Here's How to Increase Your Revenue 🚀

Happy Thursday! It's almost the weekend, which means I’ll be able to put my laptop away for 48 hours and just disconnect from the grid. Getting offline, being present in the real world, and just relaxing has been so big for my mental health and focus lately. I’ve also been sleeping with my phone outside of the bedroom, which has been great for actually sleeping throughout the night and getting to bed faster. If you need any recommendations for new books, I highly suggest one of my all-time favorites Double Your Profits by Bob Fifer or a new one I’m working on called Super Maker by Jamie  Schmidt.

Since last week, we’ve been lucky to land Costco Canada as a new account, create three co-branded nets for the first time ever this summer, and officially go live on Amazon Australia. Marketplace diversification, retail expansion into new accounts and doubling down on what’s actually working without wasting time on all the bullshit and distractions has been so big for us lately.

When you slow down, take the time to build out attribution models, and clearly understand what is working and what’s not, you’ll actually be able to scale that much quicker. It took me the longest time to realize that less is actually more. The internet and society makes us feel like we should be doing everything and anything to build our brand, but then it becomes impossible to track what’s actually working and what’s not. 

Quick Advice on Increasing Revenue

• Can you do a co-branded collab with a brand you admire this year?

• Do you know your break even ROAS number on paid social? If you're constantly hitting above this number daily, you're not spending enough.

• Have you tested purchasing individual newsletter shoutouts and full email takeovers from newsletters in your space? (eg. selling baby clothes = buy a mommy newsletter shout out)

• Partnerships with large brands to increase trust and conversion (USA Volleyball for us)

• Create specific landing pages for the demos you are running ads on with Unstack 

Here’s one test we’re working on this month. Raising AOV with GIVZ. As a one SKU store, getting a few customers to throw in an upsell that is super profitable can make or break your day. Your goal with your upsells should be to generate straight cash. You’ve already convinced your customer to purchase, now lets see what else we can get out of the sale. For those struggling to find an attractive upsell item, you should be looking to sell something that is affordable, but you can mark up around 5x what your manufacturing cost is. In our case we have our CROSSNET Doubles Net and signature volleyballs.

To do this we're using a new app called GIVZ that allows customers to donate money from their purchase to a charity that the brand supports. In our case, every time a customer spends $200 they have the option with one-click post purchase to donate $10 from their order to the Jordan Porco Foundation. The Jordan Porco fund is particularly close to my heart as my fiancée lost her best friend to suicide when she was in college. At the same time, I lost my dad when I was 19. It sucks, nothing we can do but keep it moving, but it's awesome to be able to use CROSSNET's platform to share some added awareness on mental health and suicide overall. 

We've only been using GIVZ for a few days now but it's already working pretty well. It's honestly a win, win. We get to support a charity that we love, the customer is motivated to add more to their cart, and we get a revenue boost. What's not to love?  Click here to give them a try. The coolest thing is they can add almost any charity, can give your customers options to donate to other charities, and they handle all of the donation headaches. 

Random Last Minute Valentine Day Idea:

• Search wedding registries for couples that have your product or a similar item on their list! Reach out to them and make their day. We did this last year and oddly enough several people at a CROSSNET on their list. The reaction was priceless. I think this is one of those "do things that don't scale" opportunities.

Increasing ROAS with Triple Pixel 

I'm proud to report over the last three week's we've seen an increase in ROAS across all platforms. We're testing more than ever and only spending money when it makes sense for our business. If you haven't already, chat with your finance team and identify what is the ABSOLUTE BREAK EVEN number you need to hit in order to maintain profitability. Next up is the fun part: 

• We're testing up to 3-5 new video assets a week and assigning them a relatively small budget. You don't need to spend tens of thousands on an ad to see if it performs, even a couple hundred dollars a day should do enough to give you insight into what's working or not.

• We use Triple Whale & Triple Pixel to have clean visibility on how each and every ad is performing. In a moment's notice, I can see our ROAS, order volume, CPA, AOV, and also if customers are adding product to the cart and simply not converting. Triple Whale has done a great job of launching an extremely affordable product that is vital for our small team.

• Compare the top performers weekly. We then cut the stragglers, use them for Tik Tok or somewhere else on social, and then send the new top performers to our video editor. From there he gets a good insight into what's working and what's not.

• If you haven't already built out your customer personas! When we started, I thought the 24-year-old version of myself would be our ideal customer but we ended up finding out that the mom in Nebraska with a $65,000 salary with two kids and a backyard was our ideal customer. We started immediately making content for her! If I were you'd I'd be making content for everyone (kids, high schools, adults, grandparents, etc.) and see which one sticks.

• If you haven't already taken advantage of it, Triple Whale is giving away some free trials and I honestly couldn't recommend it more. Believe it or not, they were one of the first companies I had an opportunity to invest in and I passed. Yes...I regret it big time. You can check them out here.

Team Building:

I get asked this question a lot, "Chris if you were hiring from scratch all over again what would your first three hires be?" Obviously, it depends on the business and your revenue but lets say you're right about to cross seven figures, my advice would be:

Performance Marketing Manager: Somebody who can oversee and even run FB, Tik Tok, Snap ads and assist with email marketing & SMS. It's a grind and requires wearing a ton of different hats. This person should also be comfortable with Shopify and some light coding experience certainly would not hurt. They should also be comfortable managing freelancers and any agency partners. 

Logistics Managers: You can't sell product if you don't have it. As you're scaling making sure your inventory is getting here on time can simply make or break your year. Last year we were unstocked on CROSSNET H2O's and missed out on over two million dollars in revenue!!!! Had we just forecasted properly and got orders out to the store timely we would have had a much better 2021. 

Brand Manager: If you're actually looking to build a brand that will last, can be sold, and can have those viral moments it needs to look up to par. You need somebody who simply gets the look and feel down and can articulate this across all possible touchpoints. For the longest time, CROSSNET looked like a completely different company on Instagram than it did on Facebook and we weren't communicating a comprehensive message. Get your brand down and the money will follow. 

Homies for Hire:

Looking for somebody to create Tik Tok content for you? It's tough as hell. My guy Michael is a beast at Tik Tok and can help you create 8-12 pieces of content a week! Hit him at [email protected]. 

Looking to get on more podcasts? Want to spread your name and brand but don't know where to start? Mitko has helped me appear on over 100 shows in the last two years and has room for a few more people this month. Reach him at [email protected]

Just Get Started & SteamCommerce

I'll leave you with some closing remarks today. There will never be a perfect time to start that business, ask that girl out, do that thing you've been wanting to do. You can either simply keep putting it off or finally get it done. Do I want to write a newsletter at 10:48 at night when I could be in bed watching the new Ozark? Hell no. But I made a promise to myself that I'd send out one newsletter a week so here we are. 

So many people make excuses and never accomplish what they actually want to do because they are too tired from their day job, they don't want to invest the time, or think it take way too much money. Fuck that. Just get started. You'll surprise yourself man, I promise you. I'm so damn fortunate to be where I am in live, giving advice to people on how to build their dream, but just five years ago I had no damn clue what I wanted to do with my life. I woke up miserable, cold-called people for 8 hours a day, and regretted waking up. Just get started and I promise you'll be so happy that you did. 

If you are struggling to figure out where to get started, my good friend Luca just showed me this new company he invested in called SteamCommerce. It's honestly pretty sweet. He described it to me like this: you have a great idea, but you either don't know how to get it manufactured, don't know how to ship it, or aren't the best at branding, SteamCommerce will come in and do it all. They actually ship for VonDutch (if you haven't watched the Hulu mini-series you need to), Supreme Patty, and a ton of other influencers who were facing their own challenges. 

There's literally a solution for everything these days. SteamCommerce will legit help you with sourcing, logistics & fulfillment, and customer service. So basically you legit have no excuse to go start that dream business or that side hustle you wanted. 

I hope this was helpful and you guys are enjoying this! If you have just subscribed or got forwarded this, I started this about four months ago in an effort to give back and try my best to help the future of eCommerce. There's so much advice out there from "experts" and it seems like everyone is really resonating with hearing practical advice from somebody who is actually in the trenches and building a company right in front of their eyes. 

I'd love your advice! What do you want me to cover next? What are you struggling with? How can I make these more helpful? Even if you don't have an idea, I'd love to know a bit more about my readers. Take five seconds respond back to this, introduce yourself and tell me your favorite direct-to-consumer brand that I need to check out. 

If you haven't already saw the team over at DTCX was crazy enough to let me have my own panel where I'll be discussing how to grow a bootstrapped brand. It's a two-day digital event and you need to register here. It's 100% free and I'll be speaking on March 2nd. I can't promise speakers on the 3rd will be as good as the ones on my day... but you should definitely tune in for thirty minutes on March 2nd.

See you next week! 

Chris