid I.V., if I keep making sure that it’s available and people can try Liquid I.V., then there is no reason why we should not be able to grow many more billions of dollars with headroom that we have.

Of course, there are many more formats we could look at, but the opportunity in the short term is massive, because there’s massive headroom. When I think about new formats, they must be able to hydrate as good or better than what we have today. Otherwise, what problem are we solving? 

The power of focus, especially when we’re still a youngish company, is critical. When you’ve got something good, keep working on it.

Related: Why Marketing Savvy is the Important Attribute of Successful Entrepreneurs

How do you handle competition? There are a lot of new companies offering hydration solutions.
Over 50 new competitors have entered our space over the past five years. I am constructively paranoid about the competition, but I do not let them run my strategy. We have a strategy, we stick to our strategy, and of course as competition comes in, we watch, we learn, we adapt—but we are really clear on what got us to where we are today, and will continue to double down on those things.

You’ve got to have belief in what you’re doing. You have finite time, you have finite resources. You just can’t get distracted with that stuff. Know your strengths, focus on that, believe in yourself. And when you do see material threats, or industry changes, or industry dynamics, don’t be a deer in headlights. 

If the facts change, then the business changes.

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