Wheely’s is a startup in our current class that makes self-contained, portable cafés that can be moved around by a built-in bicycle.

It’s a very unique product with an admirable underlying goal: Wheely’s wants to make it much more accessible for people to start and operate their own small food and coffee business. It costs about $3,000 for the newest version of the Wheely’s bike, compared with the $800,000 it typically costs to start a Starbucks.

Wheely’s is already seeing massive demand for its latest cart. An Indiegogo campaign launched just yesterday has already far surpassed its $50,000 funding goal.

TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler interviewed Wheely’s co-founder Tomas Mazetti in a story published about the company this week:

“[Co-founders Tomas] Mazetti, [Maria] De La Croix, and Per Cromwell’s passion  is providing the world with an easy, inexpensive way to start a new
business that is environmentally sound. They became enamored with the
idea of coffee, since it has one of the highest mark-ups of any everyday
consumable product.

…[Mazetti] said the big advantage of going with Wheelys versus working for a
classic coffee chain was that you get to keep the vast majority of
revenues to yourself. If the Wheelys buyer uses the company brand and
its suggested product line, then they keep 90 percent of revenue. This
is probably bigger than the near-minimum wage a person might earn while
working in someone else’s coffee chain.”

Read the full story about how Wheely’s works and how it was founded in TechCrunch here, and participate in the related Hacker News discussion here.