How couples made millions of dollars in months.

Audrey Finocchiaro and Lancaster over the years were turning in less than $100 dollar monthly until they found out a money-spinning venture that made them millionaires in a short while.

After months of earning less than $100 a day, Audrey Finocchiaro and her then-boyfriend Sam Lancaster were close to walking away from their coffee cart.

They had built a wooden cart with bicycle tires and a kickstand in her parents’ basement in 2016, maxing out her bank card’s $1,500 limit to afford materials, and called it The Nitro Cart. That summer, they took it to any event that would take them, from sheep shearing events to farmers markets and other gatherings across Rhode Island, serving small batches of nitrogen-infused cold brew.

She recounts their beginning “Sam and I had been popping up every day together, and when you’re not making any money and you’re also dating, that can get sort of frustrating,” says Finocchiaro, a 30-year-old. “At the end of the summer, we were sort of like, we don’t want to do this anymore.”

A group of college students changed their mind that fall, when Lancaster took the cart to Brown University for business. The cart sold out for the first time, earning over $400 in sales in just 30 minutes, Finocchiaro says.

They started going back every day to the University, building a reputation on campus.To survive the winter, they partnered with local restaurants to install their nitro cold brew on tap.

Today, the business they now call The Nitro Bar, brings in millions in sales annually. It has generated over $4.5 million over the past year, according to documents.

It has 50 employees at three brick-and-mortar coffee shops and a smaller coffee trailer, and its cold brew is available on tap in more than 52 locations across Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The co-founders are also married now, and their business has balanced profitability with expansion since its first money-making year in 2019, Finocchiaro says.

Here’s how they built The Nitro Bar, from 80-hour workweeks to some TikTok virality and a lot of luck.

An unexpected funding of $100,000

Finocchiaro did not initially believe in the business., and believed the cart would only last for one year, she says. She and Lancaster didn’t really realize they had created a business model with scalable potential until it was spring of 2017, when they were approached by venture capital investors who tried their cold brew at a farmers’ market and enjoyed it.

One of the investors was known by them: Finocchiaro worked for her previously. The investors created a spreadsheet to calculate what The Nitro Cart could grow into, based on projected number of carts and wholesale tap accounts.

“It was very scalable, and did great big numbers in not so much of time,” says one of the investors, an entrepreneur who did not want his identity revealed.

One of the Sunday mornings, the investors invited Finocchiaro and Lancaster to their home, showed them the numbers and gave them a one hundred-thousand-dollar ($100,000) loan at a 10% interest rate to help them grow their business. Sounds great right?

The investors retained a right to convert the loan into into a 10% equity investment in The Nitro Bar, according to Finocchiaro.

“When we got the investment, it was so emotional because we had never seen anything like that in a bank account,” she says. “Now, it’s not just this little coffee cart. Someone gave us all of this money and we have to figure out how to grow it.” Say the business owners.

Sooner or later, it will come back to you

The $100,000 loan provided Finocchiaro and Lancaster with a financial cushion. It didn’t mean the co-founders could sit back and sleep. They all worked “insane hours, usually seven days a week” to turn their cart into The Nitro Bar, Finocchiaro says.

Watching their cash flow rise and fall was particularly stressful in the early days, according to her.

“I would ask Sam, like, did someone steal money from our account?” says Finocchiaro. “There’s just so many costs that come with running your own business.”

Now, Finocchiaro and Lancaster’s days begin at 5:30 a.m., when they run with their dogs before heading into their shops to check on staffs. Then they create lists of tasks to complete in the coming day and weeks.

When the clock hits 6 p.m., they stop talking about work, says Finocchiaro.

“You can work 80-hour every week, but eventually it will catch up with you,” according to her. “And the recovery of finding balance after that catches up to you is so much difficult than just finding a balance for you in the here and now.

The power of social media

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s probably from TikTok and Facebook: The Nitro Bar has more than 230,000 followers on the TikTok social media platform.

The account features coffee clips and funny videos, where Finocchiaro asks baristas about the weirdest drink order they’ve gotten recently and what they would make Beyoncé if she walked in.

Finocchiaro ascribes the brand’s TikTok popularity to something she calls “the Ben and Jerry’s effect.” The idea is to treat The Nitro Bar as “almost its own person,” and for that person to come off as someone who customers want to connect to, she says.

“When you buy Ben and Jerry’s, you feel like you’re supporting these two guys from Vermont, and I think that’s attributed to so much of their success,” Finocchiaro says”.

Sales has gone up 60% since The Nitro Bar started gaining traction on TikTok, she added.

Finocchiaro has also been sharing her journey as a small-business owner on TikTok account where she has over 68,000 followers.

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