with a bootstrapped multi-million dollar brand
In today's show, CROSSNET co-founder & CMO Chris Meade tells us how he bootstrapped the world’s first four way volleyball game into a 8 figure business in 4 years.
CROSSNET is sold in over 2,500+ retail stores, has been played in 10,000 schools, and has even aired on ESPN.
In this episode, Chris is candid about his journey, and lays out the struggles and tactics that led to their success.
Kurt Elster: On today’s episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking about CROSSNET, the world’s first four-way volleyball game. Yes, we have an entrepreneur here who bootstrapped along the way very quickly a profitable and now international business reinventing volleyball. The guy invented his own sport. How about that? Currently, CROSSNET is available in 2,500 retail stores and the co-founder and CMO, Chris Meade, who joins us today, is even a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, I assume? I think recipient?
Chris Meade: Yeah. I think so.
Kurt Elster: Honoree? Anyway, I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And I’m joined by Chris Meade from CROSSNET. Chris, how you doing?
Chris Meade: Good, man. Thanks so much for having me on.
Kurt Elster: Let’s start with this. What the heck is a CROSSNET? This is like this provides cyber defenses, keeps hackers out of my network?
Chris Meade: I wish. I wish. We need more of that. So, CROSSNET is the world’s first four-way volleyball game.
Kurt Elster: How do you play four-way volleyball?
Chris Meade: You keep the ball alive. You’re in a quadrant, right? Six foot by six foot, so very safe, and you keep the ball alive. If the ball lands in your square, you’re out. And it’s a classic twist on four square, which is a childhood recess game, and adding the aspect of volleyball. Don’t let the ball land in your square, keep it alive, and spike on your friends.
Kurt Elster: So, I sit in a two-by-two grid and then it’s essentially like two nets in like a plus sign that divide it, and then we work-
Chris Meade: 6-foot-by-6-foot grid, but yeah. So, it’s a 12-foot-long net, so it’s about half the size of a traditional volleyball net, and so you have a grid, you have a quadrant, and when you serve the ball across, you’re called the king. And first to get to 11 points wins. And so, yeah, everyone’s defending each other. Left, right, straight ahead, ball is coming any direction, and ultimately it’s to get the person out in front of you to advance to the king square, where you serve, get points.
Kurt Elster: So, how long have you been at this? When did you start with this idea?
Chris Meade: 2017. We just had a crazy idea one night. We assumed somebody was already making the product and it was readily available. We said, “Why not us?”
Kurt Elster: It’s really only been four years.
Chris Meade: Four years. Yeah. We’ve invented a sport in four years.
Kurt Elster: And got it into a ton of retail stores and really have been quite successful with it. And like by reinventing this thing. Okay, so 2017, where are you at in your life?
Chris Meade: I had been out of college for three years, was $100,000 in student loan debt. I was kind of going… Oh yeah. Graduated with a film degree. Not too smart. And yeah, I was super broke. I was working at… I had just gotten a job at Uber, at the headquarters. Actually, they brought me on to be their first ever sales executive, so I was making decent money at that point, but I was going through the grind, man. Literally waking up, getting to the office at 9:00, cold calling to 6:00, having to get my 100 calls in a day, five days a week, and before that I was jumping job to job every year, like, “Oh, here’s another 5-grand raise.”
I was 24 and I felt burnt out, and that’s pretty pathetic to say, but I was thinking about it like, “Is this what my life’s gonna be for the next 40 years? This sucks.” So, it was kind of just a perfect brainstorm moment, and I figured, “Yo, I’m already so pissed off with how my life is going, I’m gonna regret if I don’t jump on this opportunity.” So, we just went all in on it.
Kurt Elster: I love that. Well, if you follow that traditional timeline of like, “I graduate high school. I go to college. I finish college. I get a 9:00 to 5:00 job working in an office.” And for a lot of people, that’s a really tough and strange transition, at least in your twenties, where you go from like what you don’t realize is an unending part in which you live in an apartment building with all your friends, like that’s the dorm life, and then suddenly it’s like, “All right, here’s your entry-level job and you’re in an office 9:00 to 5:00.” That is a tough transition, so I get that, that existential crisis that I think sometimes results in entrepreneurship post-college.
Where did the idea come from? I see you’re co-founder here, so it’s you and how many other folks?
Chris Meade: Yeah, so it’s my brother, Greg, and our childhood friend, Mike.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Chris Meade: Yeah, the idea came back in 2017. Mike had just graduated college from Northeastern. He knew that my brother was doing eCommerce stuff. Me and him were doing some stuff on the side. Nothing too magical. But Mike kind of had the same thought of me. I do not want to go get a real job yet. I’m still just a kid at heart. I don’t want to go work 40 hours for the man. So, he came over that night trying to just invent stuff, like write down some ideas and see if anything could stick. One hour turned to two. Two hours turned to four. It was all just a bunch of garbage. And then later, at like 4:00 in the morning, right before he went home, wrote down the words four-way volleyball, and yeah, the rest is history.
Kurt Elster: So, you came up with this idea of four-way volleyball based on that kid’s game, which already, there’s a Squid Game reference in there waiting to happen. I just haven’t worked it out yet. But I assume no one gets killed in CROSSNET.
Chris Meade: No. Not yet.
Kurt Elster: Okay, good. Good. Good. And you had the idea, and you went like, “Well, this is so simple, someone must have did this.” And you started to research it, and no one had?
Chris Meade: No. Nobody had.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so then from there, what’s step two? Because this feels like a fairly easy thing to mockup, right?
Chris Meade: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s not like… You’re not reinventing manufacturing processes here.
Chris Meade: Exactly. There’s definitely some complexities to it because you have two volleyball nets, so you have to have the gravity work to make the thing stand up, especially when the ball’s getting hit, because the whole thing could collapse really quickly, which we learned. But next steps for us was had the idea at 4:00 AM, went to bed, woke up the next day at like 11:00, went straight to the Walmart, bought two badminton nets, cut out the center with some scissors, rigged it up on the side of my mom’s garage in her garden, texted our friends and said, “Yo, come over.”
So, we had a group of kids over and we literally just felt like kids again. Made up the rules on the spot. We’re like, “Oh,” we hadn’t played four square in 15 years, right? But like, “All right, these rules seem like they make sense.” So, we had proof of concept down. We had gameplay down. We had the rules. Next was manufacturing. And thank God, our co-founder was an engineer, so he just whipped it up in AutoCAD that night and we were off to the races.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s really like you have the idea and then by hour 48 we’ve already got the entire concept figured out.
Chris Meade: Yeah. Essentially.
Kurt Elster: And we have a CAD file ready to go.
Chris Meade: Exactly. And so, next was finding manufacturing. When I was broke, I used to sell hockey jerseys, like DHgate NHL jerseys on eBay, so I knew how to talk to manufacturers, and we literally typed in volleyball net manufacturer, and the worst thing is you’re broke as hell, you have a great idea, you don’t want to wake up and trying to selling it the next day and then somebody ripped off your game, so you gotta be kind of secretive with who you want to talk to. You don’t want to share the magic formula with everybody.
So, we found a few manufacturers that had a good rapport, spoke English well, responded quickly, and then we kind of boiled it down to two people, and the one factory we decided to go with was one that was just understanding of where we were. We had about $15,000 to our name across the three of us. That’s all the money we had in our bank account and our 401(k). And the lady understood. And I said, “Hey, we promise one day we’ll be the biggest company in your factory. Just give us some damn time.”
So, she made like 50 units for us, and now we are the biggest company in their entire factory.
Kurt Elster: So, and this was a manufacturer in China?
Chris Meade: Yeah. Correct.
Kurt Elster: Because that, what I have found in doing these journeys, the idea is not… Really, that’s not the hard part. And then the execution on the idea, okay, harder. But still not the necessarily the hard part. Getting it made without having things go horribly awry, at least like the first go around, okay, that’s the tough part. And here you found someone who was willing to say, “Yeah, we’ll do 50 units,” so like a fairly low minimum order quantity and investment for you to start.
Chris Meade: Yeah. We didn’t get bullied into those high MOQs and having to have 300,000 units in stock and then have inventory for five years. That wasn’t the business I was trying to get into.
Kurt Elster: Do you think that was luck, or persuasion, or both?
Chris Meade: I think a little bit of both. Ultimately, we didn’t have the cash, right? I was 100 grand in debt. It’s either China getting my savings or the student loan, the fed government getting it, so that was all the money I had. There was no other money. We grew up in a super farm town, man, like 45 minutes to go to the movie theater, 30 minutes to go get gas. There was no… The concept of VC that I see on Twitter, that we see all day, that wasn’t a world to me. People weren’t VCs. My parents worked at a gas station. That wasn’t even a concept of, “Oh, we’ll go…” Who are we gonna raise money from?
Kurt Elster: Where were you?
Chris Meade: Woodstock, Connecticut.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And so, it’s pretty rural?
Chris Meade: Yeah. Some would say.
Kurt Elster: A lot of dirt roads?
Chris Meade: I grew up next to an apple orchard and a cow farm.
Kurt Elster: Well, that sounds very pleasant, though.
Chris Meade: Not saying it wasn’t, but VC money wasn’t-
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly, it gets tougher when you don’t have that network just out there, outside your front door waiting.
Chris Meade: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so were you terrified? Because you’re like, “All right, we’re gonna get 50 units made. I’m gonna give up all of the $15,000 I have and I’m still on the hook to Fannie Mae for 100 grand.”
Chris Meade: Yeah. It’s definitely terrifying. But the coolest thing was like if I go to a park or a beach, I immediately get free eyeballs, and they can’t do a damn thing about it, right? So, I would bring the CROSSNET prototype to the beach and the reactions we’d get even just with the first sample from China was just crazy. People taking photos. It felt like I was a Kardashian, right? It was nonstop attraction to the net. People asking to play. And by the end of the day, we wouldn’t even get to play our own game because there’d be 50 people on there and we’d be doing the right thing, right? Like it was still fun. I mean, still fun. But it was still cool to play your invention, but then there’s 60 people on there. We had to do what’s best, and I was shooting iPhone content and then we’d run home and run Facebook ads at night.
Kurt Elster: Oh, man. So, you take the prototype, you go to the beach, and you just play it, and it’s guerilla marketing. You just attracted people by virtue of doing something different and unusual and had fun with it and they’re like, “Uh, that might be good for me too.”
Chris Meade: Exactly. And I still do it. Whenever I get prototypes or extra nets sent to my house, I’ll just go set them up in a field, or a park somewhere, and I’ll just leave them, and they’ll stay for weeks.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Chris Meade: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s pretty great.
Chris Meade: Yeah. It’s free billboards.
Kurt Elster: So, you had the prototype, you start playing it in public, which you generate content that way, which is great. And how do you get the word out online? How did you start making the first sales? Did you do Kickstarter? Do a marketplace? Go to a website?
Chris Meade: No. We launched our Shopify in November of 2017 and everyone’s like, “Oh, friends and family around, everyone’s gonna buy.” Crickets. Not a damn person bought. Nobody cared. And then you’re like, “Oh, shit.” Spent all this money on the product. What’s happening?
Kurt Elster: Definitely some sleepless nights at that point.
Chris Meade: So, almost immediately we moved to Miami to just go do this thing, and so we literally go to the beach every single day, man, and we’d have 50 units to our name. The Shopify store was not getting any traffic at the time. I’d be happy if I got 25 visitors a day. And we would just literally go sell on the beach. I’d meet you at the beach. You’d play for a few hours. And instead of me breaking it down, I’d be like, “Yo, Kurt, take it home for 75 bucks. It’s $150 on the website.” I’m still making a couple dollars off of it.
But what ended up happening was I remember these girls specifically, they lived in Long Island, and they loved it. They loved it so much. And they took it home and then the next weekend, we started getting five sales from Long Island. I’m like, “I’ve never been to Long Island, so how’s this happening?” These girls were out there doing it for us, doing what we were doing in Miami. So, it started trickling, like all right, the more nets we get out, the more free marketing. Because it’s not like I’m doing anything special, right? I’m not going up, selling people. I’m just playing my own game. So, the more nets that we got out into the world, the quicker it snowballed.
So, we had like… Now, we have 100,000 nets out in the world, so every summer when people are going out and playing, they’re doing that same guerilla marketing for us, but they’re not even thinking they’re doing it. They’re just doing it because they’re having fun.
Kurt Elster: Wow. That is both diabolical and brilliant in that it’s like it just speaks to the quality of the product. And it’s the fact like you see people having fun and there’s just both inherent social proof and FOMO, where you had people coming up and going, “I want to try that.”
Chris Meade: Exactly. Exactly. That’s all our messaging, too, is FOMO, like, “You’re reading this email at work. You should be outside playing.”
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay. Yeah. You see it. You’re like, “Who doesn’t want to hang out on the beach and play bizarro volleyball?” Which is not as catchy a name as CROSSNET.
Chris Meade: Yes.
Kurt Elster: So, essentially the issue is you invent a brand-new product category sport, right? And by doing so, no one knows it exists, so when you launch to a Shopify store, you don’t get traffic because no one knows to look for it. They’ve never heard of it. How could they know to look for it?
Chris Meade: Exactly. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And so, like in hindsight, you’re like, “Oh, of course.” But at the time, you didn’t know what you didn’t know. But you knew, “All right, when we play it in public, people are interested.” So, you’re straight up like, “The way to save this is we gotta move to Miami because it is like hanging out on the beach,” because I’ve been to South Beach. It's nuts.
Chris Meade: It’s wild.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s like a cultural phenomenon. You just hang out at or near the beach.
Chris Meade: Yeah. And in hindsight, it’s probably not the best volleyball market. It’s more the best alcohol market and partying, but it worked for us. We were farm town kids from Connecticut. It was November, freezing cold. How we selling volleyball nets? Nobody even plays volleyball, let alone in Connecticut when it’s freezing or snowing. So, we didn’t want to move to the West Coast, all our family was on the East Coast, so it just made sense to try Florida.
Kurt Elster: All right, so you head down to Florida, and now people, because it’s a vacation destination, so now you’re able to spread this thing across the country and by people seeing, they see it there, they take it home, and then their friends see it and they’re like, “I’m gonna buy this.” And it’s nice because it’s kind of like Miami Beach, all right, spring, spring break destination.
Chris Meade: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: This works pretty well, so you have a lot of people from around the country.
Chris Meade: And we’re not thinking any of this, of course.
Kurt Elster: Oh, really?
Chris Meade: It just happened. It’s the only beach available.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s still your success, even if you stumbled into it. And I’m sure there’s more to it than that. But of course, there is some luck involved there, and circumstance, so all right, we’ve got… It’s the sales on the website now are starting to pick up. Where do you go from there? And at this point, is it still bootstrapped?
Chris Meade: We’re still bootstrapped four years later.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so at no point have you taken money.
Chris Meade: Never taken money. Profitable.
Kurt Elster: Good for you.
Chris Meade: 22 employees, profitable, eight figures, no cap table, no investors, no mentors.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Chris Meade: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And do you still view yourself as… Do you still view some of this as like luck, stumbling through it, or you’re figuring it out as you go?
Chris Meade: Oh, there’s luck. There’s definitely luck that goes into it. I think it speaks to the product. And I think it has to be our frugal mindset that we grew up with, like the farm town living kind of helps when you run a business and when you have cash in the bank account that you’ve never seen before, and you’re not just blowing it on stupid shit. So, it’s good to get back to the fundamentals, and we still find ourself like doing stupid stuff, like I did a billboard campaign for like $100,000. Probably a waste of money, but we tested it, and we’ll never do it again. Or we’ll get more calculated from it. We learn very, very quickly, and we adapt. We take risks when we need, but at the end of the day if it’s not profitable, we’re probably not doing it.
So, going back to your question, from there we started getting sales on Shopify. We literally took the money from the 50 units, bought 100. Sold 100, but 250. 250 to 500. 500 to 2,500. And we just kept scaling it up. Kept getting better terms at the manufacturer. The Shopify sales started to grow. And the best thing is every day, I just have new, fresh content. And we had a kid that I grew up playing basketball with, and he was so sad at his college, so we’re like, “Yo, we’ll give you college credit to be an intern.” He skipped a class and he’d get official college credit, and he’d just run our Facebook ads. This dude is great. He runs his own agency now. Happy for him. Shout out Ben.
And Ben would just run our Facebook ads from my phone and every day was, “All right, got 100 visitors. How do we get to 200? How do we increase conversion? What are we moving around?” And even listening to your… I swear to God. I told you this before. But like your podcast was the first one that I wanted to get on and you guys had so many good little valuable tips, so I do appreciate that, man, so-
Kurt Elster: I got goosebumps hearing that. It is incredible to be part of that journey. Thank you.
Chris Meade: I got you.
Kurt Elster: We’ve got… So, your Facebook ads, you scaled through like word of mouth, like this very intentional, profit-first strategy, where everything is bootstrapped, and some really clever grassroots efforts, which I would include giving a friend college credit to get him to run your Facebook ads. I’m gonna put that in grassroots bootstrapping and very clever. Were there other things that helped you scale, got the word out? Like you’ve got press now, or did that just come naturally as the business grew?
Chris Meade: Press came over time. The Forbes 30 Under 30 stuff, that helps, but that was last year. But really, the next milestone really was there’s a store called SCHEELS in the Midwest. Two locations they picked us up on. I got the buyer’s email through LinkedIn, begged him to take 16 of them. So, at that point, it was like a $3,000 order was life changing, and didn’t move. Product sucked. Never sold. Didn’t hear back from him. Ignored me.
And then flash forward about six months later, we have our first viral video. I wake up and this guy from Latvia had messaged me a few months ago being like, “Hey, I run a volleyball camp or something. Can you send me a net?” And I was like, “Dude, Latvia’s like $300 to ship. You pay shipping, I’ll give you the product.” So, he pays for the shipping, never hear from him, just out of my mind, and I was with my girl and my phone just starts going crazy. I remember I was on the right side of my bed, my phone’s going like this, and I wake up, and I got like five million views, 30,000 comments, and the Shopify store was just, “Ding, ding, ding.” You know that sound.
And that was our first viral video and it was the Latvian Olympic volleyball team.
Sound Board Clip:
Chris Meade: Exactly. So, they played with CROSSNET on this beautiful beach, perfect setting, and I suck. I’m not a volleyball player. Never played volleyball a day in my life.
Kurt Elster: All right, that caught me by surprise. All right.
Chris Meade: These dudes made it look so damn good. Like it’s one thing to play with my friends, or like my mom or something, where we’re just playing taps. These dudes were spiking, digging, rallying, all the terms that I barely know, like they were doing it and they made it look so good. So, we took that video, started running paid on it and holy shit did that unlock the craziest growth.
Kurt Elster: So, when this guy reached out to you and said, “Hey, I run this camp.”
Chris Meade: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It was an Olympic training camp?
Chris Meade: It was just a volleyball camp, and for me, I’m not a volleyball player, so if it was James Harden reaching out to me, I’d know, “All right, it’s James Harden. I’m giving you whatever you want.” Or Kevin Durant. I’m not familiar with the world of volleyball and I’m more familiar now that I run a volleyball business. But back then-
Kurt Elster: You’re like, “Yeah, okay.”
Chris Meade: Right. It was nobody to me. Whatever. Now, it’s like a big deal.
Kurt Elster: You pay shipping. And then they did it.
Chris Meade: And they did it. And we still work with them to the day. Great partners of ours. But back then I was just naïve, right? So, we took that ad, so two things happened. We took that, started running paid on it, beautiful. Great. We still run it to this day. It’s like the most popular CROSSNET video. Secondly, I get an email from my buyer who’s been ignoring me for six months. “Chris, I don’t know what the hell happened but all the CROSSNETs sold out last night.”
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Chris Meade: Whoa indeed. “Can I take you guys on nationwide?” Of course, you could take us nationwide.
Kurt Elster: Don’t mind if we do.
Chris Meade: Exactly. And in hindsight, it was very important because that location, SCHEELS, which is one of my favorite retail stores we work with if not the most favorite, net 30 payment terms. Very favorable for a bootstrapped company.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And unusual in retail. Most payment terms can be quite a bit longer than that.
Chris Meade: Exactly. So, naïve Chris, ship the product, get my money in 30 days, sounds good. Had it been net 120 or net 90, like we do at Walmart or Dick’s, we probably would have been screwed and shot ourself in the foot. But with an order like that, it was eight units per store, like 35 stores, it was great cash, and we got it, and we took all that money, still hadn’t paid ourself a dollar at this point. We took all of it, we just sent it to China. Go make us more product.
And about 18 months later, we were able to finally pay ourself our first paycheck.
Kurt Elster: Wow. So, did you ever get rid of that student loan debt?
Chris Meade: Yeah, I did. Thank God. Last year.
Kurt Elster: Congratulations.
Chris Meade: I appreciate it. Yeah, it was just putting it all back into the business. I was working on Upwork, dude. I was slinging Shopify sites to people. I barely knew what Shopify was, but I was helping other people who didn’t know.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no way.
Chris Meade: Yeah. I worked on Upwork. I worked on FreeUp. And I was a photographer, too, because I spent all that money going to film school, so I’d shoot weddings, I’d do little stupid stuff here and there, and we had this big whiteboard. It was the doomsday board we called it. It had how much me, Greg, and Mike had in our bank account, and every day we’d deduct it. And if we got to zero, it meant it was time to go get a real job again. And so, every month it was like, “All right, how can I add another 500 bucks to the piggy bank and go eat a $6 pizza to hold me over?”
Kurt Elster: I remember that. Yeah. In my twenties, trying to figure out what I’m gonna do, and I did a similar journey. I was doing whatever random computer work I could do. I was an assistant, wedding photography, because that’s like an easy nights and weekends thing. It’s perfect.
Okay, back to CROSSNET. You’re in this retail store but now you’re in Walmart, Target, Dick’s, Academy Sports, 20 other retailers. I’ve walked in… God, I’ve seen it in… is it in Bass Pro Shop?
Chris Meade: Not yet. I hope it is someday.
Kurt Elster: I know I’ve walked into a sporting goods store and I’m like, “Oh, no way. There’s CROSSNET.”
Chris Meade: Yeah, so we literally, I took that account with SCHEELS, which is like 35 stores, had solid sell through, and I just pitched it to Dick’s, and I kept messaging the buyer of Dick’s on LinkedIn, and he kept ignoring me, but then one day on our chat box, shout out Gorgias, we had somebody type, “Hey, this is the buyer from Dick’s. I got an order for you. Just write back.” And I was like, “No way.”
Kurt Elster: He put it in the live chat on your website?
Chris Meade: Put it in the live chat on my website.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Chris Meade: What’s good? What’s up with the order? Sends me over the purchase order for like 5,000 units.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Chris Meade: Yes. And thankfully, we had the inventory, and yeah, so we rolled out to like… I don’t know what it is, 900 Dick’s Sporting Goods stores, plus SCHEELS, and then I took that, and I leveraged those two logos and I got Academy Sports with it, so now we’re up to like 1,500 stores.
Kurt Elster: What point in the timeline does this bring us up to?
Chris Meade: This is… We’re right like mid-2019 at this point. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Chris Meade: Mid-2019.
Kurt Elster: Jumping forward, the pandemic happens, right? The pandemic was scary as hell, especially early on where like no one knew quite what was gonna happen.
Chris Meade: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And it affected so many businesses so differently.
Chris Meade: It did.
Kurt Elster: How did it affect you? What happened with CROSSNET March 2020 and then forward?
Chris Meade: It was crazy, bro, because March is typically… starts to trend up. People are starting to get excited for spring and summer. But we were at maybe 30 units a day we were selling on our Shopify and then all of a sudden COVID happens, toilet paper starts getting out of stock, we go to 500 units a day.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Chris Meade: Whoa, indeed. We were clearing well over a million dollars a month. And just on our Shopify, not on our other retail channels. And so, that’s all… That’s sick, right? 500 units a day. This is what we dreamed about. But that’s only cool for so long, because your supply chain breaks, and it breaks really quickly, so we went from 500 units a day for a few weeks, for a month, and this went for five months straight, which is amazing, but we were backordered for like three months at a time and we literally would just have to keep updating our website. Product does not ship until X date. We’d sell out. I know I have like 2,500 units in a 40-foot container. We were tracking them with pen and pad. We’re out 2,500, here’s the next ship date. Here’s the next ship date.
And at one point, we had over I want to say close to 20,000 customers backordered.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Chris Meade: It was a nightmare.
Kurt Elster: It’s one of those things that’s like that’s a good problem to have, but at the time, it’s stressful and scary.
Chris Meade: So stressful. So scary. And you have two alternatives. You have one, you shut down the Shopify store and you stop taking orders because you don’t know how to manage it, or you take advantage… yeah, I guess that’s the right word. Take advantage of the best situation possible for your business and find a way to get through it and give customers realistic expectations. Keep them notified. And we’re all in this together. That’s what we did.
Kurt Elster: So, the approach was all right, you sell out the inventory, obviously order the next inventory, and the moment you know it’s moving, then like, “All right, this is on a boat. It’s gonna get to customs.” And obviously this is like pre-2021 supply chain madness, where once it was shipped, I’m probably getting it. At that point, let’s say you had 2,500 units on a boat, so you know, all right, it’s coming. You would then presell the 2,500 with an estimated ship date?
Chris Meade: Exactly. Yeah. And we literally would just, thankfully at this time, we had bootstrapped so much that we had a lot of cash sitting there. We just gave it all to China. We said, “Keep going until we tell you to stop.” Which caused its own issues because it ended up stopping, that 500 run rate stopped like in the middle of September and it got really quiet, and so we were over-indexed on inventory, so had its own problems there, but yeah, we just told them to keep making inventory. And every time we’d sell 2,500, we’d pump back the date a few more weeks or whatever the lead time was that we were getting from China, and we’d fix our confirmation email. We had a flow go out. We had a campaign go out. It was just keeping them reminded of when their order was gonna come through.
Was it flawless? By no means. We learned a lot and we got through it.
Kurt Elster: So, as long as you kept people updated, as long as you continued to communicate, like this is what’s going on, this is where your order’s at, this is what’s available, then it was largely okay. I’m sure you had people who were like, “All right, give me my money back.”
Chris Meade: Of course. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: In which case, would you just refund them? Because you know you could sell it.
Chris Meade: Literally on the spot because we’d sell the unit 10 second later, right? So, I literally just had batch files of container one, container two, container three, and you’d just send them custom messaging based off their lead time.
Kurt Elster: All right, so then September it slows down. That-
Chris Meade: And now we got too much inventory.
Kurt Elster: So, you catch your breath again, but then does that… Is that scary in the other way?
Chris Meade: 100%, man. Because then you have six months of inventory, and you don’t really need it. So, you’re not paying bonuses out. You’re not hiring more employees to staff up because all your money’s in inventory. So, for us, what we’ve worked down to is we pretty much want to have two months of inventory on hand at all times, and then constantly replenishing that two months. That way, the business is cashflow positive. You need to add a little bit because you never know when Walmart’s gonna be like, “Yo, I need another 5,000 tomorrow.” And you’d be an idiot not to have the inventory on reserve for Walmart when they want that. So, it’s just a fine balance.
Kurt Elster: And this is a question I get a lot, is like how do I know how much inventory to keep, and so for you, your rule of thumb is we keep a forecasted 60 days’ worth, and then like plus 10% buffer, is what it sounds like.
Chris Meade: Exactly. And the way we do that is we have, and it’s tough when you’re a growing business and have hockey stick growth. Sorry, forecasts only do so much, but also historicals only do so much. Because my job is to make my business 10 times better than what it was last year, so what we do is we have Amazon historics, which help whatever. We have Shopify historics. But most importantly, it’s getting a line with the retail time. Give me your prebuys, like SCHEELS has already ordered for the next… all of almost 2022. I already have their orders. Will they order more? Absolutely. But this is the bare minimum of what they want.
So, I have all of that right now for all of my retail partners besides Walmart. We have our Walmart meeting next week. But I have all my buys for all of ’22 already locked in, so that helps me go make inventory, you know?
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. And you know, it’s guaranteed cash.
Chris Meade: And then I can plan my head count accordingly.
Kurt Elster: Smart. I have some other questions for you but in the journey for scaling it, because you say you want to be 10 times better each time, what’s coming in 2022? What are you gonna do differently, do you think, next year?
Chris Meade: Yeah, so we just hired a new head of operations to make sure those issues never happen again, and to make sure we’re never overindexed, because there’s nothing worse than being a bootstrapped business, having all of your inventory sit there in cash. I know we’re gonna sell the stuff, but if I have an extra few months of supply just sitting there getting dust, that’s so stupid. That’s the biggest mistake I could make.
So, hired somebody who’s very, very senior to take care of that. We drop CROSSNET for soccer next week, actually, so November 15th we drop CROSSNET for soccer. Literally, for years we’ve had soccer players play it, use it for foot volley, juggling, all that. Time to give them what they want. One, like our Achilles heel, I guess, is like we only have really one good SKU and then we have the pool version, so now we got the soccer version which will open up a whole different line of opportunity.
Kurt Elster: Pool version looked really cool.
Chris Meade: Pool version is dope, man. That’s a sick one. And yeah, that was a mistake this year. We didn’t have enough pool versions and then supply chain world hit and we just couldn’t fulfill it. Yeah, it sucked. But-
Kurt Elster: How are you doing with the current supply chain shortages and issues?
Chris Meade: Right now, we ordered all of our inventory like in June for the winter. We are fully stocked. We are overstocked to the point where it goes back to our conversation, but it’s kind of like at this point, you’re begging for inventory, so when you finally have inventory, you can’t really complain.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Chris Meade: Yeah, so it’s a fine balance. I definitely think we probably overpaid on some containers just to get the inventory here. Margin’s cut a little bit. Fortunately, we’re a $150 product and not a $3 little can of Coke, so we have margin to kind of surrender. Not that you always want to surrender margin. But yeah, we’re adequately stocked and we’re already seeing container costs go down, which is a good thing and promising.
Kurt Elster: That’s good. Yeah, that’s encouraging.
Chris Meade: Yeah. Very promising. So, yeah, things are going. Trying to grow the sport, like we were just on ESPN a few months ago. We had a 30-minute tournament.
Kurt Elster: No way.
Chris Meade: Yeah. It was awesome, dude. 30-minute ESPN tournament. Had a $10,000 cash prize out in San Diego. We had the best volleyball players in the world playing CROSSNET. And trying to grow the sport but not trying to do it… Things have to happen organically. As much as you want to put fire to everything, building a sport is just something that a lot of people don’t have experience with, because it doesn’t happen often, and just pouring cash in… It’s a cash burner that is a cash maker. It's just gotta happen over time.
But trying to help build the fundamentals of it this year, like having a curriculum, having a rule book and all of that, those are 2022 plans.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And I like that lesson about like, look, at least as creating a new sport is concerned, it’s gotta be organic. You can only do so much. You can’t force it. You can support it. You can help it. But there’s no way to force it to grow faster than it organically wants to.
Chris Meade: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: There’s a valuable lesson there. Well, you’ve been at this four years. Hindsight 20/20, what would you go back and do differently?
Chris Meade: I would have made content for different ages quicker, because surprisingly I bet to you, our number one customer is moms and dads. It’s not people like myself, 25, 28, looking to be active. It’s moms and dads looking to get their kid off TikTok, and off their phone, and back in the back yard being a kid again. And it took about two years until our messaging changed to like, “Go play. You need to go outside and be a kid again.” And COVID kind of woke that up in me personally, like I live in a high rise here in Miami, and my 30 minutes that I got to go outside or went on the balcony to work out, those were the best 30 minutes of my day, was when I broke a sweat and I got away from all the noise of real life.
So, it took us a long time to find that messaging, and to find rather than trying to grow a sport, people don’t really care about that. They just want to feel like a kid again and not be so damn stressed with these iPhones in their hand all day. So, like that’s really the messaging, but it took so long to build content for these other audiences because I was like, “Who the hell wants to see my mom play CROSSNET?” But more likely, everybody wants to see my mom get spiked in the face. That’s the content that sells.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s nothing… I would not have guessed it, but as soon as you said it, like I immediately related to it because I have three kids. And that’s a constant thing is like, “All right, they’re digital natives, so I shouldn’t be upset that they’re on screens, but also there needs to be a balance.” Like I’m on screens all the time too, but I also manage to go outside and let the sun touch my face and I don’t die. Whereas trying to get my kids outside was a… We live, literally there’s a nature trail in my back yard that you just… we’ll go walk. That leads to a stream. It’s very pleasant.
Chris Meade: Yeah. Beautiful.
Kurt Elster: It took several years to get them to discover and explore it.
Chris Meade: Yeah, making tree houses, forts in the back yard, that was life when I was a kid. I miss that.
Kurt Elster: We got sporting goods that we’ve bought for the back yard. I put like a picnic table. All kinds of stuff just to try and get them outside. And one of them was a badminton net which they actually did use a badminton net, so immediately you’re right, looking at my own life, I get it. But there’s I think a lesson there too in, hey, figuring out the messaging, and figuring out the real why behind why your audience buys, and in some cases segmenting the audience and figuring out, “Okay, who are these different people buying and why are they buying?” And then holding up the mirror and showing that to people so that they can have that same realization. That’s not easy. It’s deceptively hard.
Because it’s like, “Oh, you know, you just say go outside and play.” Okay, yeah. But figuring that out was the hard part. How did you figure it out? How long did it take to figure it out?
Chris Meade: Yeah. It took about two years and like you said, it’s very hard. Right now, we’re trying to break up our buyer personas into parents, like physical education teachers, and camps and clinics, and then people like myself, like the young athletes who are out there just going after and getting it. Those are our three personas. Took us a while to get there. You gotta focus on the one that makes the money, right?
Somebody like myself is the evangelist that’s gonna grow the sport. The physical education ones are gonna give me the free impressions in the classroom every day. And the mom and dad are the one taking out their checkbook or their credit card. So, that’s kind of the order of importance to me. But yeah, it took us a long time to really figure that out, and how to figure out how to segment it. Yeah. Lot of work.
Kurt Elster: That understanding, and that segmentation is just… It is solid gold that will carry that business forward. And I love that idea, you said like the educational aspect, where if you can get it into classrooms, that was Apple’s strategy. When I was a kid, every classroom had… You grew up with Apple computers in school even though I didn’t actually know anyone who had an Apple computer, because then the idea is like we would buy those as adults. Well, maybe it worked, because I got a MacBook.
Chris Meade: I remember the big back monitor, like it was all lit up and you could see through it. That stuff was so cool back in the day. Old Macs.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. Or the colorful iMacs. It was a lot of fun.
Chris Meade: Yeah. That’s the same concept, man. If I could have your kids going to class, playing CROSSNET, learning how to play volleyball on a CROSSNET, learning the sport of CROSSNET if it sticks, and then they come home and what’s on their Christmas list? The $150 CROSSNET.
Kurt Elster: Oh. God, that’s smart. And actually, speaking of Christmas, I think I will probably be buying one shortly after this. So, I want to… We’re coming to the end of our time together, but I want to ask you about your Shopify website. You have this beautiful, glorious, what appears to be a custom theme. I really like it and there’s a few apps on here. For live chat, for customer support, you mentioned you use Gorgias, right?
Chris Meade: Yep. We do.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And we like Gorgias.
Chris Meade: We do too.
Kurt Elster: All right. What are a couple other of your favorite apps? I saw the spin-to-win popup show up.
Chris Meade: Yeah. A lot of people don’t like spin to win. For us, I know that my site has a 12% conversion rate on capturing email or SMS. I’m pretty happy about that.
Kurt Elster: That’s very good.
Chris Meade: Yeah, and the spin to win constantly performs, and the people when I put them through the funnel, they perform. So, I’m gonna keep it on my site for now. And the gamification I think works in our way because we are a game at the end of the day. If I had some cash just to blow, it’d be cool to change the spin to win into like a quadrant game, maybe coming soon.
Okendo works really well for us for reviews. It’s affordable. Their customer solution team has been nothing but receptive. I email them at 12:00 midnight, I have an inbox message at 6:00 AM the next day. So, love Okendo. Very affordable. Very reasonable people.
What else? Klaviyo. I used Privy for the longest time when we were bootstrapping it, but when every dollar counted, we were using Privy for a long time. We still use Privy actually for the pop up, because we found that the welcome pop up was much easier to make look sexy in Privy, and then we import that into Klaviyo.
Kurt Elster: So, at this point you are an experienced and successful eCommerce entrepreneur, Shopify merchant, inventor of new sports. Quite a lot going on here. So, I take your advice seriously. What advice do you have for some of our Shopify merchant audience? What’s one thing you wish they would do?
Chris Meade: To not give up too quickly. And I think this is a video podcast too, right? So, this is a product right here called The King. This is my first eCommerce venture, and-
Kurt Elster: It’s beard oil.
Chris Meade: No.
Kurt Elster: No?
Chris Meade: It’s oil for your tobacco to make it last longer. So, when you apply liquid to a blunt or a cigarette, it slows the burn, making it last longer, therefore you have longer sessions.
Kurt Elster: Oh.
Chris Meade: I did this for about three years. Every day, I woke up trying to do this while I was at my full-time job. And we’d get 100 site visitors to 120, to 200, and I gave up. I gave up after three years. My brother stuck with it because he was in college, and he could. About three months after I quit, three years of sacrifice on this damn thing, it turned into a multimillion-dollar business three months later. It went viral. It exploded. And had I just kept going, I wouldn’t have been at my corporate job, miserable, out of my mind, and I would have been in my house, in my boxers, in Miami, slinging these things.
So, everyone wants instant gratification these days. Everybody wants the sales to come magically. But nobody understands the value of patience, especially when you haven’t seen patience work for you. So, I just say keep going. If you see little, small things that improve 100 visitors to 200, conversion rates up by 0.5%, little shit like that just adds up. And you never know what success feels like until it actually happens, but just keep going. If you wake up and you love what you’re doing, just keep going because there’s nothing worse than going to work for somebody else and living their dream instead of yours.
Kurt Elster: Well, final question. I need to go buy a CROSSNET. Where can I get one?
Chris Meade: CROSSNETgame.com. Best place to buy it. Ship very quickly. But of course, we’re at almost all your favorite retail stores, so go check out the sporting goods section.
Sound Board Clip:
Kurt Elster: CROSSNETgame.com!
Chris Meade: Hey.
Kurt Elster: All right, Chris Meade, thank you so much.
Chris Meade: Thanks, brother.