But they soon hatched a plan to get out of their 9-to-5 jobs: start a business by building a coffee cart with nitrogen-infused cold brew. So they started their own company, The Nitro bar, by maxing out a credit card to get things off the ground.
At first, they became disheartened, as it was hard to make any profit at all. After weeks of little business, the couple was ready to throw in the towel.
But then Lancaster had an epiphany: he realized that they hadn’t brought the cart to Brown University yet. That fall, when college students flocked back to campus, they struck gold. They realized their key audience was a gaggle of Ivy League kids.
“‘Dude, you’ll never believe it!’” Finocchiaro tells Fortune, recalling what she reported to her boyfriend over the phone. “We just had a line of people. There were all these students, and I remember that day, I think we made like, $600 which was life-changing for us at the time.”
From that day forward, the couple popped up at Brown University every day, as coffee-chugging undergraduates huddled around their cold brew business. From then on, The Nitro Cart started gaining a following on social media, amassing 500,000 followers, while continuing to pop up at events.
But everything changed in the spring of 2017. When Finocchiaro and Lancaster were set up at a farmers’ market in Providence, they were approached by a pair of investors asking how much money they needed to grow. Finnochairo hadn’t thought the cart would turn into a business with bigger potential until that day.
The couple and investors created a spreadsheet together and calculated what The Nitro Cart could grow into based on a projected number of stands and accounts for wholesale customers. They crunched the numbers and said they needed about $150,000.
“The next day, we got that money, which was crazy,” says Finocchiaro.
But The Nitro Cart got its second wind when a local bike shop in Providence offered them 200 square feet of space for $400 a month. They jumped on it, funding their first storefront by taking a steep 30% interest loan through Square.
“We just threw a ton of things at a wall and kept going until we found something that stuck,” Finocchiaro says. “And for us, that took I think it was seven years until we really started to gain a significant following online.”
But today, she admits building out a following on social media is more important than ever. Her advice for new creators is simple: make a running list of ideas in your notes app, post multiple times a day, and stick to a routine to build momentum.
“I think it’s an incredible time to start a business, because it can cost $0 to start,” Finnochario says. “ You can have no money and start a TikTok or start an Instagram account. That was monumental for us.”
The Nitro Bar’s posts include trends of trying different coffee combinations, hacks on what to order, and sampling their favorite menu items. “How lucky are we to be alive at the same time as blueberry banana lattes,” one of the videos is captioned. It’s racked up 80,000 likes.
reminder: you don’t need a trust fund to CRUSH your business #womeninbusiness #startabiz #entrepreneurtok
Ignoring boomers and friends helped get the business off the ground
Finocchiaro learned quickly who she wanted to share her business ideas with. “Ignore the boomers or your friends in sales,” she explained on TikTok.
“The second you tell someone who isn’t an entrepreneur what you want to do, they start questioning everything—‘Why a coffee shop? There’s already a million of them,’ or ‘If it were that easy, everyone would do it,’” she says.
Instead of letting doubt creep in from people who don’t understand the risks and mindset required to start something from scratch, she advises limiting those conversations altogether and suggests replying that you’re investing in the business for the long game and betting on yourself gives you a higher return.
