Happy Tuesday!

I’m writing this to you from a cardboard box that I have made into a desk for the past few days. Why a cardboard box you ask?

Well… the past seven days have been incredibly busy as I have officially escaped apartment living and moved into a brand new house! Since I was 17 and moved away for college I’ve been cooped up in a small ass apartment and now 14 years later I’m finally just remembering how beautiful it is to have a place to call home. 

Me and my wife moved into a beautiful house right in Miami Beach. She’s six minutes to work. I can walk to the beach in 15. I finally got somebody to come mount our three TVs last night and he charged $200 per tv. Made me think that maybe I should have gotten into a life of hanging tvs instead of ecommerce. 

If you’re in Miami Beach make sure you come say what’s up. Would love to meet my new neighbors and can promise you I’ll be one of the few people actually working at the SoHo House on the beach thats conveniently just nine minutes away.

Besides that, I have some other big news that I’m so excited for. If you’ve been subscribed to Crossed Commerce for a while now or this is your first edition, I just hired a full-time assistant and he starts today to make this newsletter even better! My friend Mason created this thing called Copy MBA where founders can fill out a form and they will match you with the perfect copywriter.

I’ve been working with mine for a few months now and he’s been so damn good at helping me brainstorm ideas for this & CROSSNET, that he’s now taking over other big things like follow ups, outreach, invoicing and locking down events for the Founders Club. I’m expecting this to free up 10-15 hours a week so that could be huge for you.

You’re going to love this week’s newsletter I promise.

Massive Customer Acquisition Hack

I’m so damn excited about Black Crow AI finally sponsoring the newsletter. Adam Pritchard, who is part of their founding team, is an absolute legend and one of those people that you leave every single conversation 10x smarter than you entered it. We all have a few of those people in our lives who need to be protected at all costs. If you run a DTC agency you need to meet with him.

If you haven’t heard of Black Crow AI it’s a performance marketing booster that allows you to unlock anonymized subscribers in a privacy-friendly way, thus increasing your email & sms captures and most importantly revenue.

So we just launched Black Crow on our Australia store on January 1st and boy is it working. The goal of our test was to see whether we could profitably add more email addresses to our database and convert them into actual paying customers within the first 14 days. And the answer has been very clearly yes. Our #1 priority this February was to squeeze as much revenue out of the last weeks of the Australian summer and to reduce our storage bill as much as possible between Feb-September when the AU market is not active for us.

I told Adam he was crazy to do this, but if you have a brand over $2M/year in revenue on Shopify, they will give you a $100 Amazon gift card if you take a quick demo with them to see the performance lift you can expect.

My friends over at Mansur Gavriel saw an extra $75,000 in email revenue in just their first 30 day free trial. I’ll report back our total when we blast off this end-of-summer sale that will be going to more customers than I could ever imagine.

So for a Week of Limited Internet Access, What is There to Say?

Surprisingly a lot.

As a business owner, the more time I spend away from the business the more time it frees my brain up to solve problems and step away from the everyday stress.

This tweet I put up today legit seems to capture my every day lately.

The things you are worrying about now will more than likely be meaningless in 5 years from now. Let alone 5 months. That difficult conversation? That scary meeting? That fight you had with your co-founder?

Take some time to zoom out.

Your life is pretty great.

It’s so easy to get in your head about everything that’s going wrong in your life that its really easy to overlook all the good.

I have a massive retail meeting tomorrow. My washer machines not working. My internet isn’t working on half of my house. My car door is smashed because a moped driver smashed into it when I was opening the door. The apartment I’m moving out of needs to be professionally cleaned and repaired. It’s slow season how do we make payroll, pay bills, and generate cash.

We can all make a laundry list of shit that haunts us like this.

And it’s even easier to take it out on your partners or loved ones.

My two words of the week are “zoom out” and think about the big picture.

We invented a sport. We’re launching nationwide in a massive retailer. We’ve survived in business seven years and made millions of dollars. I just moved into a beautiful house and my dog has a backyard. I’m saving and investing more money for my future kids than ever before.

Life is pretty damn good.

Unlocking New Revenue

As I was having one of these zoom out moments with my team last week my brother Greg (who doesn’t get enough credit for CROSSNET’s crazy success) had an unreal idea to sell sponsorships on our videos and create digital billboards within our content.

So hear me out - the DraftKings, FanDuels, and Manscapeds of the world spend millions of dollars a year on advertising during sporting events. Rather than trying to get people to buy summer games in the dead middle of winter when our CPA’s are 4x the cost, why not sell sponsorship and open an entirely new revenue stream?

When we had our 30 minute tournament televised on ESPN a few years back we were able to sell about $15,000 of sponsorship dollars with signage around the court & tv commercials.

So here’s how it will work:

1) Each month we have dozens of videos go viral with millions of impressions from viral clips like this 

2) We will sell the sponsor a certain number of impressions and guarantee that we hit their target (eg. Hi DraftKings we guarantee that 10M people will see this video with your logo on it for $500)

3) We strike a deal on impressions for cash and we can charge more if we can be certain that the views are coming from their desired demo

4) We create the videos with their logo in it and continue to run the content until we hit the agreed-upon view count. Rinse & repeat.

Any takers? We’re good salespeople at CROSSNET LLC and I think we’ll find some bold marketers with deep pockets who are down to take us up on this strategy.

See You Next Week

So without further ado, I challenge you to zoom out and think about your business holistically. Are there opportunities like the above in your business as I mentioned? Maybe it’s something as simple as employing a network of small commission-based sales reps to sell your product across the USA, going all in on gifting companies that sell to Fortune 500s, or finally getting out of your comfort zone and signing up for that tradeshow.

Whatever it is, I’m here for you and would love to help - [email protected]

And whatever you do, make sure you don’t leave this newsletter without checking out Black Crow. They’ve been massive advocates of this newsletter for far too long and I slept on adding them to our store all of last year. There’s a huge possibility to unlock thousands of new customer emails & phone numbers while adding tons of new PROFITABLE monthly revenue.

Have an incredible week,

Chris