Just three months after graduating high school, Mike Satterlee didn’t expect his business, which 3D prints and sells “can coolers” — hard-shell insulated drink coozies — to receive hundreds of orders in a single day.
Yet there he was, in August 2025, doing math to figure out how long his 60 printers in a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in Clifton Park, New York, would take to fulfill the demand. The answer: about six weeks. The reason for all the demand: an Instagram post.
Satterlee had posted online about his company CruiseCup’s newest product, which could hold two 12-ounce cans at a time and reload from the top or the bottom, instead of having just one opening. After the “tactical reloader” went viral, Satterlee waited for enough revenue to buy more printers. CruiseCup brought in $100,000 that month, roughly 60% more than Satterlee had ever brought in monthly from his previous entrepreneurial endeavors, the 19-year-old says.
Unlike some viral businesses, CruiseCup built on that month’s momentum: It brought in $808,000 in 2025 gross revenue across its website and TikTok Shop, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, and a marginal amount more from Amazon sales, says Satterlee.
3D-printing businesses are relatively easy to start and inexpensive to run. From October 2025 through September 2026, the number of 3D-printed products sold on Shopify increased 112%, according to a company spokesperson. Still, few founders share Satterlee’s combination of youth and ability to grow his business quickly. CruiseCup is profitable, but Satterlee only pockets some of the proceeds — $500 to $1,500 per month — because he lives with his parents and doesn’t pay rent, he says. The rest typically goes toward more 3D printers, social media ads or developing new products, he notes. (Satterlee declined to share CruiseCup’s specific annual profit figures.)
CruiseCup founder Mike Satterlee stands in his 3D-printing company’s warehouse in Clifton Park, NY.CNBC Make It
Satterlee runs the company full-time with one other employee, selling can coolers of varying sizes and materials. His previous businesses ranged from lemonade stands to selling homemade sand repellent lotion, a combination of hand sanitizer and cornstarch, he says. He learned how to use a 3D printer in a “design and drawing for production” class during his freshman year of high school, and used his savings from Christmas, birthdays and earlier ventures to buy a roughly $500 version for himself in September 2022, he says.
He launched his first 3D-printing business, which made and sold shoe charms designed to attach to Crocs, in his parents’ basement in June 2023. That business, called Solefully, brought in roughly $250,000 in 2024 sales, Satterlee estimates — enabling him in November 2024 to start renting the $3,600-per-month warehouse where he keeps his growing fleet of printers.
A few months before graduation, Satterlee decided that Solefully’s traction was promising enough to skip college and make it his full-time job, he says. He started experimenting with new products, and found that universal car cupholder adapters — which could hold any drink, from a Starbucks beverage to a Stanley water bottle — garnered more interest on social media and sold with higher profit margins than the shoe charms. CruiseCup eclipsed Solefully quickly enough for Satterlee to shut down the latter in June 2025.
The teenager designed the double-can coolers two months later, after scrolling on Instagram and seeing competing products that required the user to remove both cans to access their second drink, he says. He has two patents pending on CruiseCup designs, documents show.
Some of Satterlee’s high school classmates are now in their sophomore year of college. Satterlee says he’s committed to CruiseCup full-time, using 160 printers now to produce plastic products in New York and sourcing stainless steel models from a Chinese manufacturer that he found online. He plans to grow the business by adding UV printing — an alternative to screen printing — and more kinds of drinkware to its offerings. He wants to hire a larger marketing team to try getting CruiseCup onto retail shelves, he adds.
“Every day I wake up, I’m excited to go to work,” says Satterlee. “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.”
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