Biggest Wins of the Week 🔥

Happy Friday,

The fact that it's already halfway through August is absolutely laughable. It feels like as we get older the time just seems to go at 10x the speed it used to. Take a minute to enjoy the little things this weekend. Whether it's getting off the laptop, not checking Shopify or Slack, or enjoying little wins like my fiancée canceling our $300 last night to eat chicken tenders on the couch.

On Sunday, I'm heading to Asheville, North Carolina to visit my brother Greg who's living a digital nomad lifestyle right now. If anybody has recommendations in Asheville please let me know! After that, I'll be heading out to Yosemite with 7 of my best friends to go white water rafting for my bachelor party. Not sure when the next newsletter will go out, so for more frequent updates take a second to follow me on Twitter @chrismeadej.

Before I get into this week's send, I want to thank every single newsletter reader who invested in CROSSNET's WeFunder last week. We raised nearly $100,000 just from CROSSED Commerce's readers. I have no other words to describe it but absolutely insane and humbling. You guys have no idea how much it means that you keep opening this week after week. Thank you seriously.

Our early bird WeFunder round is scheduled to close next week. If you did want to invest and didn't get a chance to yet you can here. The minimum starts at just $100.

Biggest Wins of the Week

1) Revamping our executive meetings to be based around CROSSNET's newly built OKR tracker. Rather than having employees jump on meetings to bullshit and wasting what comes out to be thousands of dollars of time/salaries, we now have a strict agenda to get through. Each week the lead for each department will update the company with their progress, field questions, and make difficult decisions. If you want me to send you the template, just ask!

2) Brought back our CROSSNET MVP Facebook Group community. Let's face it we can't be good at everything, but not attempting to build a loyal community in 2022 is unacceptable. I hate that damn word so much and as a 29 year old, I hate Facebook even more, but it seems to be the best place to organize people, provide updates and let them talk amongst themself. My 55 year old mom customers just aren't going to be on Telegram or Reddit and that's fine. The goal of the page will be for our top customers to eventually start conversation, meet up for tournaments and be the first engaged with new product releases.

3) Released our BRAND NEW CROSSNET Family on Amazon. For the past two years we've been developing a new version of CROSSNET that will retail at a $99 price point. Let's face it $150 for a game you may or may not like is expensive. It was expensive when we launched in 2018 and its certainly expensive in this economy. Our new $99 version is priced at the perfect price to increase velocity at retail by upwards of 40%.

4) I came to a massive realization last week that our conversion dropped on our website because we went away from leading with video. Our product is so visual and its so important to show our customers having the time of their lives. We compromised on this moving to static photos in order to try to preserve page load speed and consequently fucked up our money-making ability. My buddy Claudiu at VideoWise talked some sense into me and the CROSSNET website is getting a nice refresh starting next week. He recorded this sweet Loom of some of the changes they are having go live.

New York - September 12-18th

I'm heading back to New York for the first time in years on the week of September 12th. I'm hoping you guys can help me as I'm putting on two events and I'd love for you to be apart of them.

1) Live recording of My Biggest Lessons at the Shopify HQ

For the first time ever I'll be recording my podcast live in person!

I'd love to fill my day recording 4-5 badass, 25-minute episodes, with some of the best entrepreneurs in the city. I need you to be vulnerable, share your stories, things you wish you could do over and of course, promote your brand.

Please drop me a line back if interested - [email protected]

2) Founders Dinner on September 14th

My good buddy Aaron Spivak and I will be hosting our first-ever founder's dinner in New York City. It will be at a swanky rooftop, with free drinks and incredible food, and we're capping it at only 40 people. Some of the biggest names in ecomm will be in attendance and we're looking to keep the crowd to operators doing over $5M in revenue. We have about 8 spots left on the guest list and would be happy to get some CROSSED COMMERCE readers in the room. Just reply back and I'll send the invite.

Common Thread Collective

Before I started writing CROSSED COMMERCE (which you should sign up here for if it's your first time reading) I was always inspired by how damn good their content was. Every week it seemed like they were dropping Twitter threads on e-commerce news, stuff that helped me feel not so alone on bad days, and honestly just a ton of helpful tips.

I was chatting with my buddy Aaron Orendorff (my favorite follow on Twitter) over the weekend about how we're wrapping up our Series A and how these four numbers are currently consuming me: $0, $400, $2,000,000 … $995 (then $50M)

First, amid all the challenges piling up against ecom, you only lose when the bank account hits $0. I've told the story many times but when we started CROSSNET we had a doomsday whiteboard with the amount in our personal bank accounts. When that number got to $0, we agreed that the dream was over and we'd go back to our full-time jobs.

Back then we didn't even have a "business" account, we were the business. As the story goes, we never hit $0; but shit, we got as close as $400. Millions of entrepreneurs around the world are dealing with the same struggle right now, how to stay alive and not have the board go to $0.

Fast-forward four years and we’re staring down a $2,000,000 raise. It’s wild. But it’s also why the first two numbers should mean as much to you as they do to me. As long as you’re in the game … keep playing. No. Matter. What.

Our goal with the $2M raise is to at least double CROSSNET's total revenue and become a $50M company. After nearly 50 VC meetings in the past month, it's really shocking at how many of these groups want you to run your business without a care in the world for profitability. They all want to see a 10-50x return and also a controlling interest in our business. No thank you.

I care about creating real value. And I have zero interest in diluting myself out of my own business.

So, what’s that fourth number all about? $995

A few weeks ago I mentioned Aaron was releasing what I thought was the single-most-helpful content I’ve ever come across on scaling a DTC brand in today’s world and yeah, it's finally available.

It's long, strategic, and so well thought out. As long as you’re not at $0 (or, let’s be honest, $400) its 100% worth the money and will 10x your money back. As a heads up, Common Thread will also be raising the cost to $2k on August 26th.

Oh, and he also sent me a glamour shot to show off a bit of 100+ page PDF, full “Growth Map” template, and the ecomm analytics platform Statlas you get for free to power the whole thing.

https://commonthreadco.com/products/enterprise-scaling-guide?source=email&medium=paidpartner&campaign=crossed-commerce-3

It's Friday! Go enjoy your weekend. Looking forward to catching some of you in NYC.

All the love in the world,

Chris