Today marks three years since I’ve been writing CROSSED Commerce 🎂

For those of you who have been reading along since day 1, I appreciate you more than you’ll ever know.

If you’re new around here, thanks for joining! I hope you love it.

What started as simply screenshotting a very long email to my team and posting it on LinkedIn has transformed into a full on newsletter community and better yet an exclusive members club called The Founders Club.

I’m on a flight right now to Phoenix and later tonight will be hosting 35 entrepreneurs for an epic night of drinks, dinner, and storytelling. Over the past month, we’ve hand-picked some of Phoenix’s top brands to attend for an incredible evening. Better yet we’ll have a few sponsors who have come in through this newsletter to help pay the bill. Getting paid to travel, eat, and make new friends. Chris from three years ago would have happily signed up for that deal.

You can RSVP for our next few events now:

Denver - March 20th 🏂

NYC - April 9th 🍎

Boston - April 11th ☘️

What other cities should be on my radar? We have LA, San Diego, Austin, Dallas, Vegas, and many more coming soon!

Marketing Lesson: Don’t Build Your Home on Rented Land

Yesterday was an interesting day for alot of brands out there. Facebook went down and left thousands of media buyers trying to figure out what the heck to do.

I found these two tweets funny as hell and very on brand for yesterday’s chaotic day. I’m beyond thankful it was not peak summertime or we would have been out $20-30,000 of revenue.

I’m not a media buyer. Never claimed to be. I just happen to be good at typing on a keyboard and a gifted sales person but Matt makes a great point here. Regardless of your scale, you can’t spend your entire day in the ad account. There’s so much more goes into building a brand.

One of those things means gaining trust. Simply put we buy from large brands as we trust they keep their promises.

Early CROSSNET days we ruined this trust by overpromising, over-discounting, racking up backorders, and always putting the money first.

Seven years into it, its funny to see this new age of ecommerce brands who are so overly indexed on paid media for growth. It’s completely fine and necessary to get started, but as you scale your marketing moat needs to be your brand and how you interact with customers.

For us it meant stop spending every dollar on Zuckerberg’s media world and investing into sales people, trade shows, B2B deals, collaborations, and partnerships. How could I spend $50,000 on an employee and have them make me $200,000. This type of thinking took us from $70k in sales to $2.5M the next year and then again to $9M the year after.

You need to own your marketing.

A New World of Influencing

Gone are the days where you pay an influencer a couple thousand dollars and sales volume goes through the roof. Customers are smarter than ever. Ads make sales, but influencers build brands. If you’re lucky enough to partner with the right creative you get to piggyback off the trust they’ve built with their audience to grow both awareness and revenue.

This is exactly why SARAL reached out this week to sponsor this week’s newsletter.

I know what you’re thinking… influencers are a black box.

You don’t know where to start, what to do, which software to use?

This is why I resonated with founder of SARAL when he reached out about this for CROSSNET. If you’ve been like me before you’ve spent dozens of hours DM’ing influencers, only waiting weeks for them to write back and it becoming the messiest and chaotic process. Don’t get me started when you have 2-3 marketers in the Instagram account!

If you remember my lessons from last week, I mentioned you’re likely overpaying for software. SARAL has everything you’d need from an influencer partnerships perspective built-into one tool. You don’t have to pay for a separate affiliate app, a separate discovery tool, a separate outreach platform, etc. I like the fact that it’s all in one!

They have a simple influencer management platform for brands that are looking to partner with influencers in any way. They enable the “Full Stack” of Brand-Influencer partnerships - from seeding to affiliate to UGC and more!

They’ve taken a system that used to work for their agency clients, and turned it into guided “assistant-like” software that any brand can use to:

1. Find and automate outreach to influencers

2. Ship products, manage relationships, and build community

3. Track affiliate performance and send payments

They’re offering an exclusive 14-day free trial for my readers: Claim your trial here →

If you’re skeptical, I recommend speaking with their team or let me know and I’ll make a personal introduction for you!

Closing Words

Earlier this morning I went on a quick little 5k before my flight and I was overwhelmed with 30 minutes of just clear thoughts. We are so glued to our screens and hunched laptop backs all day, its so incredibly freeing when you’re just out in nature, no matter how damn hot it is in Miami.

A few thoughts for you.

Go find your escape from work. I promise your work will improve. I got three that come to mind: running/working out, taking a bath, going to concerts

These are my three happy places that are worth all the money in the world to me. If I owned my house I’d probably put half my live savings into building the most incredible bath tub you’ve ever seen.

Why?

Because it allows me to unwind, focus, and put things into perspective. Slow one million thoughts down to two or three.

Here’s what I’ll leave you with from today.

• My favorite connections I’ve made in the past few years all came from real-life experiences, not social media

• It only takes a few people to change the direction of your life

• Trust is the ultimate guiding principle. Fucking somebody over, doing some shady shit, is never worth it. You only have one chance with trust

• Alot of the time it takes the same amount of work to make $1M as it does $10M

• We all have 24 hours in the day. Spend them wisely

• The person you were three years ago would be damn proud to be in the spot you are today

I’m going to close this one out by trying to be helpful. There are like 30,000 of you that read this at this point and I might really regret this. However, I want to help you.

Go through my following. LinkedIn. Instagram. Twitter. I don’t care.

Let me introduce you to one person that you’d like to network with. Of course I’ll ask their permission first, but 99% of the time I bet they say yes.

One person can change your entire career.

No, I’m not offering Tinder & Bumble services here. Real business connections only!

Talk soon,

Chris