Mixing multiplies a product's base price by its effects, so the fastest early cash comes from cheap effects on cheap weed — not from big, expensive combos or a dealer roster you can't afford yet.
The fastest early money in Schedule I doesn't come from a fancy recipe — it comes from adding a couple of cheap effects to your cheapest weed and selling it to customers you can actually reach, before you spend a cent on a dealer or an employee.
At the Mixing Station you combine a base product — a weed strain, for most of the early game — with an ingredient. Each ingredient does two things: it can change an effect already on the product, and it adds its own effect. Keep feeding a batch back into the station and the effects stack, one ingredient at a time.
The price math behind this is a straight multiplier: sell price equals the product's base value times one, plus the sum of the multipliers of every effect on it. Each effect carries its own fixed multiplier — the effects database lists all of them — and they range from close to zero up to roughly 0.60. A $35 weed strain with two effects worth 0.30 and 0.20 combined sells for $35 × (1 + 0.30 + 0.20) = $52.50 — no mystery bonus, just the sum of what you bagged into it.
That's also why the multiplier matters more than the ingredient count. Some effects (Toxic, Explosive, a few others) carry a multiplier at or near zero — they exist for flavour or customer preference, not for price. Piling on ingredients that don't carry real multipliers just spends money on nothing.
Two independent write-ups of the mixing system agree on the formula above but disagree on which exact recipe is "best" — the numbers shift as ingredient prices and unlocks change between patches, so naming a specific combo here would be wrong within a few updates. The method that holds up regardless of patch:
Weed is the practical starting point simply because it's what you have from hour one — there's no reason to wait on it while chasing a drug you haven't unlocked yet.
Customers aren't a shop menu — they're tied to the people you meet. As you build relationships with the contacts in a region (tracked in the Contacts app on your phone), those contacts connect you to both a dealer and that dealer's existing customer base. More relationships and more unlocked regions mean more customers over time.
Once you have customers, what keeps them buying is consistency: matching the effects you sell to what a given customer already prefers builds loyalty, and loyal customers pay more and buy more often than one-off strangers. Customers who order small, simple, cheap batches repeatedly are usually more profitable in practice than the rare big spender who wants a strain you have to remix specially for them — the steady ones are the ones worth building a routine around early.
A dealer isn't available for hire until you're friendly enough with the contact tied to them — the Contacts app shows who's connected to whom. Each dealer comes with a signing fee, and that signing fee climbs with every additional dealer you take on, so your second and third dealer cost more upfront than your first. In exchange, a dealer works without you: you hand them bagged product, assign them up to eight customers through the Dealers app, and they sell on their own — for a flat 20% cut of what they bring in.
That cut is the reason hiring a dealer too early is a bad trade: 20% of very little is still very little, and the signing fee has to be earned back first. Dealers start paying for themselves once you have more customers than you can personally walk product to — at that point, the 20% you give up on the volume they handle is worth far less than the time you get back to run your own higher-value customers yourself.