Chris Meade is not only marketing a product, he's creating a new sport! Through CROSSNET he's brought 'foursquare' to volleyball, soccer and pickleball; and he's done it all without raising venture money. Listen to Chris as he speaks to BANKNOTES editor in chief Ian Leslie on how CROSSNET got its start, lessons learned, and what the future holds.
Chris Meade is not only marketing a product, he's creating a new sport!
Through CROSSNET he's brought 'foursquare' to volleyball, soccer and pickleball; and he's done it all without raising venture money.
Chris and his brother, Greg, are the products of a small town in Connecticut. The brothers and a childhood friend were tired of the rat race, so they found something they were passionate about and dumped their savings and 401Ks into it.
Listen to Chris as he speaks to BANKNOTES editor in chief Ian Leslie on how CROSSNET got its start, lessons learned, and what the future holds.
DTC growth Show. Welcome to the DDC growth Show presented by banknotes minted by hashtag pay. My name is Ian and every episode we sit down with founders and leaders in E commerce and we talk about everything in anything related to creating a successful online brand. Today I'm joined by Chris me. Chris is co founder of CrossFit which is the world's first Foursquare volleyball game. Welcome, Chris.
Oh, man, thanks for having me. Yeah, so
good. So good, man. Like we've caught up on Twitter for seemingly ever now. I've been following your journey. So excited to talk to you. Just give me give me like, you know, 1000 foot view of crossness, your story how we got here. I know you've told this 1000 times. But yeah, just give me the quick story, man.
1001, baby. Yeah, we invented the world's first four way volleyball game. It's a literally what it sounds like a four way volleyball net. Its height adjustable for men, women and children. So has really good utility because my mom, my grandmother, and my four year old comes into play, which is really nice. And it's kind of an all inclusive sport. We're sold in 3000 stores across the country in 49 different countries and rapidly becoming one of the fastest growing sports on the planet. So really fun. It's been a cool five year journey.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that, like, there's so much to unpack with you. Because like you just said, rapid becoming one of the most popular sports. I mean, you invented a sport, you just didn't invent a product, which is like, that's a whole other. That's a whole other kind of matzah ball out there. But like, so tell me like, but tell me firstly, what was the what was the genesis for cross net? Like, how'd you come up with this idea?
Yeah, we were. We're all at different stages in our life. I have two other co founders, my brother and a childhood friend, childhood friend had just graduated from Northeastern super nerdy engineer type dude who didn't want to go work in the robotics fields. My brother was just dropping out of college to do ecommerce stuff on the side and also didn't want to get a real job. And I was cold calling, doing sales about 50 hours a week at Uber Ubers. First ever salesperson actually launched UberEATS in Rhode Island in Boston. And one of those jobs where you're just sick of waking up and cold calling and you're like shit, do I just move to a new job in five months and get a 10k pay raise and just keep doing this until I'm 60. I was like, fuck that. So all three of us kind of met up one night, we wrote down a bunch of ideas and four way volleyballs written down. And that was it.
That's awesome, man. So talking about like, I guess, getting started with that product. I know. You guys have looked at a number of funding sources. You started with the crowdfunding? I think you're back on some doing some crowdfunding. So talk about like getting that first product to launch?
Yeah, we actually didn't start with crowdfunding. 401 K money. We've never taken $1 of outside capital ever. liquidate our 401 ks took our joint bank accounts and like, had 20 grand to our name and found a supplier on Alibaba to make the first 50 move to Miami with 50 of them and I meet you sell tea for 100 bucks on the beach. I'd have like gas money or beer money for the night, start chipping away at my rent a little bit. And the coolest thing would happen three weeks later at start getting sales from South Carolina. I've never been to South Carolina right? So how am I getting sales. And it's oh that dude I met at the beaches outside playing today. And so that kind of just completely snowballed. 15 ads turned to 100 100 turn to 250. And now there's hundreds of 1000s of out there. But it was just all about getting those first impressions in person demoing the game, having fun with it. From a funding we literally just took our bank account our personal bank account money, got a doomsday board, they hit zero, we were going back to their real jobs. Thank God, it only went as low as like 400 at one point. And she just kept re buying inventory. We sold one by two. So two by four and just keep scaling it up. You know?
Yeah, yeah. I feel like every question every answer because like two questions for me, but like your go to market is so interesting, right? You start at the beach, you totally understood that. And then you sort of taking it to the colleges as well. Right? Like that's, that's a big piece for you.
Oh, yeah, we're an intramural sport at like 300 schools right now, that potentially like if we were a VC back business, I would have a full time salesperson just like calling colleges right and just like breaking down doors there. But right now it's happening organically. Kids are going to their intramural program playing cross net they're doing at their high school level. And yeah, I see it becoming a real sport. It's just it's a long thing to build the sport. It takes a lot of lot of time.
Yeah, yeah. On the crowdfunding piece. I'm gonna think I'm sorry. I meant like as you diversify, cuz I knew like I was I signed up for the for the CrossFit soccer piece. Yeah, when you guys did the current funding piece for that, so like, So you took cross net, you the Foursquare, a volleyball, and you're like, hey, let's blow this out. You got h2o, you got soccer You just dropped another one will tell us about that. So like so just talking about Like, at what point you saw Critical Mass like, Hey, man, we need to expand this into other sports verticals.
Yeah. I think it's the classic founder founder dilemma of do we focus on one SKU and go really hard with it. And then we also look at our balance sheet, and we see that LTV isn't really growing. Because why would you buy this again, if you already have it, right? If it breaks, it's kind of like a shame on me as an operator, because I've made a faulty product. And I don't want to rely on my customers to lose or break their nets in order to become customers again. So on one hand, my job is to make you go out into the world and play cross net every day. So you could be a walking billboard for me. But I also want to make more money from my customer. Because you trusted me enough. Once you go out, you have fun, you're gonna want to buy more spend more money with me if I provide more product to the world? So for me, it was like, what, what avenues can we expand cross that into soccer made a lot of sense. Because I grew up we weren't volleyball guys at all, we never played. It was just a cool idea at the beach. We all grew up playing soccer together, let's drop it to the floor, work on foot, like trapping foot skills, headers, all that good stuff and see if it applies. And it did. And now we're doing the same with pickleball. We did the same with the pool version a year ago. So yeah, I want to take cross net to whatever body part that our customer wants to play with. It happens to span over a few different body parts of it.
Yeah, yeah, I've seen some great content think a we recently saw like a women's women's college team. Yeah, got
like five of them. South Carolina Gamecocks and that's the coolest thing, bro is like, they're not even like contacting us asking for freebies. It's like I just jump on Twitter. And I see like, shit like that happening. Oh, my God, this is so cool.
Yeah, well, man, I'm proud my varsity boys down here in South Carolina. We're amongst the first to test it out. So that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, that was awesome. So let's go back to like the marketing piece for a second because you also something that I've noticed most y'all really early entry early adopter, and I'll talk about like, what the what was behind that makes a lot of sense with your product and your vertical but talking about, like the thoughts behind that, and then how it's gone where it's going. Yeah,
my goal is marketers get as many eyeballs at the most affordable cost as possible, right. And before NIHL, you had people asking 2500 bucks for an Instagram post when they're a part time bikini model and working at the coffee house, right. It's just like egregious, you get egregious rates and, and I'll open up the doors to have tons of our college like, ambassadors and athletes actually just get paid to play the game that they love. So when we opened up like on our story, oh, taking applications, we got flooded bro, like 1000s of people emailing us like not at no exaggeration. And so at one point, we had 317 NFL athletes on our roster. We shipped out so much product, depending on their performance on their platform, we would be like, oh, this person gets 50 bucks a month, this person gets 500 bucks a month, you know, and we build that a budget for it. And when I look back at it, we got amazing content. It was a really cool net moment because the NIO was like popping off for like three months. It was like everybody was talking about it for the first three months when it popped off. But of course now it's still a thing and very good. But we kind of in hindsight as an operator, I'm sure you use this show to talk about regrets as well as we went to heart. Having 317 people to manage by one person is nearly impossible. Trying to organize all that content, trying to make sure people are hitting deliverables, making sure that the people are getting paid the correct amount. It was a nightmare. So we have since gladly gotten all that content in our Dropbox and will hopefully work through it at one point in lacrosse history. But we've scaled it back we're down to like 10 athletes now. There are 10 people that have a really good rapport with us. We talk to them on a daily basis. We're in text groups, chat groups all the time on Slack. And they're now becoming like the face of the brand. And it's nice because they're the college is promoting it. They're getting Tik Tok videos all the time that are popping up on SportsCenter. So like they're really making a good impact. And it also allows us to like get a lot of diversity right? I just don't want it to be an 18 year old white dude at a college like we're getting people that look different feel different and it resonates with all different audiences which is great.
Yes, sir. We know no guarantee with an aisle athletes either. I mean, that's like it's very much a gamble. I mean, I knew just hearing about the the LSU quarterback who got paid a bunch and Li and I owe money and isn't isn't playing keeps the money right. So it's like it's definitely a gamble denial. I mean, but definitely fertile grounds there in the future tactically? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's
mostly for us like as a Brit we I look at it when I pay in Ambassador influencer. I look at them always as a content creator more than Hey, I'm getting money back, because then I can then use that content to go run performance on it. So if I'm going to pay, let's just call it $400, to a video creator to go create something, and they have no platform to get me free views. I much rather get that 400 bucks to a college kid who could also create beautiful content. But hey, maybe gets me 50,000 views on Tik Tok like that. Sure.
Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems like you guys have embraced the whole idea of content creator as both amazing content creator but also Ambassador slash influencer. Makes total sense. Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. So,
um, let's talk about, I guess, learnings growing pains. I mean, you've mentioned that and I O is kind of a 2020 hindsight sort of thing. Maybe we went to went too deep, too fast into that. It's been how many years since the first cross net popped
2018? So four years? Yeah. Okay.
So in that time, I mean, what other learnings you know, just kind of top of your head.
This one, it comes out to me. In COVID, we're about 40,000 units backordered. And we just kept accepting orders knowing that inventory was being manufactured. And so it's a tough balance. Because like, when you're a when you're a founder, you create your company to make money. And that's your number one priority, the majority of the time. But at what sake of pissing off the customer and making them unhappy, right? If I'm accepting an order from you for cross and for soccer, and your random guy that I don't know, right, like, let's just pretend that and I accept your money, and I feel good, I just made $150 sale. But if I can't ship that to you for three months, and I've terrible communication on that, you're gonna be pissed off, you might charge back, but you're probably not going to be speaking too kindly about cross net. And I have no idea how much that actually impacts my business in the future. So it was definitely a learning lesson of getting too greedy too often, and putting the customer Second, we've definitely switched that philosophy across that but in the early like, in the early learnings, greed definitely got to us for sure.
Yeah, that's not we're two years, three years into COVID. Now, I mean, that's, that's really not changed, right? Like you're still experiencing on the supply chain side, on the container side on the you know, all of it. I mean, it's still it's still tough sledding for a lot of companies out there,
especially on the shipping front man, like, I, we did a sale yesterday on our site, like we're moving to a new warehouse. So I gave like, 50% off all over. Like, we literally have to spend 1000s of dollars to move all over shit. So it's like, instead of paying a trucking company, I'll just pass it off to customers. And well, that's pretty smart. But we have shipping on our website. So like, they're getting literally $75 Awesome stuff. And then they have to pay $14 for shipping, because that's what it costs. And they're like, No, no way. What a terrible deal. You guys are frauds, like they don't even like people just don't expect to pay shipping at all. They'd rather have $0 shipping and say 14 bucks instead of spending saving 75 on the sale. So the mindset is crazy. Slick, that
Drake meme right? But yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, two things I didn't want to touch on. I think they're kind of tied in together. So talk about the future talks about you guys are now raising on we funder. So talk about that a little bit. And then as we get through that, so once I mean your your you talked about it a little bit, but the idea of hey, I'm not in a company this company to just kind of twiddle my thumbs like me it's about making money it's about profitability. You've been such you've been really strong voice and you're creating a lot of content out there and and you're just like, above and beyond cross net you're you're establishing everyone I talk to I talk to you ecommerce optimization podcast yesterday, and that, you know, your name came up, it's just like someone who you need to go to for this content in terms of how to run the business properly, how to how to strive towards growth and profitability. So talk about you know, both those things that we funder piece, and then also like, why you feel like you want to be a voice out there in terms of like, what what companies should be doing right, what CEOs founders should be doing, right?
Yeah, I appreciate that. The we funder from the funder, we are raising money for the first time ever in selling equity. We're raising $2 million for crossing at a 12 and a half million dollar valuation, which is like an early bird valuation on we funder it'll get bumped up once we hit like a certain threshold. We're doing it because we're growing way too fucking fast. And it it being in a product business. It requires inventory and it requires headcount. Two things we can't make enough of or get enough of right now. So we have the opportunity to expand to like 3000 new stores next year. Cash is required. We have four warehouses now Australia, Europe, Canada and America. Inventories required I'm dropping pickleball a few weeks I have about five other games I want to come out with for cross net over the next 12 months. Inventory is required and It just costs money to make money. And if we don't take on capital right now, the debt like we can take on debt as well. But I don't want to be taking on 25% interest rates on terrible debt or either partner with some strategic people as well. So that's the reason for the we funder. going exceptionally well at time of recording, we've raised almost 250k, literally in like four days. So it's a power of the personal brand, and also the cross NET Brand, which is great. And then on your second question was,
why do we fund a route and not you know, just more traditional go straight to Vc, whatever.
I guess it's actually ties into the personal brand. One VC money are typically looking for 10 to 15x, valuations and markups. And we're not a unicorn. I'm not building a billion dollar business. I'm working to build a 50 or 100 million dollar business, and I'm happy with that it's sustainable for the next 30 years. Venture typically is not looking for products, they're looking for tech, at least what I'm seeing. And going back to the personal brand being is is who I am. I grew up in Connecticut on a farm, There's no venture capital, there's no Shopify, there's one gas station, it's chicken nugget restaurant, like for real, like, and so I started posting when I started crossing that four or five years ago. She is like our little stories like our little learnings. And because there's so many people like just in my mind that I know of that have always wanted to start businesses, and now they're seven years later, they still haven't started their business because they're scared to leave their 40 hour week job. And maybe they have a kid to feed now or they have a girlfriend that needs to go on a date on Friday nights, and they can't be working on their Shopify business, but like, there's so many people who just don't fucking follow their dreams because they're scared. So I kind of just kept putting it out like content out there. And that's evolved from Chris Mead starting his business to Chris Mead running this $2 million business to Chris Mead running this $25 million business and, and I think it's needed. There's not many founders out there that are spending time to educate others. Am I right on everything? Fuck now, I make so many mistakes, but at least I could share my mistakes, rather than people who are trying to start and fuck up from themselves. So if I could solve if I can help one person a day, like not make a mistake, or think about things differently. It's worth my time. Definitely takes a lot of time these days, but it's fun.
Yeah, what kind of feedback have you gotten on it?
Dude, honestly, just getting I just sent out an email this morning. Just getting emails like, this is the best part of my week. This newsletter literally resonates so much. This is exactly what I'm going through. Stuff like that happens every single day almost. And yeah, it's really gratifying. Especially like where I come from, like what I've seen in my life. And like, it's crazy to be running. This was crazy meal, a fucking podcast at 10 o'clock on a Friday. Like, that's so cool compared to where I was four years ago.
Yeah, work. Yeah, no, I think that's awesome, man. That's great perspective. And I think, would you I love talking to you is for some we've talked in real life, but I love on Twitter. You're so real. I don't know if you've read much of my stuff on Twitter. But like Jay did on the Twitter, the Twitter eco chamber, you know, and I think like you just like you said, this is we're blessed to be doing any of this. And I really appreciate your perspective on
11:20am. And we are doing a podcast and getting paid for it. Like, Well, how could you complain about life?
Yeah, or Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, man. Hey, this has been awesome. I appreciate your time. I couldn't, you know, I can't believe how much out of just 18 minutes we've gotten. And I think a lot of people are going to take some great takeaways from this. If there's one thing you want to leave the listeners with, what would that be? And then tell everyone where to find you where to find cross net where to find soccer and pickleball and h2o and all that man.
When the game is just get started, right? Like, you have an idea. You may have an idea. You may have one in the future. If you never try you never know what's gonna happen Worse comes worse. You're in the same spot you're in right now. So just get going. I think living with the idea of regret is very fucking scary. And I'd never want to do that for myself. You can find me on all socials at Chris Mead. You can support cross net across that game.com or Amazon or pretty much any retail store in America.
Yeah, I've seen it. I've seen it at Dick's seen it a Walmart. I've seen it everywhere. Man, that guy to talk to you. I'm so glad we got to catch up. Thanks, man. Is it alright, we'll see.