Things I Wish I Knew Sooner

Subject lines are important. That was a reminder to spend more time on them.

Happy Wednesday! Spring is right around the corner and its been a fun four months of planning for the warm weather. I'm so damn excited for everything we have in store for you. I just uploaded CROSSNET for SOCCER secretly to the back of our Shopify, so if you to order before everyone else we are going to start shipping in a few weeks.

As I reflect on what will now be our fifth year in business it's crazy to think about all of the things I've learned. The fuck ups. The things that make you just shake your head and say why did I even do that? After several months of recording, I'm dropping my very own podcast called My Biggest Lessons this week, sponsored by good friends over at Gorgias. I want to take this week's send to shed some light on some of those mistakes. Things that are just such common sense now that the younger entrepreneur would have wished he could have read something like this. So let's get going! 

Start Collecting Reviews with Okendo:

During the first three years of CROSSNET I downloaded every review app under the sun. Almost got into legal situations with Yotpo (the biggest scam on Earth), overpaid for so many apps, tried things that broke my Shopify store. It was a terrible experience until I found Okendo. What I wish I would have done sooner:

• Integrate Okendo review requests into every step of our communication 

  • Customer service agents should have a review request link ready to send to happy customers who leave a positive social media comment or enter our live chat

  • Customer service agents should have some of our best reviews ready to go to send customers who are on the fence about purchasing

• Create a 2-3 step email review flow via Privy to ask for positive & honest feedback. I've learned so much from our customers over the years and is 100% the best way to improve your product. For so long we sent out 1 email and forgot about the follow up. Take the time and create the follow up! I have personally seen that motivation people with Amazon gift cards and other sales tactics in exchange for a review doesn't work too well. Instead make them feel like part of the community (invite to an app, discount on next purchase, free item?) genuinely thank them for their time. How many times have you honestly left a review? Especially a five star one? People are quick to bitch, not to give praise. 

• Create a review request email & sms campaign that can be sent out to past customers once every few months. This will only be sent to customers who failed to complete a review request on your post purchase survey request. What this looks like:

  • Create an email & sms that says "Hey did you love CROSSNET? Why didn't you leave us a review! We want to hear how you're liking it and what we can do better?"

  • Create a filter for customers who have A) Purchased within 90 days B) Haven't left a review yet

  • Then fire this off every 90 days to your new customers

Save yourself the headache and try a free trial of Okendo here. 

Spend More Time Critiquing Creative

How many times have you said “oh the ads aren’t working?” Or “the ads aren’t profitable like they used to”?! For so long I used to sit there and blame the Facebook ad manager, the media buyer, or think something was broken. Here's what I propose:

• Set time weekly to go over creative with your team. What is working? What isn’t? How many of your videos have 2-3 seconds of bullshit fluff you can cut out. How many videos make you cringe that you see running?

• Identify the top performing assets, use a freelancer or somebody on staff and go make edits of content you already have to mirror those exact assets.

• Make content specific for each platform. Sure you can syndicate a Tik Tok video onto IG Reels, but there’s nothing better than creating content that is specific for each native platform.

• Set a budget for creative internally. As you scale up your ads you should also scale up the money that you're spending on creation. I recently saw a few brands I admire say that they take about 10% of their ad spend each month and allocate that towards content creation.

Start Collecting SMS & Emails 

Would you believe it when I tell you I didn't have email capture set up on our website for the first year because I was afraid of looking spammy? What an idiot. Or the fact that I didn't start collecting phone numbers until the end of 2020 because I didn't want to get sued for texting people incorrectly.

I'll always remember when we started with our email agency just a few months after collecting emails and just hitting send on those first emails. We were having $30,000 days. $50,000 days. All from hitting enter and blasting off an email. It was an incredible feeling. It felt like free money and something I wish I would have done a lot sooner. 

I'll make it easy for you. Download Privy for email capture & Postscript for SMS. 

We now sending email campaigns via Privy at a cadence of 3 sends per week. These are typically educational, used to create FOMO (you should be on the beach instead of reading this newsletter), or promotional. As an inventor of a sport its my goal to do anything and everything to get my customers outside in the real world playing. 

On the SMS side we are using Postscript and trying our best to work up to one send a week and make each touch point extremely conversational. We want to text back and forth with our customers like we are friends. Not just spam them for a $20 off coupon code. Create excitement, give customers an excuse to write back and build rapport. 

Create a Balanced Calendar

Time is the most sacred resource you have. You don't need to be told this. It's obvious. So if that's the case why do all of us spend so much time in meetings? Going from one call to the next without actually making any time to do the damn work we are meeting about. Busy work for busy sake is a terrible outlook.

Here are the three regularly reoccurring meetings on my calendar:

1) Monthly 1vs1 with each direct report (used to be weekly and found it to be overkill)

2) Weekly Marketing meeting (where I see my direct reports)

3) Weekly Executive Meeting (2 Hour Session outlined below) 

• Exec team meets for 30 minutes

• Sales/events team joins the call for 30 minutes to provide updates on quota, goals, and updates from last week and what they are working on.

• Marketing team joins for next 30 minutes, followed by the operations & product development team 

• The exec team will debrief alone, plan next steps and end the call

Spend Less Time Building a Tech Stack

It pisses me off thinking about how much time I've spent within Shopify. 

How many times have you downloaded an app, set it up, deleted it a few days later because you found out it wouldn’t work? In the early days I spent so much time downloading shit thinking it’d be my golden ticket. Reply back to this email and I'll send you a photo of our current tech stack if you're interested! 

Expand Your Team

We waited until we were dying of sleep exhaustion and anxiety before we hired. I promise you that $12/hr hire for 10 hours a week really won’t kill you if you have money coming in. Of course you need to wait to hire until there’s some cash coming in the door, but when you get things down to a science when you know each and every day you’ll be making around x amount of money, with x amount of profit coming in then you'll be good. 

Reminder: Hire for your weaknesses first and I promise you don't need a secretary :)

That's all I got for this week! I hope some of these help. If you have questions, I'm always down to try to help. I've just opened up two consulting slots for this March. They typically go quick so shoot me an email back and we can lock something in. 

All the love in the world,

Chris