The Idea

In 2012, in the basement of a struggling coffee shop on Broadway in Saratoga Springs, New York, a former state accountant was quietly failing. Mike Brown had quit a government job in his twenties, taken a year off to hang around cafés, and opened Saratoga Coffee Traders, where business was bad enough that he had plenty of time on his hands. Customers kept asking for his strongest cup, and he couldn't deliver one. So he went online, ordered samples from importers, and started blending. The trick was Robusta: a bean scorned in specialty coffee but carrying nearly double the caffeine of Arabica. He roasted it dark, named it after a souvenir poster his girlfriend had bought him, a mean-looking dog with "Death Wish" printed underneath, and drew the skull-and-crossbones logo himself. His entire ambition was modest: make an extra $5,000 a year selling it online, and maybe make rent. This was the beginning of Death Wish Coffee.

The Execution

• 2012: Brown launched the blend direct-to-consumer from his shop's basement, selling online and on Amazon under the tagline "the world's strongest coffee." Robusta-heavy, dark-roasted, no investors.
• 2013: Good Morning America opened its show drinking Death Wish and sent a crew to his shop; Brown says his customer base doubled off that one segment. He was reinvesting nearly all revenue back into the business.
• Rock bottom: Cash ran so thin that Brown sold his house, moved back in with his mother at 30, and borrowed money from her to make payroll, the moment, he says, he got serious about online marketing.
• January 2016: Death Wish beat out 15,000 small businesses to win Intuit QuickBooks' "Small Business, Big Game" contest, a free 30-second Super Bowl 50 spot worth a reported $5 million.
• February 2016: When the Viking ad aired, more than 147,000 visitors hit the site and the company did over $250,000 in sales in roughly two hours, about $2,083 a minute.
• 2016: Revenue jumped from roughly $3M the prior year to about $20 million, and store count went from seven to 150 within months.
• September 2017: The near-death moment. Death Wish voluntarily recalled all its Nitro Cold Brew cans after a process authority found the packaging could grow botulin, the toxin behind botulism. No illnesses, but Brown put refunds at over $300,000 with millions more at risk in lost sales, a company literally named Death Wish nearly living up to it.
• Today: Certified by Guinness World Records at 728mg of caffeine per 12oz cup, Death Wish is now the #1 organic and #1 Fair Trade coffee brand in the US and stocked in more than 40,000 stores nationwide, a bootstrapped brand now doing tens of millions a year.

The lesson?

Brown didn't invent a better bean. He embraced the one everyone else refused to touch, then wrapped it in a skull and a promise that it might kill you. The product was contrarian; the branding did the rest. A cult following, a poster his mum wouldn't take down, and five customers with the logo tattooed on them are worth more than any ad budget, which is exactly why a free Super Bowl spot landed on a company already doubling every year. Build something people want to wear on their skin, and distribution finds you.