Couple grew their basement side hustle into a business bringing in $4.5M/year: We'd ‘never seen anything like that in a bank account'After months of bringing in less than $100 a day, Audrey Finocchiaro and her then-boyfriend Sam Lancaster were close to walking away from their coffee cart.
A gaggle of college students changed their mind that fall, when Lancaster took the cart to Brown University. The cart sold out for the first time, bringing in $400 in sales in just 30 minutes, Finocchiaro says.To survive the winter, they partnered with local restaurants to install their nitro cold brew on tap.
"It was very, very scalable, and did pretty big numbers in not a lot of time," says one of the investors, an entrepreneur who requested anonymity to protect her privacy.One Sunday morning, the investors invited Finocchiaro and Lancaster to their home, showed them the numbers and offered them a $100,000 loan at a 10% interest rate to help them grow their business.