Most business models sound complicated until someone breaks them down.
This one doesn’t.
Micah and I kept circling the same idea during this episode: vending is one of the few businesses where the entire model fits into a single sentence.
You need:
- A location
- A machine
- Product
That’s it. No complicated delivery ops, no estimating, no labor scheduling, no crews.
And if you’ve got an entrepreneurial brain, Micah described the thought every operator has had at least once.
Every time you buy something from a vending machine, you start wondering who owns it. Because the economics feel obvious.
What’s not obvious is what happens when you try to scale it.
Micah Didn’t Choose Vending. Vending Chose Him.
Micah didn’t enter vending because he was obsessed with vending machines. He entered because he got shoved into a pivot.
He tried opening a vape shop in 2023. Lease signed, inventory bought, everything moving in the right direction. Then the city shut it down before he could open the doors. Occupancy issues, zoning disputes, and no money at the time to lawyer up and fight it.
So he was sitting on inventory with no storefront.
That’s when the vending plan moved from “later” to “right now.” He took the same products and placed a vape vending machine inside a college bar. That bar was only open Thursday through Saturday, so he didn’t think it would do much.
First month: just shy of $3,000 in revenue.
That’s when the entire model became real.
Scale Didn’t Come From Machines. It Came From Trust.
Micah’s footprint today is real:
- 20–30 machines around Lincoln / Omaha / Blair / Columbus
- ~5 machines in Charlotte, North Carolina
- ~70 machines in Cleveland
Total: just under 110 machines across three states.
At that point, you’re not running a vending hustle. You’re running route operations. And Micah was blunt about what actually controls the ceiling:
You could have a hundred machines, but if you don’t have somebody you can trust to fill ‘em, you could say goodbye.
That’s the central lesson.
These aren’t snack machines. You’re not refilling Doritos and Snickers. You’re dealing with regulated products that people actively want to steal, which means hiring random help and handing them product is a fast way to get burned.
Micah said he’s seen people try to run this like a national model with employees under them, and it becomes extremely hard to control.
So instead, he built his scaling model around trust.
In Nebraska, his parents run the route. In North Carolina, a partner runs the machines. In Cleveland, they have enough density that it supports a full-time tech who fills and installs.
Machines are easy to buy. Trustworthy operators aren’t.
High Ticket + Low Volume Is What Makes This Work
One of the smartest parts of Micah’s explanation was how the economics change the workload.
Snack vending is high effort because the math forces you into constant service. A snack machine doing $300 a month creates headaches: expired product, frequent refills, and weird demand patterns where one guy crushes Doritos and empties half the machine. You’re always chasing it.
Vape vending is different because it’s high ticket and low volume. Micah explained that a machine doing $300 a month might only move around the equivalent of eight vapes. Meanwhile, the machines hold anywhere from 80 to 240 vapes depending on the model, and the product doesn’t expire for two years.
That completely changes the game.
It makes the route quieter. It makes service more predictable. And it explains how one person can reasonably operate 70 machines in a market like Cleveland.
How Micah Gets Locations (And Why Owners Say Yes)
The pitch isn’t “let me put a machine in your bar.”
Micah’s real pitch is that the bar already has a leak. They just don’t see it.
If customers want nicotine and can’t get it inside the bar, they leave. And when they leave, they don’t leave alone. They take groups with them. That group is done buying drinks. Now the bar owner just lost alcohol sales, not because the bar was bad, but because the bar didn’t have what customers needed in the moment.
That reframes the vending machine.
It’s not an add-on revenue stream. It’s retention.
Only after the owner understands the leak does the revenue split matter. Micah said most of their locations have splits, and they always offer it, but he’s even negotiated certain low-performing places to keep the machine without paying a split.
In those situations, the conversation becomes simple: we’ll keep servicing it, but we can’t make the economics work if we’re paying out on a machine that does $200–$300 per month.
The owner still wins either way because they’re keeping customers inside, and many owners like it because it’s mailbox money for giving up a small section of wall space.
Regulation Scares People Away (Which Keeps It Open)
Micah thinks the biggest reason more people aren’t doing this is psychological. People hear the word vape or nicotine and assume the whole thing is illegal. Then they search it and run into misinformation, half-right interpretations, and vague summaries that don’t match their specific state.
He gave a strong warning here: don’t rely on blog interpretations or AI summaries because definitions vary. “Tobacco” in one state can include vapor products. Another state treats them separately. Taxes can vary by tobacco, vapor products, synthetic nicotine, and more.
So if you want a real answer, you go to the source.
Micah’s approach is to look up the statute directly on a state .gov website and verify language there. He also said you can call the offices to confirm nuance, because these laws weren’t written for clarity. They were written by bureaucracies with definitions that shift state to state.
On taxation, he explained Nebraska as an example: 10% of wholesale price for vapor products. And he took a surprisingly optimistic view of excise tax. If a state is taxing it, the state is making money off it, which makes them less likely to wipe it out entirely.
There are exceptions, though. He mentioned places like Washington, DC, and Minnesota having an excise tax around 90%, which makes the business nearly impossible.
The Real Lesson
This episode wasn’t really about vending machines.
It was about how certain business models look simple on paper but only scale through structure. In Micah’s case, structure meant two things: location density and trusted operators.
The machine is just the container.
The business is built on placements, partnerships, service cadence, and trust.
And Micah’s starting advice was refreshingly direct: stop overcomplicating it. People get stuck in LLC formation, machine selection, and analysis loops. In vending, none of that matters if you don’t have the location.
Verify your state’s laws. Find a location. Then solve the rest.
Or as Micah put it: drive downtown, walk into bars, and there’s a 90% chance you won’t see a vape vending machine on the wall. If you don’t see one, that’s your opening.
