This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Audrey Finocchiaro, the 33-year-old cofounder of The Nitro Bar, based in Rhode Island. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The summer I graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in 2016, I moved back home to Rhode Island and started working in restaurants with my boyfriend, Sam. I also took on a part-time job tracking a social-media account late at night.
Sam and I had a limited budget and always talked about how restaurant jobs can come with unnecessary negative management. We always knew it was possible to run a business and be both kind and successful.
Sick of being poorly treated in restaurants, we wanted to start something of our own. We kept our jobs, but in our off time, we decided to build a coffee cart.
That coffee cart turned into The Nitro Bar, a coffee business that is soon expanding to five locations. We started with a maxed-out $1,500 credit card balance, made seven figures in revenue last year, and are on track to make eight figures this year.
One of my first jobs was at a coffee shop
When I moved to New York for school and experienced the coffee scene, it was hard to find coffee I liked when I came back to Rhode Island.
My dad, Sam, and I sketched an idea on a piece of paper and used old wood I found in my basement to build a three-sided cart that folded down for transport in the back of my Subaru Outback. We threw on bicycle wheels, and it was barely functioning. We started selling coffee from the cart in 2017, using a maxed-out credit card to get us going.
My uncle owned a diner, so he let us rent space and brew coffee there when the diner was closed, store it in the fridges, and bring it up to Providence. We taught ourselves a lot on YouTube and have learned so much as we’ve grown.
We got a peddler’s permit to bring the cart to the streets of Providence. We’d pick up Allie’s Donuts on the way to sell alongside the coffee. Frequently, people would only get a doughnut, and we’d say, do you want anything else?
In the beginning, the cart was super slow
Courtesy of Audrey Finocchiaro
One of us would pretend to be a customer at the cart because we found that if someone was at the cart, it was less weird for customers to approach it. I’d pretend to be a customer, walk away, and then trade places with Sam, which was so embarrassing.
We were making $40 to $60 a day. Sometimes we’d hit over $100. When we brought the cart to the hospital where my mom worked, we’d make around $400, which would carry us through. It was getting bleak, and working so much every day was exhausting.
One day, Sam brought the cart to Brown University and called me an hour after arriving, saying they sold out of everything. This had never happened before.
It clicked that we had our cart in the wrong spots
We were recent grads ourselves, and what did we want? Really good coffee. We started bringing the cart to Brown University every day, and our following grew.
At Brown and local farmers’ markets, we met incredible people and new friends. A local family who followed us to our events invited us to their house one day.
We didn’t know what to expect. When we got there, they told us they wanted to invest in us. The next day, we were wired $100,000 to help get our business up and running.
That money was life-changing for us
We’d never seen anywhere near that number in our bank account. It took us about eight months of running the cart before we could quit our restaurant jobs.
Before the investment, we had fifteen wholesale accounts. Afterward, that number grew to over 60, and we purchased a production facility to continue growing.
I think it’s a misconception that when you get an investment, you’re financially set. When you’re trying to scale and grow, costs keep increasing, from building a production facility to bringing on more team members.
Two years in, we’d run through the money quickly and realized that we needed a storefront
To help fund the first two stores, we took out four loans during the construction of The Nitro Bar. Two of our favorite places, Newport and Providence, felt like a natural fit for our shops.
As the business grew, we documented what we were building on Instagram. About two and a half years ago, we started posting more aggressively on TikTok, and it started to catch on. That summer, we saw lines wrapped around the building daily and knew it felt different.
Seeing young women take photos of their drinks and over 75 people showing up to a pop-up in the small town of Little Compton was so cool and made us realize it was working. Today, we have 227,000 Instagram followers and 648,000 TikTok followers, and our videos reach millions of viewers.
I don’t have a real social media strategy
Making videos of my Dunkin’ Donuts dad trying our coffee creations, like the black raspberry chip latte, is super fun. I also talk about mental health. It doesn’t get talked about enough, and it’s important to me. I try to talk about it as much as possible to make people feel less alone.
When we first started posting, it was cool to see people leaving positive reviews and engaging with us. I specifically remember getting the first negative review that hit me like I was being broken up with.
I’ve learned to accept this and to realize I can keep going. My goal for The Nitro Bar is to do good, make people feel good, make everyone feel welcome, and create a bit of lightness in everyday life.
We’re opening our fourth shop in Providence and our fifth location in NYC
We’re finalizing permitting processes for our fifth location in New York City, collaborating with amazing brands like Reese’s, L’Occitane, and Rhode, and working on a cookbook with Ten Speed Press by Penguin Random House. We currently have 145 employees.
Sam now co-leads the team and has his hands in every aspect of the business, while I tend to focus more on our culture, branding, marketing, and expansions. We both have different strengths that complement each other.
Looking back, I’ve realized that if you can’t stop thinking about something, then it’s a good idea, and you should just do it because the biggest thing holding you back is yourself.
