Well hello there!

It’s been a bit since we last chatted. I’m finally coming up from air after the Black Friday craziness and damn has a lot happened.

But before I talk about myself, what about you? How did your Black Friday go? How’s the rest of the month trending? Any new products & things you’re thinking about?

After my trip to Tulum next week, I’m co-hosting a 2025 goal setting virtual session that I’d love to invite you to. You’ll see more promotion around it soon but wanted to invite my readers to it first. If you want to join just reply to this and I’ll get you added.

Lots to talk about and too much to unpack. My initial thoughts were this holiday season just feels different. Consumer spending feels down and I read somewhere there are five fewer holiday shopping days than there were last year. Not good for my bank account.

From all accounts, Meta really shit the bed on performance for almost everyone. There’s so much love out there for new solutions like AppLovin and Tik Tok Shops, but it is really concerning for brands who aren’t genuinely good at creating organic content.

The best brands can create a cultural moment, consistently know how to go viral, or like my friends over at TRUFF - perfectly time some national media with shows like Oprah and Good Morning America to help your brand become top of mind throughout the holiday season.

Time and time again I’m reading about founders who are just sitting home and ripping 20 pieces of selfie content a day and driving hundreds of thousands of page views. One of my good friends Brock from FrostBuddy does this exact thing. It’s crazy, but it works and its beyond scalable. Doesn’t hurt he has a good jawline and mom’s love to watch his content.

From our end here’s how I saw things:

1) Static ads ripped. Normally video content is our bread and butter. This year static was the way to go.

2) Reintroducing old winning ads worked well. It’s weird to think about running the same old video from years ago, but if its not broke there’s no need to fix it. There’s billions of people in the world and not even a percent of them have seen your stuff.

3) We continue to have issues with shipping costs. On the day of Black Friday we saw that our shipping costs in Australia were too high and was tanking our conversion year over year. Last year we undercharged and got hit with a wild freight bill 30 days later for like $150,000.

This year we overcharged, ensuring profitability on every purchase, but it limited our upside. We need to find a better balance between “Free Shipping” and “Full Price Shipping” that allows us to find the sweet spot on our customer acquisition cost. Seven years into this its crazy to be typing out that that is still an issue for us. Customers expect free shipping even when things cost $25 to ship. They don’t expect to pay that mark up on their retail cost, but if they don’t then the business is nearly unprofitable and doesn’t work. Slippery, slippery slope that is slowing top-line growth for us.

4) I wish we would have done more influencer work (newsletter, IG Posts, Tik Toks, etc.) with popular publications in the sports, backyard, gifting, and mom industries. Historically these have ripped for us and we’ve been able to find a few that we spend a couple thousand on and find 5-10x return on investment. The team is smaller than ever and excuses are better than ever for why we didn’t do these but it was a missed opportunity.

5) Upsell offers absolutely crushed. This is the first time our entire site has been decked out in full cart & post purchase upsells from head to toe. Aftersell did the entire thing and they are LEGIT.

NEW WAY TO MAKE FREE MONEY

I am not a coder. I have messed up our Shopify store too many times to count. I need to show some extra love for Aftersell for making us thousands of dollars extra this year. I have never met a team that is more hands on, in the Slack, ready to roll up their sleeves and help you make more money. I really don’t know how they do it but if you are selling on Shopify and don’t have your entire upsell, downsell, and post purchase process dialed in then you NEED to work with them. They are criminally undercharging and crushing it for CROSSNET.

They rolled out this new feature that not enough people know about yet called Network Offers which transforms your thank you page (order confirmation) into a money making machine. Every time a customer checks out, you can get paid by displaying them a relevant ad - aka us showing an Adidas banner after somebody buys on our site. You can enable this in under two minutes.

They just dropped this calculator but basically, if you do 5000 orders a month you can make a free $21k. The numbers really get crazy when you’re pumping volume and you’re making an extra $20k a month in free profit.

If you want the intro hit me up or just email my girl [email protected]

Big Life Updates:

This year has been a busy one for us and there seems to be no end in sight. As you guys are the direct motivation for why I write this every week I figured you should be the first to know.

1. The Founders Club is acquiring MY NEWSLETTER 🎉

This is huge news for me personally and professionally. As I transition from operating the day-to-day at CROSSNET, to now 60+ hours a week on Founders Club, I’ll be able to build this out into the media business that I know it can become.

I’ll be spending tons of time writing (probably my best trait, besides sales), being creative, and sitting down with founders to get in the weeds about their businesses. Its my job to find out who’s killing it, who’s a fraud, and what actually is needed in 2025 to crush it.

This entire newsletter will get a brand new facelift, full time attention, and a beautiful graphics team to make these thousand-character reads a bit more cheerful. Plus now that The Founders Club is over several hundred members, I can pull interviews and strategies from all different founders. Every day the Slack group is buzzing with helpful tips and advice, so whether you’re a DTC founder, agency, SAAS founder, or running a brick and morter business, I promise this newsletter will be for you.

I got a fresh canvas. More time than ever. I’ve never been more excited.

2. Our pilates studio is opening up in Miami on January 3rd and we JUST LAUNCHED OUR PRE-SALE last night 🧘

Body Hot Pilates is now officially live baby! It’s so cool to see the crazy support for our new business before the grand opening next month. We 50/50 partnered with a massive pilates studio down here in Southern Florida, so its been crazy to see the interest and hype that we’re able to leverage from their pre-existing customer base.

We essentially took the Jake Paul & Mr. Beast model and flipped it into the fitness world 😉

If you run a CPG, clothing, or fitness brand and want to collab hit me up!

You can check out the website here - Body Hot Pilates

3. We’re out of our mind. The Founders Club is hosting three holiday parties tonight at 7PM in NYC, Toronto, and Dubai.

300 founders attending. Incredible sponsors. People flying and driving in from all over. All while I get to sit in my office and type this email to 50,000 of you. Shit doesn’t happen without a kick-ass team.

4. We just announced our 2025 calendar and HOLY SHIT are we going to be busy. Over 55 events all across North America. If I don’t have the most elite flight status ever there is going to be hell to raise.

5. I’m back to marathon training baby! I said I would never do it again but here I am training for a half marathon in Nashville in April. There are bands playing on every street corner and it looks completely badass - Nashville Rock 'N Roll Marathon. Who wants to run it with me? Assembling a group now.

That’s all I got for you! Time to go set up my Christmas tree and get festive with the one and only Lyndsey Meade. Our fur child Sosa isn’t doing the best these days, so send some extra love our way. He’s on cage rest for the next two weeks recovering from a spine issue. Dude’s locked up like Akon.

Love yall to infinity.

Talk next week!

Chris