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It's been one week since I last wrote you and damn has a lot of shit gone down. It looks like our head of sales just got us our official purchase order for Sam's Club, the biggest order in company history! We met with one of the coolest sporting good companies ever on a potential collab for CROSSNET for Pickleball. And I think I found a beautiful two-bedroom apartment, so I won't be living on the streets of Miami underneath the Starbucks with unreliable internet.
Also, the coolest news of all - starting soon, I'll be hosting a weekly show with my good friends on Gorgias. It will be quick hits, 20-30 minute episodes featuring entrepreneurs that I truly look up to in the space. I'll be asking the hard questions, the fuck ups, everything they wish they would have known so either you or I don't make the same mistake. Respond back to this email with who I should have on? I want the big heavy hitters and people who you normally don't get access to.
The reason I started this newsletter is because I wanted to give advice and help to people like yourself. I know the feeling of starting a business with just a few dollars, wanting to grow faster than what you're currently doing, and sometimes just feeling fucking stuck. it sucks, its frustrating, you want to go a million miles per hour, especially when it seems like everyone on the internet is winning and you're not. If I've learned anything over the past few years, its you gotta go at your own pace. There's always going to be somebody richer, cooler and farther along. There's always going to be that girl that legit had an idea last Tuesday and raised an $80M seed round by some big PE firm. That's life. The only thing you can control is are you genuinely happy and making enough time with your loved ones and for yourself.
I want to start by giving a big shout out to my friend Paul Benigeri, he's the founder of Archive App and his app officially just went live for public download in the Shopify app store. Meeting people down here is TOUGH and I'm lucky that I met this dude a few months back. Everyone is either a pretend millionaire, drives a Lamborghini, or looks down on you if you aren't at the club on a Tuesday night. Paul is an amazing operator and Archive App is so extremely useful as it tracks and saves every single time somebody posts or tags your brand.
Just this afternoon I was looking at all the people who have tagged @crossnetgame on social and found this amazing video from a school playing inside. I was quickly able to download it out and share with our social team.
1) We are always desperate for indoor content (our bases are expensive and schools never record)
2) Content of children playing and having a blast is our top-performing assets as the parents are the ones who have the money.
While we're on the topic of content, I want to point out something that I see so many brands do over and over again and it's so damn frustrating. Why is it when a brand gets a hold of any money (whether its funding or through profits), they automatically go and want to spend tens of thousands of dollars in content? Most of the time the brand is either just starting and getting ready for launch or are feeling stuck so they think overspending on content is the answer. If your back is against the wall and you're starting up with just a couple dollars to your name, DO NOT go blow 50% of your budget on a video. If CROSSNET did that back in 2017, we would not be around and I'd be back at my corporate sales job. Use a phone, hire a friend, edit things yourself to get started.
I absolutely loved this thread of CROSSNET's Head of Brand, Lyndsey Townsend, on how we created this commercial with an amazing camera crew, location rental, and actors all for under $5000.
The most important things included:
You or your team need to act as creative directors. Get your hands dirty. We saved thousands by writing, storyboarding, concepting, and providing art direction. You know your brand better than anyone else. Share your vision.
Hire for your weaknesses. We had copywriters in house, so we needed a design and visual team that could shoot and also use After Effects.
Chose a director that understands your vision and simply gets it from both a copy and visual perspective.
Good content comes from happy creatives. Im a huge believer in building a team that you vibe with. Happy creatives do good work.
Use Voices.com for voiceover actors. Super affordable!
You can read the whole thread here and Lyndsey is actually taking on a few clients next month for graphic design, brand work, and packaging designing. You can reach her at [email protected].
I'm going to take this time to answer a few questions I've gotten from readers last week.
What are ways you're increasing revenue and AOV?
We just launched a brand new website with a company called Wollson. They are super affordable and most importantly make beautiful websites that convert. They just custom-coded this upsell logic that customers can see when you add a product to the cart. For the first time ever, when you add a CROSSNET to your shopping cart you will now be offered an H2O & Doubles Net. The dynamic offerings will vary below based on what's added to the cart. I'm so damn excited to test these results.
How are you increasing Email & SMS opt-ins?
Hate it or love it, we have found that our spin to win almost performs 3x better than our standard take $10 off pop-up. The best thing is that our spin to win only offers $5 off. So... converts 3x better & saves me $5. Sounds like a no-brainer. We just moved the spin to win to fire on entrance rather than exit attempt and the results have stayed strong.
On the SMS side, I saw this on Twitter from Joy Milk Tea and I'm 100% stealing it.
How Are You Approaching Partnerships?
Partnerships have been incredible for CROSSNET and are so important for expanding customer lifetime value, especially for a brand with one hero SKU. When looking for partnerships we are looking for a win-win situation that allows us to work with brands that are even bigger than us. Getting a larger logo attached to our name allows us to enter more big-box stores, get more respect in the industry for future partnerships, and even more press. When looking for a partner, seek somebody out that you can provide value for! We just created a co-branded net with USA Volleyball. This is 100% a sneak peak and you're getting first access to it. It was a win-win for both brands as they get a % of the sales from the product, we get to use their logo, and we leverage their audience to move product.
Now go out and make your dream list of partners. If you don't have a good introduction either cold message them via social or refer to my plan of attack for wholesale via LinkedIn from last week.
How Do You Find a Manufacturing Partner?
When we started CROSSNET all we had was a blueprint, a cool idea, and our life savings. We had always ordered a bunch of knockoff NBA jerseys from China and waited patiently for months for them to arrive in the mail. We figured this would be the best place to start so we simply started searching on AliExpress and AliBaba.
So if I were to start all over again, let's pretend I'm making a tea kettle company I'd do this:
1) Search tea kettle in Ali Baba
2) Find the dopest kettles that look like they are fairly in my price range. For some fun basic math, you want to back into your retail price when scouting suppliers. So let's use these numbers for a good rule of thumb.
$12 Cost of Goods + $5 for Bullshit Shipping & Importing Fees = $17
$17 x 2 = $34 My Wholesale Cost
$34 x 2 = $68 My Retail Cost
3) Next up, start going through all the products you like and look for the minimum order quantity. Hit "contact supplier" and send off your best pitch. If your project is top secret obviously go slow and message one supplier at a time. Be frugal and don't order 10,000 units when you really want 1,000 because you got a 15 cent price break. Save that money and put it into marketing and branding for your launch.
Where Do I Start with NFTS?
I've been spending more and more time learning about NFT's and the metaverse this week. Don't worry this newsletter won't become about that, however, hate it or love it, the metaverse isn't going anywhere and it's here to stay. If you're interested in learning more, I really enjoyed this sit-down with Gary V & Zuck as they chatted about web3. If you've been buying some projects, my favorites lately have been Doodles, The Littles, Alien Frens, The Heart Project, and Cryptobatz. If you want to learn how to start simply make yourself an OpenSea account and go have fun....responsibly of course!
Best Shopify Apps?
Much like everything in life, less is typically more. If you are just starting off you absolutely should not be on Shopify Plus or spending crazy money on apps. If I'm just starting off make sure you have revenue coming in and have cash in the bank before you start adding on bells and whistles. Here's what I recommend:
Starter Store:
Privy (Email Marketing)
Contact Form | Form Builder (Wholesale Form)
Tawk (Customer Service)
KnoCommerce (Customer Engagement Survey)
Postscript (SMS Marketing)
Okendo (Reviews)
Advanced Store:
Hotjar (Heat Mapping)
Rebuy (Upsell & Cross Sell App)
Massive shoutout to my good friends over at TripleWhale for sponsoring this newsletter each week. They've been so damn good at helping a ton of my friends with tracking their ad spend and making sure they are running a profitable business. If you're reading this now and don't know your breakeven ROAS number you need to go find that now. Add up your landed costs, packaging, labor, and shipping and now figure out how much is left in your margin for paid advertising. Track your spend in, versus spend out daily, and then monitor what platforms are giving you the best results. We've been seeing Google & Amazon PPC being the best places to squeak out an extra sale or two a day.
Each week I'm going to end these sends with a Homies for Hire section. It feels like almost daily I'm either looking for assistance for a new project or I have friends asking if I have a good connect for this job or that. So here's what I got, more than likely most of these people don't know I'm putting them in here, so just send them an email and let them know I sent you.
UGC/Content Creation: Get 5-10 pieces of creative done a week - Michael Uy - [email protected]
Podcast Outreach: Get on 3-5 new podcasts a month, if not way more! - Mitko Ivanov - [email protected]
Twitter Ads: Get your tweets to go viral and get tens of thousands of new impressions, super affordably. CROSSNET does this all the time - Ali Khali - [email protected]
Amazon Management & PPC: A02 has been amazing for us - Justin Rapoport - [email protected]
I hope this was helpful and you guys got a ton of value from this. As always, I'd love to hear from you either by replying back to this email or hitting me up on Twitter with your questions. I want to know, what are you struggling with? What would you pay a consultant for right now? What mistakes do you not want to make?
I'm on the quest for some good new tv shows and the best coconut milk to mix with my daily Tenzo matcha. Give me suggestions!
All the love in the world,
Chris