A Better Way to Sell Energy: Marketing a CPG Brand the Right Way

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Paul Vassau is the rare Utah founder who is not chasing the lane everyone else is fighting over. Energy drinks built a giant market, they also built a routine consumers are tired of: the crash, the jitters, the warm half-finished can, the inability to control the dose. Paul Vassau saw the gap and built around it. Dripz Energy is the world's first nootropic energy candy in a hard candy format, a micro-dosed delivery system designed to give users a smooth, steady-state lift, full dosage control, and a portable, shareable product engineered to fit real life better than a bottle or a can. On the latest episode of the Utah Business Spotlight Podcast, Paul Vassau sat down with me to walk through the product, the market, and the operator strategy underneath the launch.

I am Peter Anthony, founder of The INCubator Marketing Agency. I have spent more than three decades building, scaling, and exiting service businesses, and I have watched a lot of founders try to break into consumer packaged goods the same way: bootstrap, hope, grind, run out of capital, repeat. Paul Vassau is doing it differently. The product is engineered for category disruption. The cost of goods is engineered for scale. And the founder strategy underneath Dripz Energy, assembling a growth advisory board of senior Utah operators before the brand was even fully built, is the move most Utah founders skip and later regret.

The Blue Ocean Underneath Dripz Energy

Paul Vassau almost launched an energy drink 25 years ago. He passed because the cost of goods on liquid is brutal and the category, even then, was already turning into a red ocean. The category is now arguably the most crowded shelf in convenience-store retail. Red Bull. Monster. Celsius. Alani. Bang. Reign. Ghost. Prime. The fight for shelf space is essentially capital warfare, and the unit economics of liquid distribution structurally favor incumbents. Paul Vassau's read on the category was correct in 1999 and is even more correct in 2025.

Dripz Energy is not in that fight. Dripz Energy is the world's first nootropic energy candy in a hard candy format. There is no gum competitor, no mint competitor, no gummy competitor occupying the same position. Paul Vassau is opening a lane. The format ships easier than liquid. It stores easier than liquid. It trials easier than liquid. And the price point, $11.99 for a full bag holding the caffeine equivalent of four to eight energy drinks, beats the legacy category on cost-per-serving while preserving meaningfully better margin for the brand. That is what a defensible blue-ocean position actually looks like in CPG.

"This is a pretty blue ocean. No one's done this. This is a world's first."

The Dosing Math: Why Format Beats Formula

Paul Vassau walked the dosing math on camera and it is worth restating because it is the entire commercial thesis. Each drip delivers 25 mg of caffeine, sourced from a natural green tea extract, stacked with L-theanine, ashwagandha, lion's mane, and a full vitamin base. Two drips equals roughly a Coca-Cola. Four drips equals a cup of coffee. Eight drips equals a Monster. A full bag retails at $11.99 and carries the equivalent of four to eight full energy drinks. The user controls the dose. The user shares the product. The user does not throw away half of a warm can.

The strategic insight underneath the math is that format beats formula in mature consumer categories. Every legacy energy drink is competing on flavor, branding, and incremental formulation tweaks inside a fixed delivery vehicle. Paul Vassau changed the vehicle. Dispensable, micro-dosed, sublingually-absorbed, and shelf-stable, Dripz Energy is structurally different in the user's hand. That is why a private equity firm Paul Vassau is in conversation with is circling 5-hour Energy: the legacy shot category has held 500,000 to a million units per day for 20 years on essentially a worse user experience. Paul Vassau's offer to that PE firm is direct: give Dripz Energy half the shelf space and watch what happens.

Why The Modern Workday Created This Category

I made this point on the show from personal experience and Paul Vassau confirmed it as the demand thesis underneath the brand. Twenty-five years of integrative physical work followed by fifteen years behind a screen running an agency is a structurally exhausting modern reality. Zoom calls, monitor light, low movement, recycled office air, no sunlight. The instinct is to reach for coffee, Red Bull, or worse. The need is real. The legacy delivery format is not designed for the actual use case.

Dripz Energy is engineered for the knowledge-worker reality: focused, steady-state, micro-dosed, and crash-free. The neutropic layer, ashwagandha, L-theanine, lion's mane, is designed for the cognitive use case, not the gym session. That is the demand pocket Paul Vassau is occupying, and it is structurally larger than the energy drink incumbents are positioned to serve.

Designed For Grandeur, Not Designed For Grind

The single most important moment of the episode for any Utah founder watching is the operator move Paul Vassau made before the brand was even fully built. Most Utah founders default to the same bootstrap-and-grind playbook: build the product, ask friends for feedback, ask family for capital, hustle to okay. Paul Vassau did the opposite. Paul Vassau assembled a growth advisory board of senior Utah operators, chairman/CEOs, marketers, and operators with billion-dollar reps, and onboarded them before the brand went public. Not as investors. As mentors with strategic insight, door-opening capability, and the wisdom of more reps than Paul Vassau has himself.

About INCubator Marketing Agency

INCubator Marketing Agency is Utah's first AI-integrated marketing infrastructure team, headquartered in Sandy, Utah and serving small businesses, founders, and operators across Utah County, Salt Lake County, and the wider Wasatch Front.

Every engagement is built around the INCubator Method: seven core marketing systems — authority web design, local SEO, CRM and pipeline, marketing automation, AI voice receptionists, video content, and conversion-focused funnels — installed together as one accountable infrastructure so every dollar compounds month over month.

The agency was founded by Peter Anthony Wynn (Founder & Marketing Strategist) with Marc Olsen (Partner & Automation Expert) and Chelsie Wynn. INCubator operates Utah Business Spotlight, a long-form Utah small business podcast filmed at Bad Bet Productions in Sandy, Utah, and hosts Tuesday Night at the INCubator — a weekly marketing training and networking event for Utah business owners.

Contact: team@incubatormarketingagency.com · +1 385-386-6988 · Office hours Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Mountain Time.