It’s Thursday baby!

I’m writing today from my hotel room in NYC where I’m coming down from what was probably one of my favorite events we’ve ever thrown. New York’s a special place to me as its where I was living when we came up with the idea for CROSSNET and where I had to look my boss in the face and say I’m quitting to start a crazy new life.

Every time I come back here its like a homecoming and I get to see all my high school & college friends who live down here now and its special being able to introduce them to my new “online” friends who have become real friends. Kinda like you reading this.

I’m sorry if you’re reading this and didn’t make the cut for last night’s dinner. We had over 225 people on the RSVP list and had to trim it down to just 50. We followed the dinner up by getting the keys to The Othership, New York City’s new incredible bathhouse for 2 hours of saunas, cold plunging and networking.

I sure wish I had some Tru Wild this morning. My boy Zach Curhan (follow him @zstar77), started the best electrolyte company and if you haven’t tried it or are over paying for other garbage your missing out.

Before we get into this week’s send I want to give a huge shout out to Grapevine. They are a first-time sponsor of my newsletter and want to give $500 for free to all my readers. More to come on that below!

So let’s get into this week’s send!

Prime Day Recap

If you’re reading this and were one of the thousands to purchase a CROSSNET over the past 48 hours, thank you.

If you didn’t…. what were you thinking?!

I have a love hate relationship with Prime Day because Amazon loves to just sprawl it on the merchants randomly with like four weeks notice. For most of our businesses it takes more than four weeks to stock up on inventory so if you’re running low on a SKU you’re pretty much shit out of luck. Sadly one of our most popular products was low on inventory and Amazon wasn’t able to get our stock checked in on time so we did see some lost revenue.

I’ve been pretty vocal about Amazon becoming one of our biggest priorities this year and I’m proud to report we had our best Amazon sales day in 2024 with zero Facebook spend.

As we set CROSSNET up for a potential exit, the team is dialed in on two key metrics: Can we increase gross revenue, while maintaining last year’s profitable ways. In a perfect world the business runs on a 20% net margin and that’s essentially the gold standard in the sporting goods world. The way we can achieve that is to be so locked in on a few key metrics:

1) Are we spending to our 4:1 ROAS target?

2) Are we blowing profit on discounting?

3) Do we have any faulty products that customers are returning?

Looking at our July numbers we realized things were running a little bit hot and in order to have as profitable of a July as possible we decided to cut Facebook ad spend 100% for the past 48 hours and just enjoy all of the organic good will we’ve built up with customers this year. Remember, moving units is cool, but if you’re doing it at a loss it’s legit pointless. Especially if you’re in an industry like ours where LTV is so limited.

I’m not recommending you go cut your ad spend to zero, but I bet you’re probably overspending a bit.

New Strategies

With more brands dumping all of their money into Meta, its getting harder and harder to stand out. Next week we are starting our “UGLY” ad strategy. Our goal is stand out from the noise by shocking the customer while their innocently searching on the timeline.

We’ve been doing the whole “this is four way volleyball”, “this is your new favorite game” ads for way too long. Time to switch it up!

If you’ve found something that’s working over the past few weeks I’d love to feature it in next week’s send. Just shoot me an email back to [email protected]

You’re Invited to Join

If you haven’t been paying attention, The Founders Club is picking up ridiculous momentum. We’re adding 30+ new members monthly and it just feels like the early days of CROSSNET. You remember those days when you’re up late, grinding until the sun comes up because you’re so damn excited about what you’re building?

Every two weeks, The Founders Club members meet in their cohorts that are created based on revenue, industry, strengths, and weaknesses. I’ve been blessed to be able to jump into dozens of these groups on a weekly basis to help answer questions, but also selfishly learn from people way smarter than me. Here are a few big ones from this week:

1. How to navigate bad press from the media?

2. How to deal with people knocking off your product?

3. When do you know if you’re spending enough on Facebook?

4. When should I start spending money on different areas of advertising?

5. I’m running out of money, what should I do?

If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of please apply below.

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Tonight’s my last night in NYC before I head back to Miami for a massive event we’re throwing in Miami with the founder of Solidcore. I’m heading out to Williamsburg to go see Ben Howard (sick musician) and third wheel with my college roommate and his girlfriend. We’re looking for a good new spot to try for dinner, so if any one has good restaurant recommendations please let me know!

If you have questions about the Founders Club shoot me a message back and 100% check out Grapevine. They are the real deal.

Talk soon and thanks for reading!

All the love in the world,

Chris