This week on How Success Happens, I cracked open a fresh one with Ken Grossman, the founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., who helped kickstart the craft beer revolution in America. When he launched in 1980, nearly every beer on the shelves tasted the same—and he decided to build a business by offering something totally different. And if you’ve ever walked down a beer aisle, you know that he has more than succeeded.
Watch above or listen here, and read on for some insights to help you brew your own success in three, two, one!
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Three Key Insights
1. Create a Category Customers Don’t Know They Want
When Ken started Sierra Nevada, the U.S. beer aisle was dominated by light lagers with “not a lot of character, not a lot of hops.” He saw an opening: “We thought that there was a consumer looking for something different,” even if that consumer didn’t fully exist yet. So he designed a pale ale that was way hoppier than mainstream beers—but intentionally stopped short of the extreme bitterness of a full IPA because he knew he couldn’t pull people “from drinking lager beer into drinking an IPA in one step.” Instead, he treated Pale Ale as a bridge product into an entirely new flavor world, then educated people one bar tasting and beer festival at a time.
Takeaway: When you’re creating a new category, build a “bridge product” that meets customers where they are today while slowly training them to love what’s coming next.
2. Aim to Win Over 2% of Customers, Not 100%
Early on, plenty of drinkers hated what Ken was pouring. At tastings and bar visits, he says they “probably had way more detractors than we had supporters” because the beer was so different from what people were used to. But he didn’t try to convert the entire market—he just needed a sliver: “We didn’t need to win over a hundred percent of the beer drinking public back then. We just needed a few percent, and that was enough to get us started.” That mindset let him stay stubborn about flavor, patient about adoption, and focused on the right customers instead of chasing everyone.
Takeaway: Design your product for the small group who absolutely loves it and let them pull the rest of the market toward you.
3. Innovate at the Edge, Then Pull It Back
Ken still runs structured weekly tastings where his team tries “new beers and new, non-beers” and admits, “We go too far and pull it back quite often.” Ideas come from everywhere—salespeople spotting local trends, brewers experimenting with styles, leadership thinking about where tastes might be heading. Sometimes products like their hazy IPA variant tap into a large new audience; other times, an idea is too early or too niche to scale. The key is constant experimentation at the edge of what customers know, then using real-world feedback (taprooms, visitors, sales data) to decide what becomes a category and what stays a one-off.
Takeaway: Build a repeatable experimentation habit—push ideas past the line in testing, then use feedback to dial them back into something a broad customer base will actually adopt.
Two Great Ways to Learn More
- You can keep up with Sierra Nevada’s latest releases, experiments, and news—and sign up for updates—on their website.
- This Entrepreneur.com story pairs well with Ken’s philosophy of continuous experimentation.
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One Question to Ponder
Ken built a legendary company by asking customers to fall in love with something they didn’t even know to ask for yet.
What is one “weird” idea or product you believe people would love three years from now—but are too nervous to offer them today?
Email your answer to howsuccesshappens@entrepreneur.com—your response might be read on a future episode.
About How Success Happens
Each episode of How Success Happens shares the inspiring, entertaining, and unexpected journeys that influential leaders in business, the arts, and sports traveled on their way to becoming household names. It’s a reminder that behind every big-time career, there is a person who persisted in the face of self-doubt, failure, and anything else that got thrown in their way
What part of Ken’s approach to creating a new category do you most want to try in your own business?
This week on How Success Happens, I cracked open a fresh one with Ken Grossman, the founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., who helped kickstart the craft beer revolution in America. When he launched in 1980, nearly every beer on the shelves tasted the same—and he decided to build a business by offering something totally different. And if you’ve ever walked down a beer aisle, you know that he has more than succeeded.
Watch above or listen here, and read on for some insights to help you brew your own success in three, two, one!
