When Michael Joseph's parents came home from a trip to Colorado last spring, they were met with a less than pleasant surprise.
The entire first floor of their Pittsford home was stacked with thousands of bottles of Vital Energy — a vitamin enhanced energy drink with the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee — a beverage Joseph launched with two other twentysomething Pittsford Sutherland graduates in 2009.
"He must be mad at us," Joseph's father can be heard saying over his wife's screeches. Little did they know it was a prank, as Joseph recorded the incident on video.
The video has since become somewhat of an Internet sensation. It has received nearly 1 million hits between YouTube and Break.com, was featured on Gawker.com and garnered some international attention.
Now the video is going to be featured on the Top 20 Most Shocking: Pranks on TruTV (cable channel 76) at 10 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 12. MTV has also contacted Vital Energy about possibly airing the video on Pranked this fall.
Although Jacob Blish, chief marketing officer, said they never expected to receive so much attention, they knew the value of viral marketing. The entrepreneurs have used social media and other nontraditional forms of marketing.
"For us, spending $1,000 is like spending $10,000," said Scott Baron, chief financial 
The company still isn't bringing in an enviable amount of cash (all the principals still live with their parents), but their patience may be beginning to pay off. Since they started selling out of the trunks of their cars last September, Vital Energy has grown. They hired their first full-time employee (fellow Sutherland graduate Patrick Henderson) in February, and the product can be found in more than 250 stores in Monroe County and hundreds more in 13 counties across the state, thanks to a distribution deal with Wright Wisner Distributing Corp. in April.
"We like the people behind it, and we think the product is very similar to Glaceau (Vitamin Water), which we used to handle," said Claude Wright, CEO of Rochester's Wright Wisner. "The product is good and it has a redeeming quality."
Their next objective? Getting the product into Wegmans. "It would be our first commercial chain," Blish said.
For now, Blish said he's depending on their local story to make them a mainstay in western New York. "It's like the local lemonade stand — people are going to buy it even if it's terrible lemonade just because it's the kids on the corner," he said. "But we don't have terrible lemonade."
