Hey you, happy Monday!

I hope you had a better weekend than my Amex statement did. Friday was filled with more sushi than I could ever dream of. Saturday was a morning lift at muscle beach in Miami and a beach day. And yesterday, writing this email and hanging with my long-time friend Johnny Brown who recently started an amazing newsletter called Progress Protocol that’s all about health and wellness.

Speaking of wellness here’s a funny and blurry picture of me when I used to weigh 240lbs when I was 17. Wasn’t a good look but damn I still love chocolate chip cookies.

Before we get into this newsletter, I’ve got some fun updates for you:

• Hosting a massive dinner in NYC tomorrow - 3 Seats Left

• The Founders’ Club is putting on a private workout at Ambition on Wednesday in NYC. Ambition is Anne Mahlum, the legendary Solid Core owner’s new spot that she just opened up. Come hang and work out, it’s free. Sign up here.

• If you’re reading this and run a brand in Toronto, Aaron and I rented out the Amex Lounge for the Post Malone concert on July 20th. It’s a way to give back for the community of founders were building. Better than those random $50 Starbucks QR codes I see on Twitter! We have 18 tickets to give out. Put your name in here.

Most importantly! Go follow your boy on Threads. I promise to be your new favorite follow - @chrismeade

Enough with the free dinners, concerts, and workouts - Let’s get into it!

Prime Day - July 11th & 12th

Oh baby! There are two holidays in any e-commerce company. Black Friday and the legendary Prime Day. The one day when moms, girlfriends, and wives turn a blind eye and spend aimlessly because things are marked down by 20%.

I can’t wait to see what Lyndsey buys for us 😂

In all seriousness, this should be one of our biggest days of the entire year and the only thing standing in our way is ourselves with a lack of inventory.

Here’s a deep dive into how we’re preparing:

Inventory: 

We expect sales on the big day to be anywhere from 3-5x a normal day on Amazon. If the sales end up being 5x for two days straight, this means we are going through 10 days of worth of inventory in 48 hours.

So when placing our orders with our manufacturer several months ago we doubled up on our standard order to make sure that we had an extra container worth of inventory on the world to be restocked for the big moment.

In a perfect world, we would have been able to go really big and have a ton of stock. We would have pushed our ad dollars up, sold more units, pushed crazy top-line revenue. This year is a rebuilding year and working to make as much profit on each sale as possible.

Sales:

We only use one ad agency these days and its Arvanza, our Amazon agency we’ve been with for over two years. These guys are beasts and responsible for us becoming the #1 volleyball net in the entire world on Amazon. We meet with them weekly and we’ve dialed in a markdown strategy that we think will not only lead to crazy sales, but profitability as well.

A+ Content:

Our design team is hard at work polishing up all of our product photos and product listings. We’re even going full sprint ahead to try to get SmashNet, our newest game up on Amazon by Prime Day.

One of the biggest mistakes we ever made on Amazon was waiting to make our listings top-notch. A+ Content allows you to add images, text, and comparison tables to your Amazon page to engage readers and give them more information. When we rolled this out we saw a massive sales lift.

You can check out the CROSSNET store here.

Capitalizing on the Summer

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Tapcart.

We’ve been power users and big fans of them for a long time and they’ve helped Good Sport grow from a startup company to one smashing past 7 figures in just a few months .

For our companies, we have three “freebie” holidays as I like to think of them:

1. Summer starting

2. 4th of July

3. Prime Day

These three holidays are all organic moments that make me people think about buying our games if we’ve ever been top of mind. Acquisition costs go down and people just spend money because they are excited about summer and forgetting about whatever stress they are currently going through.

After that, it’s up to our team to create organic moments that build excitement and make people want to buy.

Here are three ways we’re thinking about blowing up app usage later this summer:

1) We’re hosting a tournament on ESPN for SmashNet and all registration will be done through the official Good Sport app

2) Similar to Prime Day we’d like to create App Day (We’ll make a better name), but essentially all of our products are marked down big time for a one-day sale inside our app only. We’ll spend a few weeks promoting the big day, arrange it around a good summer date, and build hype for what could be one of the biggest online revenue days of the year.

3) When we launch our pickleball line later in August, we have two exclusive paddles that will only be available within the Good Sport app

SMS & Email revenue has been great for us, consistently hovering around 25% of Shopify revenue, but the real difference maker for us this year has been push notifications. They combine the best of both worlds: open rates that are comparable to SMS, personalization with images & GIFS, but best of all they are 100% free to send.

If you’re looking for ways to layer on new incremental revenue and reward your best customers, using Tapcart is a no-brainer for the cost.

Get your first month free on me using this link: https://tinyurl.com/chrismeade

Just Get Started

The number one thing I hear when I talk to people is “When is the perfect time to start your company?”

The simple answer is there will never be a right time.

Just like you, there’s so much shit I want to do with my life that I just put off.

Here are my recommendations:

1) Save up 6 months of living expenses and quit your job. Budget for the bare minimum. Rent, food, car, gas. If you need to factor in the Gucci T-shirts you’ve been buying, you’re not going to make it.

2) Calendar it out. This newsletter would never get written each week if I didn’t calendar out the time to do it. Hold yourself accountable.

3) It’s not going to be perfect overnight. You aren’t going to just wake up and make $100,000 over night. Hard work takes time. Be patient.

Remember you can only do so much in one day. Focus on doing the little things correctly. There’s a reason why they say 20% of your clients are responsible for 80% of your business.

You can always go back to that shitty job you’re running from if things don’t work out. You can never go back when you’re 60 sitting at the kitchen table with regret telling your kids you never went out and took a chance on yourself.

Ad Strategy 101

The best advertising strikes a chord. Makes you feel a certain way. Whether it makes you think about your future self or a memory from simpler times, you sell product by making your customer feel a certain way.

There is a thing I’ve stumbled upon called Life Force 8 which is the eight core human desires. So the next time you whip up some ad copy try to throw one of these elements into the mix.

🌟 Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension
🍽️ Enjoyment of food & beverages
🔒 Freedom from fear, pain, and danger
 💑 Sex
🏠 Comfortable living
🏆 To be superior, winning, and keeping up with the Joneses
 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Care and protection of loved ones
👍 Social approval

That’s it for this week! If you’re in NYC hit me up and lets hang.

Thanks again to Tapcart for sponsoring this week. If you need a personal introduction to my rep and to get the free month hook up just email me back.

I’m opening up two-time slots to do some 1vs1 consulting this Friday. If you’re interested and working on something fun, hit me up.

If not, I’ll see you on Threads!

Chris