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.”