Chris Mead - Growth tactics Crossnet used to fuel hyper-growth

Jay Myers: Hey, everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. Today we’re doing what we call a merchant deep dive. Our goal of these merchant deep dives is not just to inspire you as a merchant, but to give you actionable takeaways that you can use to help grow your eCommerce business. Today, we have a very special guest, Chris Meade. He’s one of the cofounders at CrossNet and CrossNet is just one of those amazing stories where, when they started in 2017.

I think I read somewhere and Chris can correct me on this, if I’m wrong but they barely had, they scrounge together enough money to buy fifty of the items to have in stock for inventory and I think I saw posted somewhere the other day that last couple weeks, they’ve been selling five hundred a day online. So this is all within the span of a couple years. I think there’s going to be a ton of really good learnings here Chris, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being on it.

Chris Meade: Yeah man, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. It’s been a fun ride since 2017. It’s been crazy just to see how fast it’s been growing. So really, really, really fun.

Jay: That’s awesome. Well, why don’t we start with like, so what is CrossNet?

Chris: Yeah, so we’ve invented the world’s first four-ways volleyball net. So it’s exactly what you see like it’s two nets that intersect, you quickly bring to the beach, the park inside outside wherever you want, and start playing. So not only have we created this four-way net, but it’s a combination of Foursquare and volleyball rules. So essentially there’s a whole new sport behind it as well. So games are played to 11 wins by 2 one person serves the ball across, and then from there, it’s a free for all and if you stay alive when you serve you get a point, it’s a lot of fun.

Jay: Where did it come from, are you a volleyball player?

Chris: No, not at all. We all actually all three founders never played a day of volleyball in our life, really. We were home one day, and we were just like, we don’t want to do this nine to five day anymore. So like one of us was just about to graduate college. It was, we started a company I was twenty-five and my partners were twenty-three and we just always loved going to the beach and we’re sitting up late one night thinking of ideas and four-way volleyball was just written down on a piece of paper and we googled it and we searched the internet and I think we were just watching ESPN on repeat and we couldn’t find anything on the internet. So we woke up the next morning, we ran to like our local Walmart and bought two volleyball nets, thread them together and I made a four-way bet or like, this is amazing.

Jay: I don’t want to spend a ton of time talking about the product. I think it’s really cool. Fun fact, Bold as the fore founders of Bold the three of us, we all played University volleyball. So three of us knew each other from volleyball. One of them was the brother of one of the persons, so volleyball is actually a big part of my bold existence.

Chris: That’s awesome.

Jay: Like, how did you make up the rules, started trying things, see what was fun, and then.

Chris: Yeah, we remembered Four-Square from elementary school, which is just you bouncing a ball into one of the quadrants and you try to get your friend out. So we kind of just brought that up into the air with the volleyball, and then we had one person serve it across. They were like, alright, that’s the square for that’s where you get points and if you stay alive around and the ball doesn’t drop into your square and you’re still in your square, you get one point, and then we love playing basketball like basketball is our sport, right? and so, game to 11, won by two like typical street like pickup basketball rules, so we, we threw that in at the end and then we had a brand new sport and then we had our friends over and we played for like six hours straight and that was our proof of concept that night and we were like, alright, let’s start manufacturing, we gotta get this going.

Jay: That’s awesome. Well, I actually could see this being a useful practice tool as well, for volleyball teams.

Chris: Hundred percent.

Jay: I remember when we, a lot of our practices, we would spend hours in what we would just call netplay, and we would just be two on two we weren’t allowed to go past the attack line, which is like, a few meters behind the net, basically, and it was just tipping around the net just to get really comfortable, and like this would do exactly that. So.

Chris: Exactly, yeah, it’s crazy. Just to see the two different markets we have. We’re in almost 4500 gyms right now. So like, kids are learning how to play volleyball on a CrossNet, which is really wild.

Jay: Okay, so take us back. So 2017 you came up with the idea it was written down CrossNet, you’re like, let’s try to stick a couple of volleyball nets together, make some rules. Try this. Did you just launch a website? or did you try to sell it in existing stores? or what was your go-to-market?

Chris: Yes, our go-to-market was we made a Shopify website, we’d go we take our prototype, bring it to the beach every day, and we would just get content and we’d throw it up on the Shopify store. We put it up on Facebook, and then we ran some Facebook ads, we scraped up about 10,000 bucks and we bought our first 50 nets and had no idea really how fast they would sell but we eventually got into kind of a steady habit of selling like one a day. So we’d see that $150 Shopify notification pop up will be like, alright, we hit our quota and eventually we sold out. We took all the cash from that we didn’t pay ourselves anything and we just ordered 200 nets and then we ordered 400 and we just kept doubling down for about two years straight. So we kind of felt like, alright, we need to start paying ourselves like we’re doing pretty good. We’re happy. We’re selling 100 a day now.

Jay: So you are a true digitally native direct to consumer born company.

Chris: Correct, although our whole intention was to also get into retail, so we did start like, when we founded the company, I would add every buyer on like Dick’s Sporting Goods, Shields, Olympia Sports, I’d add them on LinkedIn, and they’ve been kind of following along on the LinkedIn road. So that presence has definitely, I’ve gone from like, my LinkedIn has been pretty good lately, which I’m really proud of but it’s been able to connect me to the buyer. So I could literally send them a DM on LinkedIn, say, Hey, I think you’ve seen CrossFit or I just saw that you’d liked my last post. Why is it not on your shelves yet? Like it’s gonna sell?

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: So, that’s how I’ve been able to make a lot of connections with buyers, just through LinkedIn.

Jay: LinkedIn is an undervalued resource, I think.

Chris: It is, It really is.

Jay: I think anyone that still thinks that LinkedIn is just a place to keep your resume and update it when you get a new job is missing out. Okay, so I want to dive in a little bit. Speaking of LinkedIn, why don’t we start there like I actually saw you post something the other day that I thought was really, really cool. And I think I have the post you said something like, you need traffic in order to make money, here’s how we get our visitors.

Did I miss any? and actually so if anyone listening goes follow Chris Meade on LinkedIn and you can kind of see because there’s actually a lot of really interesting feedback in the comments but you listed out, you said pretty much order of highest to lowest. I’ll run through them really, quick. I have a couple of questions about them but the ones you listed are Facebook, AdWords, YouTube, Snapchat, Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Influencers, Email Marketing, Display ads, Bing Ads, Referral, Affiliate Network, Sponsorship, Podcasts, Coupon Websites, and in-person events.

Chris: Sounds about right.

Jay: I thought this was really cool to have. Here’s a holistic view of traffic and I think like, that’s the heartbeat of your business, your online stores where are people coming from where are they converting from, so you said in the thread that this is pretty much order of ranking, but you said email would be higher up is it Facebook first and then email or what’s it?.

Chris: Yeah, it’s definitely Facebook first and then email. I left off SEO and that list SEO is definitely very valuable for us too but yeah, Facebook’s where we get the majority of our traffic, and then we just got to make sure that we do a great job retargeting and also following up with customers if they do provide us with an email address and actually don’t end up checking out but I just remember when we started back in 2017, right, we had 50 people to the site a day and now we’re having 15,000 to the site.

So every hundred visitors, I would always like I just remember always assigning like our average conversion rate and then like do the math like what does it cost me to get another 100 visitors what’s my net profit after that and then we would be justified if those hundred visitors are worth the ad spent and we just did that over time to where we’re at 15,000 a day almost.

Jay: Let’s talk about Facebook. I noticed a lot, I guess because I went on your website and did a bunch of things now I’m getting all your retargeting, so on. Yeah, makes me want to buy one. You use a lot of this in the industry called user-generated content, like it’s a lot of, looks like, is it just customers sending in videos.

Chris: Yeah, It’s all customers.

Jay: What’s the strategy there?.

Chris: Yes, the strategy that we found is that UGC performs way better on ads than my camera crew spending $5,000 on like a premium video, you know, people want to see what they’re actually going to see in their backyard. The majority of our customers online are families looking for a great game for the backyard and a family in Nebraska, when they walk outside, it’s 30 degrees and it’s snowing like, they want to see what it actually looks like. They don’t care about that Miami drone shot. So that eight (8) to twelve (12) second UGC videos been great. We collect that all by either, we have an email campaign that goes up like, hey, send us your best content, and we’ll give you 10 bucks back on your order and then we go and use that content to monetize, so it’s a win-win for the customer.

They’re normally probably going to be posting it on Instagram anyway and now they just forward that over to us and they get 10 bucks back in their pocket and we have content for days.

Jay: That’s all you offer and they’re willing to make a video for, it’s a $10 coupon on their next order, or?.

Chris: No, we refund them, $10. So we just.

Jay: Okay.

Chris: Yeah, we give them 10 bucks back.

Jay: They place an order, they’ve obviously got the product and now you say, shoot a video of you using it and we’ll send you 10 bucks back.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. As long as our margins are pretty strong, so $10 for a video that we can run ads on to millions of people. Like that’s, I can’t think of a better business model.

Jay: Oh, it’s amazing and like, what percentage of the videos you get are usable? Like, is it?

Chris: Like, we like to give everybody a fair shot. I’d probably say 50% or like

Jay; Oh, it’s that high, Okay.

Chris: Yeah, pretty solid and if we do see, like, potential, we’ll like we’ll email them back. We have a social media team that’s like. Hey, this video does have potential but he kind of forgot to hit record and he only sent this photo like, go back out there. We’ll give you 25 bucks for Amazon. Yeah, it’s easy.

Jay: Do you do anything on the legal side? Just to make sure you’re clean there?.

Chris: Yeah, 100% Yeah. So we have our customers sign NDA’s and just other things to kind of say. Hey, we’re a hundred percent willing to comply and use video for social media.

Jay: Okay and if you all of a sudden did a billion dollars in sales because of someone’s video, they could never come back and, you know, sue you saying that the person?

Chris: Yeah.

Jay: Okay.

Chris: Yep, that’s the whole goal.

Jay: Did you consult with a lawyer for that? Or did you just research online for standard wording, or?.

Chris: No, we have a pretty strong legal team in house, so we’re happy about that.

Jay: Okay. So that’s good advice because I know a lot of like this user-generated content is definitely a thing a lot of people are working on and, and I think that’s probably something that I’m hoping a lot of people don’t get themselves in trouble in, in a couple of years, some of it coming to bite themselves. So definitely a good takeaway is if you do use it, make sure you’re dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s and all the legal areas. So how much do you spend on Facebook? Do you spend as much as you possibly can up until a certain cost per acquisition or do you say I have a budget of X a month? Or how do you decide how much money to put into Facebook? because I know that question comes up a lot.

Chris: Yeah, so we’ve never allocated a budget towards Facebook ever. There’s like a spend that we’re comfortable at and then if we see that we’re getting the CPA that we’d like, we’ll keep doubling down but just for like, number sake, when we started in 2017, we’d be spending $50 a day on Facebook and I’d like okay, my CPA was in the threshold I’m happy with, let’s increase the 75 bucks and then okay, we run it for a few days, okay, let’s go up to 150.

As long as we’re seeing the consistent results, and the CPA not changing too much, we’ll keep doubling down and then there are days, we’re spending $10,000 a day on ads, but you see that return that you’re happy with, so ad sets change, things change the world changes, as you’ve seen, so we are switching up our ads all the time, but it will be hot streaks and they’ll be like alright, cool, like we’re two weeks straight and money’s coming in really good. Well, keep firing away.

Jay: Then you get to a certain point where a certain ad if it’s reaching a certain cost per acquisition, then that’s it. You set the cap or move on or swap in a new ad.

Chris: Yeah, exactly.

Jay: So as far as some of these other ones that are more social like Snapchat, Tik Tok, and well Instagram will be a similar strategy. LinkedIn, I guess with LinkedIn, you mentioned, your strategy is a lot of personal outreach. That’s probably great.

Chris: That’s kind of me just reaching out to buyers and doing press.

Jay: Are you doing any ads on Twitter or LinkedIn or any of those platforms?.

Chris: Yeah, we do Twitter ads. It’s kind of just a network of people who retweet each other. We have some really good Twitter connections that we’ve built up over the years and our videos, we’ll put up a video on Twitter, I’ll send some over after, they had like a million and a half views and likes in 48 hours so I’ve definitely been able to get the game going pretty viral on Twitter, which has been great, but our biggest revenue channel besides Facebook is 100% Email Marketing, which we definitely undervalued for a long time.

Jay: Well, emails, just an amazing channel because you own the relationship with the customer. So what are you doing now, existing customers? Are you collecting? I’m on your site right now. And I haven’t been asked to put my email anywhere. I’m assuming there’s a, okay, there’s a subscribe on the bottom for $10. Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about that because I think for sure, something that a lot of stores are leaving on the table is, yeah, they’re collecting emails, but they probably could be collecting three times as many more or maybe they’re collecting a lot of them, but they’re not maximizing them as they could. So what are you doing with emails?.

Chris: Our goal is to get at least 10 to 15% conversion rate to capture an email, we have one that pops up right away within like the first five or seven seconds between AB test all the time, but here’s $10 off your order, if you order within 24 hours, and then also we have one of those fun wheels at the end of the website. Hate it or love it. It works really well for us.

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: We’ll offer like 20 bucks off 10 bucks off, maybe a free net if you’re lucky and then from there, they’re all going into a flow, Welcome Flow Campaign. This is depending on if they ordered if they didn’t order, but if they didn’t order, we’ll put them into a Welcome Flow Campaign, give them a few discounts for one or two touches, and then kind of send them just tons of FOMO. Like, you’re looking at this email, you could be outside in your backyard playing or at the beach with your friends. Why have you not ordered yet? Like, here’s a sweet gift. People like spiking it. So yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff we do with the welcome flows.

Jay: You’re aiming for 15% opting?

Chris: Yeah.

Jay: Of what visitors are on your site opting in to give you their email for whatever it is $10 or a draw or something.

Chris: Yeah.

Jay: That’s pretty good.

Chris: Yeah, between all the different captures, we have about, I want to say four captures right now, whether it’s SMS or email. My goal is to hit 15%.

Jay: Yeah, that’s great and I noticed it’s Privy you’re using right for your email capture.

Chris: No, we’re actually using Klaviyo. So

Jay: Okay.

Chris: Yeah, we used to use Privy then we moved on to a new email marketing agency. That’s rockstar so we’ve just decided.

Jay: And they’re managing it all?.

Chris: Yeah, they’re managing it all.

Jay: Nice, I meant to ask you too for your ads are you guys managing them, or is it an agency?.

Chris: No, yeah, we have agency partners for email and also for Facebook.

Jay: Cool, there’s a few other ones on here. I noticed right away your referral program’ Friendbuy I think is the one you’re using.

Chris: Yeah, we just started working with them a few weeks ago, it’s been going really well. We’ve literally sent out one email. I have done very limited press about it, should definitely step that up, but it’s just working organically. People see the get $20 on our website, and they pass it off to their friends and people make money so everyone’s happy.

Jay: Yeah, it seems like one of those products that, is not something I would go to the internet and search for. Like Four-Way Volleyball. I, in fact, I’ve never searched for it, but when you see it. It’s like or if like someone told me about it like, Oh, that’s pretty cool. That would be fun at the cabin or that would be fun to do.

Chris: Exactly.

Jay: So referrals, I feel like would be such a big thing for this. So that’s interesting. I want to dive into a couple of things here one, if anyone listening to this it’s on the site, I encourage you to have a look around. There’s a couple of things I thought you are doing really well and then there were a couple, things I had questions about. So one thing I did notice, I noticed your product reviews actually look really, really nice. They’re well designed, laid out, easy to read, I’d like to do concerts, and what are you using for your product reviews?

Chris: Right now we’re using a tool called Bazaarvoice and the reason why we use that is that it syndicates across all different channels. We sell on Walmart and Target.com as well. So we need consistency across the channels. cause if we’re working with a buyer and they go to Walmart, and there are zero reviews and there’s $500 on our site, that’s an issue, but yes, we use them and we’re also in the midst of a brand new website. So we’re having a new website drop at the end of July. We’re having a, whole teamwork on that now which I’m really pumped about.

Jay: Nice. It looks really sharp. One thing I didn’t notice anywhere was as far as I could tell it’s just the two products the indoor and the outdoor version,

Chris: Correct. Yeah, we have indoor-outdoor and the heat by the indoor by itself but yeah, complete set outdoor the just indoor basis.

Jay: Okay, so something that obviously came to mind right away is like, this just seems like a perfect opportunity for some type of kidding. or bundling or upselling.

Chris: One hundred percent.

Jay: Whether it’s under cross net shirts or the balls because they’d have to go to somewhere else like a different store to buy the ball. So is that something that’s on the game plan down the road then or?.

Chris: Yes, we actually place a ball and a pump in every set.

Jay: Oh, okay.

Chris: Yeah, normally, we do have an upsell like feature as well, but we’re back-ordered just due to COVID but we just signed a deal with Wilson and Wilson is actually going to be manufacturing our pro model like volleyball, so the super-premium volleyball,$25 off. So that’s going to be a sweet upsell, that we’re pumped offering in June.

Jay: Is it the same size ball as a normal volleyball or is it different?.

Chris: Yeah, no, it’s the same size ball. It’s one of the AVP replicas like pro volleyball that all the players buy.

Jay: Nice. Let’s talk a little bit about the store. I’m curious. It’s been since 2017 till now, but I’m sure there’s been a ton that’s happened. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes or learnings over that spam that you maybe would have done differently?.

Chris: Being scared to put email captures ad because they have a connotation of just being like, oh, they’re spammy. They look crappy, like, why would I want that on my website, but when I set the risk of you losing money, you better be capturing some types of email. So we spend a little bit more Boldish, on that lately, and just making sure we capture because we can make a direct attribution to the more emails we capture, the more money we make.

So keep doubling down on that and other things are like, least have like a link to the other websites that we sell on. Like we have Amazon when we’re back in stock, Walmart, and I’d actually link it and then that actually see people bounce and go to those companies, because they’re a little bit more well established or a little bit they’re very much more well established than we are, and then we’d be driving our customers elsewhere. So we’ve taken all of that off, we do our best to keep the purchase on-site and get them through that funnel immediately within a few seconds on the site.

Jay: Yeah, I think that’s smart. Even if there is a B2B aspect, you’re primarily, a direct to consumer B2C brand. Your relationship is with the customer and it’s shifting back now but you know, there’s been this shift over the last, you know, 50 years, hundred years, whatever, that everyone used to sell directly to a customer, whether it was in a local market, local store, whatever and then these distributors came in and said, hey, we’ll take 10,000 of your nets, and we’ll give you a $1,000,000 right now and then we’ll sell them for you and it sounds great, but what they’re also buying is the relationship with the customer and then yeah you don’t get the customers email, you’re not able to follow up, you don’t have a relationship with the brand. If they buy them from Walmart, their relationship is with Walmart, not with you. So it’s not just that you didn’t make the $20 on the order you actually lost out on that relationship with that customer and I think that’s what a lot of people don’t realize.

Chris: Exactly.

Jay: When brands are considering going the distributor route or like with these large box stores, its tread lightly, is what I would say. Sounds like you are too, so.

Chris: It’s been fun kind of prioritizing, the DTC side versus the wholesale business because our margins are good there but having that relationship is huge and at the end of the day, it’s like a relationship, plus a little bit more money in my pocket or selling directly at a big box store and I’m going to take that relationship all day long, usually.

Jay: Yeah and you know, something that came to mind when you mentioned the email merchant will put on some type of, an email capture, they’ll get a couple of complaints saying like, oh, your pop-up is so annoying, or some something to that extent and then right away, they want to say like take off all pop-ups and it’s an overreaction, of course, but it’s natural and I think this was from Facebook, who originally they came up with this philosophy, and I, don’t quote me on this, but the concept was, they called it the blowout, the 20% or something like that.

It was like there’s a lot of people that only want to email their list once a month, or they don’t want pop-ups because they don’t want to annoy the customers. They don’t want to, you know, come across as overbearing or whatever but you know, 5% of the customers might get annoyed by that, but 90% of the people who are on your list actually want to get your emails and so if you blow out that 5 or blow out that 10%.

Yeah, sure they’ll unsubscribe but then keep sending to all the ones that actually do want your content and keep offering those offers and those pop-ups people are like, everyone knows when they enter their email there for that $10 off, they’re gonna get an email. So yeah, I hundred percent I couldn’t agree more, obviously. And you’ve done a really good job on your site, like match your brand. Make it feel good. Don’t overdo it like not on every single page. Yeah, because you can never go back in time. If you don’t do it for a couple of years, then all of a sudden, you want to run a promotion to your email list, and you don’t have any well. You’re outta luck.

Chris: Exactly. Yeah, at least, I remember we used to be so nervous about that, like people would complain about it and also, I think the biggest thing was sending the emails like you have to get into a groove of sending them and then you could really prove out that ROI, but I remember we’d be like oh only send one every two weeks. I don’t want to be annoying and then we start sending them like every few days and our revenue just skyrocketed. It’s like, what were we thinking? They want to unsubscribe, let them unsubscribe.

Jay: Yeah, they’re either gonna be a subscriber and they want it or they don’t but you have to cater to the audience that wants your content and cater to them don’t cater to the people that don’t want your content anyway. So it’s like, it’s like building a business plan around customers that don’t even want to hear from you. When you think about it, it makes no sense. But it feels so natural, as a merchant to say, oh, yes, it’s annoying these pop-ups, I’m going to take them all off. I’m going to take this ball. So I think that’s great advice. Is there anything else that you’ve learned over the three or four years that you’d share?.

Chris: Transparency with customers, we’ve had to ramp up with COVID just had to ramp up customer service like 24 seven around the clock now, but I think if we had done a better job of customer service going back then our company would have grown that much quicker. Something that has really been just a focal point of a stressor for us over the last six months, it’s just been, we need to respond to customers within five, ten minutes leads are coming in, and we need to be responding right away.

When you start an eCommerce store, like oh, maybe I’ll get to the email tomorrow. Obviously, at our scale, we can’t do that anymore but just putting more emphasis on treating every customer like they’re the most important customer, I think it has helped our business that much quicker.

Jay: What has COVID done for your business? Did you see depths in, obviously, you mentioned you see, increase but did it go like down first and then up, or.

Chris: No?.

Jay: How did it affect you?.

Chris: Literally, just a spike? We’ve gone from selling like 100 a day to selling like 5- 600 sometimes, so.

Jay: Wow!.

Chris: Yeah, it’s been a 500% increase for the last like 90 days at this point.

Jay: What do you attribute that too?.

Chris: Just people needing fitness, right? Like I’m doing YouTube fitness videos for the first time in my life. People all across the country here like they need something to do. I live in Miami, so I don’t have that backyard but the majority of the United States has some type of patch of land that they could go set up a net so if their backs are getting sore from watching Netflix, and they just, they need to go outside. So it’s been the perfect game and with our Facebook marketing, we’ve been able to get it out to millions of people. So, yeah, it’s been working nicely.

Jay: There’s a website, it’s called ccinsights.org. I check it every now and then and it kind of just, been following a lot of these trends during COVID, and last week the second most, fastest-growing product search/sale was the office chair ball that you sit on. So. So I think like everyone’s kind of been sitting for a month, and now they’re like, Okay, I got to do something here. Well, the reason I asked what you attributed to is I was curious if it was due to lower customer acquisition costs on advertising and, you know, there’s been a lot of people saying that people are pulling back ads spend I was curious if you’ve seen that or noticed?.

Chris: Yeah. 1,000,000%. Yeah, we’ve seen our CPA drop, which has been amazing, which is only more motivation for us too, if we’re getting our acquisition much cheaper, like yeah, let’s throw more money on it right let’s light the fire. So we’ve been ramping up our ad spend, we’ve increased, as our sales have increased 500%, we’ve probably like three or four x star ad spend.

Jay: I’m getting better value per every dollar of ad spend too.

Chris: Exactly and more customers that value, just building the sport and the perfect time for summer. So summer is kind of our q4. So the more nets I could get out into the world, hopefully, we return to some type of normalcy where people could go to the beach and actually play.

Jay: Do you have a strategy for when and this is a conversation that comes up with a lot of merchants right now is a lot of merchants are seeing great spikes in sales and conversation now is how do you maintain that? Obviously, there might be some dip when this is all over and people can shop wherever they want to shop but do you have any thoughts around, strategy to kind of maintain the momentum when like if tomorrow, all of a sudden, there’s a Yahtzee here every night.

Chris: I can’t speak for every brand but fortunately for us, right like if hypothetically this ends in 60 days all right, we’re returning to some type of normalcy. We’re going into our best months, which are the summer, so our peak season is ahead of us, which is great, leaves me very optimistic but if I was in the opposite end of the spectrum, and we’re heading into September, October. I would be reaching out to every customer collecting as much content as possible to repurpose throughout these colder months and really just take advantage of all that positive momentum.

We have more emails than in, database and ever before like, I really go hard in monetizing that because the best acquisitions are the ones that you’re not paying Facebook for that you’re getting with a personal touch in the email and email doesn’t cost me any money to send that Facebook might cost me 40 bucks for a customer. So get the most out of your other channels, even SMS start setting up SMS, so much potential there.

Jay: Yeah, I’ve been kind of telling people that look at this time as an opportunity. You’ve got this whole new batch of customers that if you were getting 100 orders a day 100 hours a month or whatever you know, the store was getting before that now you’ve got this influx. This is like this fresh ammo that you have because every customer could potentially refer five more customers or potentially come back and order another set and that’s just something I think like merchants need to really focus on is maintaining that relationship and that can be through like, the other day I just mentioned to someone like why don’t you paint all the new customers that have ordered from you in the last, like during this COVID time and send them a gift some a free ball?.

Like what’s your customer acquisition cost on Facebook if it’s $25 to acquire customers and I don’t know if it is but if a new volleyball costs $25 send them a new ball, say hey, thanks for ordering us. We know during this hard time, these balls on us something like that. I think there’s going to be a great opportunity for even when COVID is over to maximize on this new base of customers, the ones that aren’t thinking about that they’re going to fall back down, but the ones that are and it sounds like you’re on top of it, I think are gonna actually continue to grow even more.

Chris: Absolutely.

Jay: Jump gears here for a little second. So we talked about some of the mistakes and things you would change what something that you think you should be doing on your site right now and we’re all busy and life is busy and you’re trying to sounds like you’re just barely like trying to get orders out the door and answer, support and stay up to date, but like on your list of dreams and wishes and things you want to do to drive specifically like online sales more that you haven’t done yet. What’s high up on that list for you?

Chris: Yeah, there’s just two things, one is getting SMS marketing up. We’ve been able to turn email from zero percent of our business to like 15% of our business in the last four months. So that’s been like my focal point for the last quarter or two but now it’s time to really crank into SMS and start collecting phone numbers. I want to create a pop-up on the site being like hey, throw your phone number in here and enter to win our hundred dollars all flash sale that happens once a month and we put in live for like 15 minutes, you know. So that’s gonna be huge for us, I’m pumped to just have time to give the proper attention to that.

That’s really big for me and then another thing is we use some type of app ad, I don’t remember the app off the top, my head that it’s a form field that gym teachers fill out and wholesalers send out and then every one of those comes to my inbox where I actually have to message them personally back. I want to have canned responses set up. So like, hey, gym teacher puts his info in, they get this canned response of oh, here’s your net that you could buy a net for X amount of price and here’s your discount. So I want to just automate that part of my life and I just believe this is a fine time to do it.

Jay: But you still need to manually approve that they qualify for the discount, somehow, but just automate your reply.

Chris: Yep. All fun stuff like that.

Jay: What are you using for SMS?

Chris: Yeah, we use a tool called SMS bump. We’re doing very, really not too aggressive with it right now. It’s just hey, they abandon their cart. They get to abandoned cart text, but I could definitely see a time when there’s flow built out or like, we got a video the other day of some lady playing CrossNet inside her living room, it was like, it was crazy. She’s playing inside your living room.

Jay: Must be a big living room.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. It was just a perfect video to text out. You know, it could have been like, yow, we just got a video of somebody playing the living room who could beat it?. Like something so simple as that, could be great for the community.

Jay: I didn’t think about texting videos.

Chris: Yeah, gifts all that

Jay: We don’t do anything on SMS at Bold but, is that something a lot of the SMS platforms support?

Chris: Yeah, to my knowledge, it does, at least the one that we’re using does, I know that you do have to pay a higher premium to embed gifts or videos or photos. So like, normal plain text is like a penny or whatever it is like, there’s like a three-cent premium for anything with downloadable assets.

Jay: I’m writing down, I got a couple, SMS specialists on here.

Chris: Yeah, for real.

Jay: Right now, It’s all about capitalizing on opportunity and, you know, open rates for SMS right now is like 97% or something.

Chris: Exactly.

Jay: There was a time when email open rates were 97% too and I imagine that SMS like text marketing is going to look very different in a couple, years there maybe will be aspects of folders and like if we start getting thirty (30) marketing texts a day something will happen but right now people aren’t. There’s a window to really leverage that. It’s gonna be interesting how that all plays out though.

Chris: Exactly, yea I just right now from my perspective, it’s just such an untapped market for us. We have so many customers coming in. So even if we get 5% of our revenue from text messaging, that’s still a couple hundred thousand dollars throughout the year, so definitely worth investing.

Jay: I think 100% on the abandoned cart on order confirmations, on shipping confirmations, sending that via text is actually a great way to do it, and it kind of gets the customer used to get a text from you. So then a month later when you text like hey, we got a fresh shipment in and 20% off for the first hundred people that need a second net for their friend’s house or something like that they won’t be so offended but if they get their order confirmation by email, their shipping confirmation by everything is like email, email, text promotion, I would be like, What the hell are you tasting? So you have to kind of train people to get used to it. Like that’s how you communicate and it’s okay.

Chris: Exactly, yeah I think people are comfortable getting an order confirmation. Like, I would love to get a text message being like, hey, your shoes are shipped, like, that makes me have trust with the brand and I’ll take the next text message if it’s gonna give me, good news.

Jay: Yeah, it feels more personal for sure.

Chris: Yeah.

Jay: Okay, well, we’re getting close to our time here. I want to ask one more question. I actually asked one of these questions already but I’d like to end with just kind of like our little lightning round a couple, questions but before we get there. What does the future hold for CrossNet? What are you most excited, for?.

Chris: I mean, after the dollars and cents like, we’ve gone from a, $87,000 a year company to eight figures in less than two years. So that’s been really cool.

Jay: That’s amazing.

Chris: Besides that, the whole thing is to spread the sport everywhere I want CrossNet to be a household sport. I want to show up to the beach show up to the park and people have their nets out and they’re playing and on the gym teacher side of things, our game is helping people learn the sport of volleyball in a fun and interactive way. So if we could be a staple in gym classes across the world for the next 20 years and have a sport that’s played on TV and airs on ESPN, I’m gonna be pretty happy.

Jay: Have you ever gone to a beach and seen a CrossNet setup and just walk by.

Chris: Yeah, it’s crazy.

Jay: Obviously they might not know who you are, do you ask like. Hey, what is that you’re playing there, what is that?.

Chris: Yeah, it happens. It’s pretty cool. It’s happening more and more often. My friends will be on vacation and will text me like, look what’s at the beach? and I’m like, that’s crazy, I wish I was there.

Jay: That’s a neat feeling. It’s like when I shop online and I just like, randomly see someone using, like a Boldapp on something. I’m like, hey, I didn’t even know this was a customer and they’re using one of our apps. That’s always neat.

Chris: That’s awesome!

Jay: Adding a little bit of a lightning round here. What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Chris: Freedom, absolute freedom to do what I want when I want nobody tells me what to do, and It’s pretty nice.

Jay: What’s your favorite online store to shop at besides your own? or if you don’t have a favorite one the last place you shopped online?

Chris: Yes, I got a nice little record shop. I’m big into collecting music so I love Vinyl.

Jay: What’s the type?

Chris: sweatrecords.com, it’s a local record shop in Miami and yeah, they just went all online so being supporting the boys over there by buying Vinyl online from them. So

Jay: They just went online during COVID here?.

Chris: Yeah, exactly.

Jay: Awesome!

Chris: They had to shut down their doors and they’re like it,s just it’s a small record shop in Miami. That is like a mile from my house. I love going every Friday like picking up new music so

Jay: Nice.

Chris: Definitely supporting them.

Jay: Nice. If you could give everyone listening one tip and everyone listening is imagining that they are an online merchant. I guess it could be a tip for anything. If you give everyone listening, one tip. What would it be?.

Chris: Why not you, literally like it doesn’t matter how much money you have, what connections, like nothing outworks hard work and you can build the connections you get like, you know, we just met a few days ago but you’ll we’ll be in our each other’s networks for the next 10 years over LinkedIn. So like, you could literally with eCommerce, everybody’s on the same playing field. Nobody has unless you’re like Kendall Jenner, but yeah, you know what I’m saying? It’s an open playing field. If you have a good idea? Go for it. You never know what’s gonna happen.

Jay: Yeah, I love that and you know what, I just want to actually mention how we met because I probably get, I don’t know, like 50 to 100. I don’t even hardly ever check LinkedIn messages. Well, I would say about 20 a day, are outsource developer companies trying to ask if we need developers, and then about like, 15 like. Hey, we should partner, hey we should partner.

Your approach was, I thought bang on I think we posted something about one of our apps and you just messaged me and said like, yo, we love your store locator app. We use it and I like it was like a one-line that you sent. I think I just said like, oh what’s your site? I want to check it out and I went, I looked at your site, and you’ve done a great implementation of our store locator app and I guess that’s everywhere you can buy them locally.

Chris: Exactly, yep.

Jay: Then we reached out and here we are on the podcast, and that I think you’re just real. Like, it wasn’t like, man, LinkedIn is absolutely a great tool. So I take what I said with a grain of salt that I get like, yeah, like, there’s a lot of really good, good ones in there. But you know, when you’re reaching out to someone, just like right away, you offered value, and you didn’t say, Hi, my name is Chris and I would like to be like a, like it was just like, that’s.

Chris: Human.

Jay: Exactly, yeah. Chris: Human touch, is everything. Especially on LinkedIn. Like, just key. I mean, if you talk a little bit like a robot in person. I guess, keep it like a robot. Like for me, it’s like, Yo, I love Your app. It works great, like a badass job. Like, I’m happy to jump on a podcast if you want. Like it was super how I approach somebody in real life and it’s been working wonders on LinkedIn.

Jay: Well, it’s good, keep it, don’t change. I was gonna ask you if you had a favorite quote, or I mean, this is kind of your advice kind of was a quote, why not you, but any favorite business quotes you have?

Chris: Yeah, not much of a quote guy, but the one that I’ve been liking a lot lately has been ‘‘rich people have large libraries and small TVs, poor people have big TVs and small libraries”.

Jay: Oh, man, you know, that’s so true. The richest guy I know has literally, I’ve been to his house and he probably has the smallest TV I’ve ever seen.

Chris: That’s funny.

Jay: It’s probably, like 20 years old, but he could care less and he has an office. That is bookshelves floor to ceiling on three of the four walls in the office and the only other wall is a window. And it’s all books.

Chris: That’s crazy. Yeah, it’s true, though. It’s true,

Jay: It is. Cool. Okay. Well, I mean, thank you so much, Chris, for being on the show. I know we went a little bit over time here, but I think there was a ton of valuable information and I don’t know if any of our listeners are interested in being fit and getting outside and I mean just because your work by sight on a computer all day, actually that probably not just because you probably should. Chris has put together a little offer or he’s going to and it’s going to be live when the show goes live. What’s going to be the coupon code they should use?

Chris: Yeah, go to crossnetgame.com and use Bold20 for twenty bucks off.

Jay: Awesome, thank you so much for that. I might use that myself.

Chris: Do that! I would love to have you.

Jay: Okay, crossnetgame.com. That’s the best place to find, learn more, or search for Chris on LinkedIn. He is leveraging LinkedIn like a champ.

Chris: Perfect!

Jay: Thank you so much for being on Chris.

Chris: Thanks man, appreciate you having me on.