An 18-year-old brings in $300,000 a month selling 3D printed 'reload can holders.' Here's how he comes up with unique product ideas.

• Teenage entrepreneur Michael Satterlee created a "tactical reload can holder" that went viral online.
• His Instagram video, which has over 50 million views, fueled his e-commerce company's explosive growth.
• To come up with unique ideas, start by innovating an existing top-selling product.

Earlier this year, Michael Satterlee posted a video chugging a Dr Pepper from his "tactical reload can holder." It's like a coozie, but more fun.

In the video, as he finishes the beverage, another soda can slides into the frame. He slams the can holder on top of it, sending the original Dr Pepper can flying, and proceeds to chug the second soda.

The video has more than 50 million views on Instagram.

When asked why it went viral, the 18-year-old entrepreneur points to the novelty factor: "I think it's just, they hadn't seen anything like it before." Viewers were also astounded by how quickly he could chug a Dr Pepper, according to the thousands of comments. That part was just good acting, though. Satterlee told Business Insider that he'd drained the can beforehand and "pretended to drink it in like a second."

Satterlee's viral video has contributed to the quick success of his e-commerce business, Cruise Cup, which sells a variety of 3D printed products, including the top-selling can holder. In November 2025 alone, he generated $300,000 in sales, which Business Insider verified by reviewing a screenshot of his Shopify dashboard.

He was poised to capitalize on the viral moment. Satterlee has been building businesses since he was 10, when he went door-to-door asking neighbors if he could mow their lawns. Nearly everyone declined.

"I knocked on doors every day for like a month straight, and I think I had one client," he said. However, he had more success with e-commerce, creating and selling a sand-repellent product, which funded his next project: a clog accessory company called Solefully.

"I was no stranger to the orders flooding in and what it's like as soon as a viral video goes off," said Satterlee, who scaled Solefully's Instagram account to more than 100,000 followers. However, he did need to buy more 3D printers to keep up with the demand for Cruise Cup products.

"When you're printing a big product, it could take 10 hours, so if you get 10 orders, then you're going to need 100 hours' worth of print time," he explained. "For Solefully, I was able to maintain all my orders with around 50 printers, but when Cruise Cup hit, it just got so insane. I'd be buying batches of 30 printers and still not being able to keep up."

Satterlee, who learned about 3D printing in a design class he took his freshman year of high school, said that one of the main benefits of printing products, rather than going through a manufacturer, is the low barrier to entry.

"Anybody could do it. You could get a 3D printer for like 100 bucks, and a roll of filament costs like $20. They make the modeling software so easy now; there's even AI where you could just type in a prompt, and it will come up with a model for you that'll be ready to 3D print."

Satterlee's company has outgrown his childhood home in Clifton Park, New York. The operation "took over my entire house," he recalled. "My basement was all 3D printers, my dining room was my shipping area, and then my room was my studio."

While he still lives there, he's shifted operations to a nearby warehouse that houses more than 130 printers. He's also in the process of setting up a mold with a manufacturer and expects to produce stainless steel products by mid-2026.

How to come up with a viral product: Put your own spin on an existing top-seller, and pay attention to your customers

Before the viral can holder, Satterlee experimented with a variety of products, including a one-can cooler that was performing well. It prompted him to look at the most dominant player in the cooler space — Yeti — and see if there were any products he could innovate.

"I was looking at a standard Yeti coozie, and I was like, 'How can I make this better?'" he said.

"A couple of things popped into my mind: I can make it easier to load. Instead of having to twist the top off, why couldn't you just be able to slide a drink in through the bottom and then drink it through the top? If I tighten the caps up a little bit, then I can make it so when you put a new can in, the empty will fly out like a shell case."

He figured he was onto something, and Instagram confirmed his suspicions.

"I didn't know if it was that good of an idea, but I just posted it on Instagram to see how it would do," he said. "The video went wild."

Then, he paid close attention to what his audience was saying about the product. One comment popped up over and over again: "Make it hold two cans," he said. "So that's what I did from there, and that did even better."

Satterlee believes in creating a product quickly and iterating from there, rather than spending months trying to perfect it. That's a major advantage of working with a 3D printer: you can create products quickly and at a low cost, and then test the market before deciding to invest time, money, and materials in producing something at scale.

"Just make whatever idea you have exist first, and then make it good later," he said. "People would tell me all the time, 'What's the point of a can cooler if it's 3D printed? It's not insulated. It's not going to keep the drink cold.' But I didn't care. I had the vision. If you have an idea, just bring it to life as fast as you can, and then go from there."

Don't expect your first product, or even first several products, to succeed, he added.

"You have to be super, super resilient because you're going to fail a ton of times. I just listed to you the companies that I had that made some money. I've lost money on a bunch of businesses, a bunch of ventures — and then sometimes you just get lucky, and it hits."

This story was originally published in December 2025.

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