A teenage entrepreneur who does 6-figures in sales explains how anyone can start an e-commerce business with a 3D printer and a couple of hundred dollars

• Teen entrepreneur Michael Satterlee built a six-figure e-commerce business using 3D printing.
• He started with minimal funds, leveraging free tools and rapid prototyping to test products.
• Satterlee now operates over 130 printers and is transitioning to working with a manufacturer.

Michael Satterlee knows a thing or two about launching businesses on a shoestring budget.

He was still in middle school when he started his first e-commerce company, which sold a sand repellent product he created using hand sanitizer and cornstarch.

"I didn't have any money at the time, so I used a free app like Google Sites instead of Shopify — and for my checkout, I had an Amazon Handmade account," the 18-year-old entrepreneur told Business Insider, referring to Amazon's marketplace for handcrafted goods that waives the monthly selling fee for approved makers.

"So, I had a free Amazon account, a free Google Sites account, and then my 'buy button' was just a link to my Amazon store. That's how I started selling."

His sand repellent company funded his next venture — a clog accessory company called Solefully — and Solefully funded his homerun business: Cruise Cup, which sells a variety of products, including his viral "tactical reload can holder." In November 2025 alone, Satterlee generated $300,000 in sales, which Business Insider verified by reviewing a screenshot of his Shopify dashboard.

The teen, who lives in his childhood home outside Albany, New York, and is foregoing college to scale Cruise Cup, explained how to start selling products online with a few hundred dollars.

1. Start prototyping with a 3D printer. A core component of launching an e-commerce business is working with a supplier to bring a product to life, a process that can be time-consuming, especially if the manufacturer is overseas, and expensive, as there's typically a minimum order quantity.

Satterlee's work around was to create products using a 3D printer. He learned about 3D printing and CAD (computer-aided design) modeling in a class he took his freshman year of high school, and is adamant that anybody could start creating and testing products with one.

"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."

It'll take some tinkering before you have a product you're satisfied with, he said: "As soon as I come up with the idea, I get the CAD, and I start working on it, and it's pretty rare that I nail something first try."

But he's able to move a lot quicker than if he were working with a manufacturer, sending samples back and forth. It took about three days of prototyping to get the first version of his viral can holder down, and about a week to get the product listed.

"I had to work with some people to get the website images up and get some animations, make the website look really nice, and then I would say, within a week, I was able to get the product up."

2. Test multiple product ideas. 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 within days and at a low cost, and then test the market before deciding to invest time, money, and materials in producing something at scale.

Solefully came about after he experimented with a variety of products on Etsy before one took off: a snowplow attachment for clogs. After seeing the demand, he decided to build an entire store around clog accessories.

"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."

3. Take advantage of low-cost and free resources. In the e-commerce space, "a lot of the startup costs are free," said Satterlee. Once you have the essential supplies — a printer and filament — you can start creating and posting content on social media for free.

"Instagram and TikTok are the biggest things when you're starting out because you want to get a following and you want to get organic sales and organic traffic," he said. Rather than buying ads, he focused on creating viral content.

As for your selling platform, "Shopify is $1 a month for your first three months, and then after that it's $35 a month."

Other early expenses you may incur include bubble mailers for shipping your orders and a label printer for creating shipping labels.

Satterlee has outgrown his original office space — his childhood home — and now runs operations from a nearby warehouse that he leases. He has more than 130 3D printers working around the clock to produce Cruise Cup products, but it's not enough to keep up with the demand. His next step is to set up a mold with a manufacturer, which will cost between $20,000 and $30,000 but will save him time and money in the long run.

"The final product in my mind is when I have it manufactured in stainless steel," he said.