Fully Baked #26: Vape Gum

💡 Taking a new spin on a 40+ year old product

🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found

🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product

🤑 What do the unit economics look like?

⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks

❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea

Vaping is one of the great epidemics of our time. Approximately 20M Americans vape, but most of them don’t want to. 68% of adult vapers say they plan to quit, but only 17% actually tried to quit in the past year.

The maddening part is that the thing that works is sitting on the shelf being ignored. Nicotine replacement products (like nicotine gum) lift quit rates 50-60% versus placebo. But every box of nicotine gum is beige, medical, and asks how many cigarettes a day you smoke. The packaging is repellent and the instructions are for somebody else. It’s time to change that. Here's the idea.

Create a nicotine gum brand targeting young vapers…vapists…eh…people who vape, to help them quit vaping and/or smoking.

Do what Liquid Death did for water, but in the nicotine gum space. Loud, viral branding that taps into culture

You could also create a companion app alongside the gum product to help customers to track streaks, buy other products and join a community

The nicotine replacement market is $3.5bn in 2025 heading to $7.2bn by 2034, and gum alone is 49.6% of it. Meanwhile 6.5% of US adults vaped in 2023, up from 4.5% in 2019, and it's 15.5% among 21-24s - the highest of any age group.

68% of people who vape plan to quit, 17% actually try to. Of those who try, 78.4% go cold turkey and 54% use nothing at all. On the quit-vaping subreddits, research on 7,110 posts found cold turkey discussed in 38.33% of them, alternative nicotine products in 17%, and tapering in 10.5%.

And it isn't working. Nearly half of young adults who reported successfully quitting were vaping regularly again. That gap between "what works" and "what people actually reach for" is a branding problem, not a pharmacology one - which is the whole thesis for this business.

Is a product like this legal? Short answer, yes - and more easily than you'd think. You don't have to invent anything or get anything approved, because somebody already did. Perrigo has had FDA sign-off since 2006 to make nicotine gum that's essentially Nicorette and sell it under other people's brand names, in mint, fruit and cinnamon.

The catch is you don't get to decide what the box says. That approval covers quitting smoking. There is no FDA-approved product for quitting vaping - the rules are still written entirely around cigarettes. This is a bit of a grey area so you’ll need to keep a close eye on any changes in legislation here.

Subreddits built around quitting vaping are a great place to get early users. Don't advertise though - you'll get torched. Build your brand in public, get feedback and play the long game here.

15.5% of 21-24s vape, so activations on college campuses are the way to go here.

Search volumes on phrases like "how to quit vaping" and "quit vaping" are high. SEO/GEO will be your best friend over the long term.

Organic content is the way to scale here - stunts, viral videos, etc. Meta restricts anything nicotine-adjacent, so the usual DTC engine is half-closed. Going big on organic is the only way to scale here.

Most users will have 5 - 8 pieces per day, so 150+ pieces per month. That brings the price point up a bit. This is a $50-$60/month product, not a $30 one.

Subscription ($50/month): a month's supply, stepped down on schedule. Undercuts the incumbent while looking like the premium option.

Target CAC: $20-30, weighted to search and organic rather than paid social.

LTV: ~$170 at 3.4 months average taper. Better than it looks, because the price is higher than we first assumed.

Note: a cessation product churns 100% of its cohort by design - your happiest customers never come back. Either you grind CAC relentlessly, or you build referral into the taper so every graduate becomes a channel. Liquid Death solved this with an audience that buys the merch whether or not they're thirsty. You'd need the same trick.

Nicorette: Nicorette advertises that it can be used to quit vaping too. But it’s a legacy brand, the whole play here is to acquire the users they can’t.

Quit-vaping apps (Puff Count, Quash, Kwit, and a dozen near-identical clones): there’s a bunch of free puff-counters and streak-trackers. The one that raised real money, Pelago (formerly Quit Genius, ~$150m in) fled to B2B through employers and health plans and literally dropped "quit" from its name. Interesting.

Nobody has made quitting vaping cool. That’s the gaping hole in the market here.

Have an idea you want feedback on? DM me to discuss it or book in for Office Hours here.

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