En esta noticia
Behind many success stories in the United States is a long road of effort, risk, and setbacks. For Mike Satterlee, that road started much earlier than for most.
At just 19, the New Yorker runs CruiseCup, a brand of 3D-printed drink coolers that brought in $808,000 in gross revenue in 2025, according to CNBC Make It.
While many of his high school classmates are now in their second year of college, Satterlee chose a different path. “Every day I wake up, I’m excited to go to work,” he says.
“I don’t really even see it as work. I love what I do, I love building stuff and it makes it not even feel like work. It’s just fun.”
From his parents’ basement to a warehouse
Satterlee learned to use a 3D printer in a high school design class. In 2022, he used savings from Christmas, birthdays, and earlier ventures to buy his own printer for about $500.
In June 2023, he launched his first business from his parents’ basement: Solefully, which made charms for Crocs and brought in about $250,000 in 2024.
That success allowed him to rent a warehouse in Clifton Park, New York, for $3,600 a month. A few months before graduating, he decided the business was strong enough to skip college and work on it full-time.
The product that went viral
Looking for a way to use his extra printers, he created CruiseCup. Its key product is a cooler that holds two cans and lets users reload a new one from the top or the bottom. After a social media post went viral in August 2025, the brand brought in $100,000 in a single month. In November, sales reached $315,000, he told Entrepreneur.
Part of that growth, he explains, comes from treating his brand like a personal story. “No one wants to just follow a company. They want a story,” he said.
Growing without losing focus
Today, CruiseCup operates with 160 printers and one other full-time employee and also sells stainless steel versions made overseas. Satterlee has two patents pending and plans to bring his products to store shelves.
Despite the numbers, he keeps a modest lifestyle: he still lives with his parents and only takes $500 to $1,500 a month from the business, reinvesting the rest. Hiring help, he says, was key: “You can only get so far running your company entirely by yourself.”