How Christopher Meade Built Crossnet Into a Global Sensation

Go straight for the conflict and rip off the bandit. That'd be number one. Number two is never lose sight of the businesses P&L. You could put a lot of smart financial people in the right seats but as the owner, it's your job to make sure the plane's flying every day and if you remove yourself from the finances that's a recipe for disaster. Um, Welcome back to the super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Durrani.

Today we have with us Christopher Meade, the co founder of Crossnet, a company based on a simple idea. Four way volleyball and turn it into a global success. Chris and his team created an entirely new game that quickly grew. It reach key retail deals and aims to make Crossnet and Olympic game. That's incredible. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. Danger, quite an intro. No, my honor, my, my pleasure, brother. It's great to have you.

Chris, cross net is such a unique idea, and you have turned into a into global, so quickly, that's what's exciting about it. Can you share some of the biggest hurdles that you face when you were growing this new sport? Yeah. And, how did you push through them? Yeah, you say quick.

I say slow, it's been seven years of doing that. It took a long time. A lot of perseverance and trying through. There's a lot of days where people didn't want crossing it. They didn't like it. They were confused what it was. What is this game? And for two years, it took us literally going to the beach every single day, trying to convince people to play. And then I'd come home. I'd take content from the beach day and I'd upload it to Facebook. We'd run ads on it and slowly started getting sales.

And first year was a dud. Second year was a little bit better. And then we shot from a couple hundred grand to two and a half million and then from two and a half million up to 10 million. So it just it kept skyrocketing. Yeah, we bootstrapped the entire thing. And over time we just started knocking down retail doors. We just rolled up the target this week, actually. So I'm excited about that. Oh, I love it. Congratulations, bro. I love this. So you mentioned the first year was a dud.

What kept you going? What was that? Did you have a specific belief in your ability to make this happen? Or was it the actual sport or the feedback that you were getting from people? Yeah, there was the desire to change our lives. None of us wanted to go back to our city. Love it. Internal belief. Yeah. Nobody wanted to go back to their corporate job that they hated. And this was going to be our one chance to change our lives and we weren't going to give up on it.

Yeah. Never give up on your dreams. There is a perfect example. And your partner, I believe he was supposed to come on as well. Last time. Yeah. Yeah. So we, I now have a new business actually. So it's called the founders club. And so that was a part of going. Yeah. So we created this entrepreneurship community. So about two years ago, we launched this thing called the Founders Club,

which is a private entrepreneur community that has over 250 founders. So it's probably all the listeners of your show a lot of them are probably in this community. So there are e commerce experts different entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. Average revenue is about 10 million bucks a year and they mastermind, they network, they mingle. There's a chapter here in Miami. There's a chapter in Toronto, in New York, in Los Angeles, and events are happening all the time.

Yeah. We have an event, a massive event tonight in New York for about 90 people. We had three events in Miami last few weeks, becoming a massive business and kind of my new passion. It's really fun. Oh, cool. And not to mention the contacts you're making. Of course, dude.

Yeah, they're yeah, it's very it's inspiring to walk into a room that you help bring together and the 10 times that you do, and there's some of your favorite brands showing up, but like the key tone is that Every entrepreneur is lonely to a degree. We all need connections. We all know it's going to be stuff that we struggle with regardless of how many you're making or how big is entrepreneurship stuff. Yeah, and that's 1 of the.

Purposes behind this show too is to expand that value in the marketplace and bring more awareness out there, build a community around it, of people, thinking and feeling the same way. And that's what you created because those guys their mindset is at a different level and how they look at money and revenues and success. Them coming together, like you mentioned, loneliness is the one thing to do is to surround you, surround yourself with like minded people, of course.

Yeah. It's the power in the community, right? Like your friends can't relate to your high school friends anymore. Your parents have no idea what you're doing and sometimes it comes off like you're bragging, but it's just real problems. You just want to vent to somebody and seeing the power of being able to vent and. Not only just complain and vent but also to reach out and when you need help and to level up It's really cool. And it's been awesome to see.

So are you still involved with cross net or are you selling it or you're keeping it? Any juicy news about it? No juicy news. The juiciest news is that we rolled out the target to several hundred

stores this week, so that's a, that's big business continues to grow. We, have an Australian distributor. Now we have warehouses in Canada and Europe are sold in 53, a million players. The goal is there's no end in sight. It's not a fad. It's not a get rich quick scheme. It's a sport game. That's going to be here for hopefully until I'm not on this planet anymore. And my kids and my grandchildren will get to play it. So that's the goal.

Wow. So if you had to do this entire success over again God forbid, if you. Say you just lost everything, you have to start over again. What would be your top three things to do initially?

Have the hard conversation sooner. The conversations that just fester in your mind and you just want to have them, but you're too scared to have them or you don't like conflict. Go straight for the conflict and rip off the bandit. That'd be number one. Number two is never lose sight of the businesses P&L You could put a lot of smart financial people in the right seats. But as the owner, it's your important, it's your job to make sure the plane's flying every day.

And if you remove yourself from the finances that's a recipe for disaster. So that, and then my other thing would probably be Fire quick and be careful. Be more careful with hiring because we had a similar normal startup issues when we scaled up at 10 million mark, we just hired. Try to have a 30 person team, right? Like we need to scale and need to scale. We need to hire. But reality is we didn't need to do any of that shit.

We just need to keep doing what we were doing and the business was going to continue to grow. And yeah, we over inflated the business. We set ourselves back a couple of years by just making too many big time hires and running down our cash. So I go back. Yeah. Now I build this new business. It's keeping my eye on the prize every single day.

Yep. Yeah those are wonderful recommendations, especially the last one and this comes in all areas, not just hiring, but sometimes we, confuse emotional excitement for intuitive. Nudges, but we get really excited about someone, for example, we meet and we bring them on, but then they, without doing the due diligence, it could be costly later on, man, I did, I just did the same thing. I'm coming out of a four month relationship with a salesperson and hired too quick, didn't do enough diligence.

Brought him on and set back our financial goals by pretty much six months because I trusted this one person who had a ton of experience to crush it and Yeah, should have had some harder conversations quicker and you always make yeah uses why you didn't do it sooner Oh, they need to ramp. Oh, they need these tools. It's always there's Always an excuse Yeah At the end of the day, it's the owner and the operator.

It's your job to make sure you're hitting your revenue targets and your dreams for the business. And if the person is not doing it, you got to remove it. Yeah. Rip off the badge. But to elaborate to go further on that question is see if you had to start from ground zero again, what would be the top three things you would do to get yourself as fast as possible to where you are right now?

I'd have a firm focus still on Facebook ads, like really getting a firm understanding of how to run Facebook ads. We spent so much money just going left to right, spending money on podcasts, billboards, you name it. We spent it. There's only one thing that really works the best for most e commerce brands is knowing how to run profitable Facebook ads. Number two is spending more time on the details of manufacturing. So lowering our cost of goods.

Shopping around import brokers and finding cheaper containers, finding cheaper storage. There's a lot of ways to make money, but there's a lot of ways to save money that most people overlook. And we're manufacturing our nets now, probably 200 percent less than when we started back in 2017, so it's not accepting shit as Bible and really going down to make those products cheaper It's not like we're reducing quality.

We're just finding different suppliers and not getting screwed, but then they're really put through the reps and then Number three would be to really focus on organic content That was a mistake early on was I yeah Like I just said the Facebook stuff is really important But the look the quicker that you can build an organic audience The quicker you could get to profitability and make pure money, right? Like with the founders club, we have 250 members annual memberships costs around 5, 000.

I'll probably be increasing memberships in Q2, but yeah, we haven't spent a single dollar on paid ads cause it's all been organic. All organic. So do you do any influencer partnerships or podfluencer? A podfluencer is another term. We, We definitely do some, it depends on the product, right?

If you have an affordable, what I've noticed from influencer marketing is if you have an affordable product to ship and your cogs are cheap, send it all day. Like I was just hanging out with a founder in Miami, 200 million business selling like hoodies and he sends out the 5 hoodies all day long to thousands of influencers. And the shipping is cheap, right? So he's 10 on everything for me. My cogs are, let's just pretend my cogs are 25 bucks. My shipping's another 25. It's expensive, bro.

I'm 50 in for an influencer just to leave me on red. So it's But if the influencer paid for that, yeah, if the influencer paid for it, it's fine. But typically the influencer doesn't want to pay, right? Like you're looking to make, they're going to use it too, yeah. Hopefully they use it for sure. Yeah. Like why would I wouldn't see any influencer taking that step unless they're excited. And then paying it as any other business you're investing in it. And then actually playing the game.

That's another aspect of that excitement. And then, yeah, definitely. But I do see a lot of younger companies just seeding product out for free without having the influencer pay anything. And that's when it gets dangerous, right? Like we had, at one point we had 217 influencers on monthly contracts and they were sending out the lip, every month they had a certain deck of deliverables. Five pieces of video content, five selfies. They need to do this. It was an army.

We had a three person, three people just wasn't that good. It was amazing. It was amazing. But eventually we found out we almost had too much content or spending too much money to run this whole program. Can there ever be too much content with this ocean though, that we have online? Yeah that's a solid point. I felt like for the amount of money that we were spending on Facebook ads, we weren't able to, we're unable to test all the contents.

We ended up having, it was, there's a time and place, right? The content makes sense. It was tough to end up becoming like almost a 300, 400, 000 project just to maintain all this stuff. Yeah. So if. Once I had content, I just cut it back and I was like, okay, I have a library of content that can last me years. Yeah. But are you still doing that? Or are they still publishing stuff online? Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. We still have influencers, but we scaled it down from a crazy effort down just because the unit economics didn't work for CrossNet. Makes sense. If your sub 10 bucks all in, I'd be doing it like crazy. Yeah. That's a manageable price, based on the ROI that you're getting for the rest of the sales. But if you look at 40. And I would even use like a tool like portless, you know what that is?

No. I would literally, so it's this company that has you send, you manufacture in China, you send it to them, they have warehouses in China, and they'll do all the shipping to your customers directly, airship. So you don't have to Fulfillment. Yeah, so you don't have to pay for any tariffs, you don't have to pay the storage costs at your warehouse, you don't have to pay the US fulfillment costs. You don't have to pay storage.

So if you have let's just call it a hundred influencers, you send a hundred orders to portless and then portless will just ship it directly. So you're cutting out the middleman, you're cutting out the American custom workers and all that stuff. It goes that much. That's something that could be done. Yeah. It looks good. I'll take a look at it. Maybe get the founder on the show. Yeah, for real. Yeah. And if you have any founders, I know you have a network. Bring them on the show, man.

If big network. Yeah. If bring them on this show, invite them, refer them because at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is build that network and also share their voice, because there's people out there that want to hear from people like you, they want the guidance, yeah, of course. Yeah. If someone is looking at launching their own brand what could they do?

And this was a very creative idea that you mentioned about going to the beach every day and then, not being shy, but just getting actually people playing it and getting their feedback. Depending on a product, obviously. But is there any recommendations, suggestions you can give to someone that's looking to launch a product how they can intensify the demand for it as soon as possible through creativity of some sort. Call every single person that wants to support you.

Anybody who's ever purchased anything on your website. I have a good friend who's used to call 2000 customers a day. Literally just picked up the phone every day for 12 hours straight. Just calling dialing whoever's going to talk to them. And Just make the dials. Actually, sorry. It was 2000 a week, not 2000 a day. That'd be crazy. Yeah, I was trying to do the math, but early days, anybody who orders on your site, ask them, why did they shop, where did they find out about you?

What do you think about the product? Make them feel included, right? It's if you own a gym, right? You own a gym and the customer is this machine, you end up putting that machine in, the person feels like they're bought it, right? They're now a loyalist to the brand. Same thing with us, right? Like we're asking our customers, what do you want to see from us? How can we. What other games do you want? What else can I do to make you spend money as a customer?

You'll get a ton of feedback really quickly. So again, it goes back to avoiding the hard conversations. Some of the stuff you don't want to hear the box might come down. It's okay. It's okay. The hunger to get that. Yeah. And you launched Uber Eats in a few markets as well. Yeah, brother. I was one of the first salespeople at Uber. Wow. Yeah, I launched it in Rhode Island private and sent a little bit in New York. And yeah, that was my first sale, one of my first big sales jobs.

I had like sales team of a bunch of college kids and we just hammered the phones all day and sick sales. Yeah. Any big takeaway from that experience that could help someone? Get used to hearing no, the all get comfortable with no, Get comfortable and yeah, I think honestly having a having a few years in sales is just so valuable in the moment it sucks. It's a grind. It's a. It sucks, right? It's a lot of cold calls, all the mindset game, bro, all the mindset.

And I think those couple of years of doing it was the best thing I ever did for my career. Learning how to get in the face every single day. It's strengthened my jaw and yeah, I have no worries about rejection these days.

Yeah, when you go into entrepreneurship you realize that more successful you get, the less ego you start getting, and it could be the other way around too, depending on the person, obviously, but it's extremely beneficial if you're, you have some sort of a. Eye on your ego when it comes to these things, because if you let it wild, then it will stop you from so many things, from, especially from progress. But that's great that you have that policy. Are you working on any new products?

Not right now. It's just working on a very successful launch hopefully to target. Cause if we nail this account, happy, make the customers happy.

It opens up a Pandora's box for us. And yeah. Yeah. No, that's great, man. Chris, this is so amazing. So in Canada, which stores are you selling through? We're in like, sport check Canadian Tire. Okay. All yeah, a bunch. I'll go check it out. Experts. Yeah. A bunch of stuff up there. Yeah. But it's more of a summer sport. Obviously it's a lot of snow here, but of course. Yeah, so what do you feel being successful in entrepreneurship being successful in startups?

What do you feel would be the next area of product development that could catch on quickly? That you could manufacture in China and sell here. Is there something that is it's a good idea to keep an eye on? I wouldn't say I'm the best person to to answer that question. I'm not really looking at current trends and more focused on my sporting goods industry and also the founders. I think the most important thing is any product that makes you excited to create.

Organic content to make other people pick up their phone and take selfies with it and as long as the product margins are, that's a good point. If you have shitty project product margins, the business is doomed from the red. Yeah, good point. Another excellent point. Look at you, Chris.

You're full of all these great suggestions and thank you so much for your time get to your busy day I hope is as productive as it's worth your time definitely keep in touch And yeah, once we go live we'll send you the information if you can help us promote it. Absolutely brother. I'd love to it was great Thank you. I appreciate it