Happy Wednesday,

I hope you’re having a better day than my 3PL. They magically lost 280 units of one of our best-selling SKUs and now we are short on a massive purchase order, all while the trucking company is the parking lot waiting to load up the order. But that’s another story for another newsletter :)

I’m off to Canada to visit my good friend, Aaron Spivak, for the next week. Tomorrow night we’re hosting a 60-person dinner in Toronto where there will be over 1.5B in revenue in attendance. The following Wednesday we’re hosting another one in Montreal. So if you’re from Canada, read this newsletter, and run a direct-to-consumer brand, hit me up and I’ll get you on the guest list.

This will be my second time in both cities, so if you have any recommendations, coffee shops or must-visit areas give me all the suggestions. Anyways, lets get into this week’s send.

If you’re tapped into the ecommerce community it’s been a pretty crazy week. Between the Meta overspending issue, Grazagate, and people actually getting mad about me asking when is the “right time” to buy a luxury timepiece on Twitter, there’s been a lot of drama.

We got lucky over the weekend and we’re able to escape the Meta overspending with only a couple hundred dollars in wasted spend. We’re fortunate we have a media buyer who lives in Italy, so he was actually awake while most of your ad budgets were being blown in seconds while you were sleeping.

Although Meta hasn’t officially put out a helpful statement, I’d make sure that you reach out to your Meta rep (if you have one), and document the entire occurrence of the overspending, when your daily budget was deployed, and your ROAS. Hopefully, they will make things right and provide a refund over the next 60 days. If not, I saw some class action lawsuits floating around the internet that I’m sure you can tag along in.

So for today’s topic:

Adding $25K+ in Incremental Revenue

As a founder, one of my top responsibilities is to find areas to add additional revenue. Ways where I can spend $100 and make back $500. Find as many of those as possible and let them compound over time.

There is a ton of commentary about staying focused and disciplined, which I 100% agree with, however, there is a middle ground that involves you pushing new boundaries, getting creative and finding new ways to make money.

Here’s my favorite in the past month:

Corporate Gift Guides:

• We hired a sales consultant who gets paid $1500 a month to get CROSSNET listed in as many corporate gifting catalogs as possible.

• In the first week, he landed us a small PO for $1700 and he’s still got a few weeks left to land more orders as we head into peak season

• Time required: Two 15 minute phone calls and a handful of follow-up emails

Sales Reps:

• Struggling to get into a specific store? Have you exhausted every single possibility to get in? Work with a sales rep or sales group that sells to a specific list of accounts

• I’m currently working with an amazing rep who sells into Meijer, Pool Corp, Fleet Farm, Camping World, and many more

• These were all stores that I had no luck with, so I’m happy to give him a small % in order to get the business

• Time required: Two monthly 30 minute calls to discuss updates & account strategy, responding to emails for vendor setup and processing orders as they come in

Retention.com

I’ve been a fan and a power user of Get Emails, now rebranded Retention, for several years now.

As we slashed costs and apps left and right in December, Retention.com is one of only 5 that we kept that was ROI positive.

If you don’t follow Adam Robinson, their founder, on social you’re missing out. He’s one of the best at building a SAAS company in public and is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to building from scratch. It’s so damn cool to see him not take the traditional route and legit share so much information for free. Like who else is sharing their P&L, breaking down their ROI, and spend on a $250k tradebooth, and hiring like 30 sales reps in 20 days. Anyways, Retention is badass, I wish I thought of it, and its soon to be valued at over a billion dollars!

Hows it work?

Essentially they put a pixel on your page that scrapes customers coming in who have opted in for other sites but didn't necessarily put their email in when they failed to checkout on your site. Our abandoned cart & welcome email revenue has gone up nearly $45,000 a month and much more in peak seasons like the summer and Black Friday. We’re sending 3-4x more emails since using it and its been a sick secret weapon for just a small monthly software cost.

Almost all of the big ecom brands have been on Retention for a while, but if you’re not using it hop on a trial here and mention my newsletter for a 20% off discount.

Time required: One kickoff call and getting Retention installed on your site and integrated with Klaviyo. One day of building dedicated welcome & abandoned cart flows for your newly collected emails to flow through.

Get Retention for your site now.

Good Morning America & Deal Shows

• Have some free time? Visit this website for a list of 15 of the best deal & promo shows on national television

• The margins aren’t sexy but we just landed a 5000-unit order for Good Morning America for our pickleball paddles this June

• Spend an entire afternoon going through that link, filling out the application forms for these shows and you’ll be stunned with the responses

• Pro Tip: Most of these shows will expect you to sell your product 25-50% off for a short period of time and provide wholesale margins that support them still making money

• Time required: Not even a phone call. Several emails back and forth to confirm pricing, vendor set up document, and creating them a dropbox of content to use for our on air-feature in June

Tik Tok Ads:

• I heard this morning from a person that I was mentoring “Tik Tok ads don’t work for me.” When I asked him why he said “we can’t get them to scale.”

• My response back? That’s fine! Can you get them to work profitability for $200 in daily ad spend?

• If your goal is to see a $3 return on every $1 spent, can you get this on Tik Tok and add an extra 5 sales a day? I remember when we started and I was so excited to get one sale a day, let alone 5. If you can find a channel like Tik Tok that can drive some extra sales profitably, do it

Amazon PPC

• One of my biggest mistakes was not spending money on Amazon and bidding against other backyard games sooner. I didn’t have the knowledge and Amazon felt so foreign to me.

• We’re now the #1 volleyball game in the world and I owe a great deal of this credit to our agency who’s done an incredible job at spending money efficiently and showing CROSSNET to new customers who may not have known we were exactly what they were searching for

• Let me know if you’d like an intro to my agency they are world class, boutique and very hands on. Just overall great dudes that you want in your corner.

Building an App

• Building an app in 2019 cost $250k. Building an app in 2022 takes two weeks and less than a couple thousand dollars with Tapcart

• If you have an audience that has proven that they’d like to keep buying from you then funneling them to an app is a great idea. You can have exclusive products, private sales, and best of all push notifications that are more effective than emails that end up in their junk or a text message

• If you spend $2000 a month on an app, provide an exclusive place for your community, and can drive a couple thousand dollars in sales through push notifications and exclusive products then this is an ROI no brainer

So what’s working for you?

At the end of the day this newsletter is free and hopefully always will be so hit me back with some levers you’ve been pulling to make some more money each week for your brand. With your permission, I’ll share a few of my favorite responses in next week’s newsletter.

That’s all I got for you guys. The flights landing and I’m praying Aaron’s got some chicken wings ready and the New York Knicks game on at his house. If you’re in Toronto hit me up, I’ll be here til Sunday and then Montreal til Wednesday.

Massive shout out and thanks to the good folks at Retention.com for sponsoring this week’s newsletter.

Appreciate you more than you’ll ever know,

Chris