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Late Night Thoughts
You gotta commend people who take a chance. The game changers. The ones who try to do things differently. The ones who take a chance on themselves. Even if they fail at least they tried.
If that’s you, you’re already ten steps ahead of most people. Congrats.
I was at my grandmother-in-law’s 90th surprise party this weekend and had an awesome chat about business with a lady who is now my cousin-in-law (is that a thing?). She’s an awesome entrepreneur in her own right running a nursing healthcare company but she started to ask me “How did I start thinking about business and entrepreneurship the way I do?”
Growing up in the sticks of Connecticut, she wanted to know what challenged me to think the way I do, to think anything is possible, and to actually take a chance at this life of entrepreneurship when everyone around me was settling for the 9-5 and 14 vacation days a year life.
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Lyndsey’s grandma looks damn good for 90
She has her first daughter heading off to college to get a business degree this year and she asked me how did I get started?
While sucking down on my mini Capri Sun juice box, I realized it came down to meeting just one person, his name was Nate Hirsch and he was a senior in my fraternity when I was a freshman. At the time I was working at the school cafeteria (it was called the RAT for short - should give you an indication for the working conditions), where I perfected making the greasiest hamburger and fries the state of Connecticut has ever seen. All for $7.25 per hour!
One Sunday morning at our Delta Tau Delta fraternity meeting this guy Nate came in and asked if anybody wanted to make $15 an hour working from their laptop. My jaw dropped and I was surprisingly the only person to raise their hand…I went to a rich liberal arts school and I was far from rich so maybe that’s why I was the only one who wanted to work? But I said yes and said tell me more!
For the next few years I worked alongside Nate and his partner, Connor, as they built out a company called Portlight, a massive Amazon dropshipping company. Essentially I would list hundreds of products every single day on Amazon from the comfort of my dorm room. I’d find a Lego set on Target.com for $75 and then list the same set on Amazon for $109.99. The customer would buy on Amazon and then I’d swipe Nate’s credit card and buy it from Target and ship it directly to the customer and they wouldn’t know the difference. Dropshipping 101 baby! The coolest thing is we would do hundreds of orders a day!
So take a second and think.
Who was that one person that changed everything for you?
Have you changed somebody’s life in a similar way?
I got this email earlier this week and it was honestly one of the best things I’ve received in years. All these newsletters. Seven years of putting myself out there every day offering up advice. If I could make the same impact on somebody’s life, like Nate did mine, then that’s a life very worth living.
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AfterSell Legends
If you’re like me, you are spending way too much time focused on growing the business and not enough time making the small tweaks on your site that would actually help you make more money and increase your average order value.
For me I just kept kicking the task down the road until I found the team at Aftersell. On my life, they had a swat team of like 23 members open up a Slack channel with me and they built out my post purchase upsells on CROSSNET in legit less than 48 hours.
When you buy a CROSSNET you get asked if you want to buy a SmashNet. If you buy a CROSSNET H2O you get asked if you want to buy a CROSSNET for the yard for $50 off. Those kind of things.
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Good example
We have seen our AOV skyrocket. Customers are happier. And its something we should have done years ago.
AfterSell just launched a sick new feature called Network Offers which literally allows us to make free money.
99% of order confirmation pages are completely pointless. So AfterSell created this thing where a blue-chip company like Amazon or Adidas will place an ad on your thank you page and if the customer takes the offer the brand gets paid. It’s an absolute win-win as the customer gets an awesome offer, the ad looks super native, and the brand showing the offer makes money.
Here it is on our site - playgoodsport.com
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Julia my contact there is doing a full on sprint to get Network Offers as adapted by as many brands as possible. They are offering AfterSell 100% for free when you sign up for Network Offers.
Just use this link or email [email protected] and mention Chris Meade sent you!
Let them help you make free money. You won’t regret it.
Have a great night,
Chris