Under The Hood: Chris from CROSSNET

You first launched in 2017. What’s the growth been like since then? 

So we bootstrapped it in 2017, with $20,000 in cash. Our entire life savings. And the first year was really rough, we made $87,000 in revenue. But then in 2019, things started to pick up and we did over $2.5m in sales. And the year after that, we shot up almost to the eight figure range. And since then, it’s been hockey stick growth. 

Let’s start at that first inflection point where you went from doing a couple thousand dollars to a million dollar business. What happened? 

In the beginning of 2018, things we’re still slow. We’d go to the beach every day, and try to sell our CROSSNET. If you’re a CPG product, you might be standing outside a supermarket to try to get people to taste your product, we were doing the same thing - but on the beach. 

And over time, more nets started to spread out into the world. But the real shift happened when we had our first viral video. It was a video professional volleyball players having a blast with CROSSNET. That video generated millions and millions of views. It was insane.

So we leveraged that in every way we could including paid ads, and the word started to spread even faster. 

So would you attribute a lot of that first D2C wave of success to Facebook ads? 

Yes - 100%. And then wave 2 was wholesale. Once we had a strong enough presence, we were able to speak to some of the biggest retailers. And that’s how we got into places like Dick’s Sporting Goods - that all happened around 2019-2020. 

When you were looking at your Facebook ads, were you optimizing for a certain ROAS? How were you making media buying decisions? 

As a bootstrapped business - we had no other choice but to optimize for profitability. So our magic number did fluctuate as we added team members on and expenses start to tally up - but in the beginning, we had a $150 product and we knew our COGS, shipping costs and overhead. After all costs, we were comfortable selling a CROSSNET for $60-$70. And as long as we were hitting that number, we could spend as much money as possible. 

Did you ever need to take on outside investment? 

Eventually we did get to a point where we were working with Walmart, and they’re a beast. So we had to take lines of credit out in order to keep up with demand. But we still haven’t sold any equity. 

Team wise - Who’s calling the shots on the digital marketing activities? Is it still you? 

The team definitely get involved and makes their own decisions. I try to give everybody as much autonomy as possible, but I'm still heads down in the business trying to grow it as much as possible. 

As a Chief Marketing Officer, I handle the sales, manage all the retail accounts and keep the team in sync. 

Who else is on your team? 

We have a head of eCommerce, a head of brand, a social media manager, a graphic designer, and then a part-time video editor and a designer. We try to keep pretty lean. Everybody’s full remote. 

Tell me, tell me a little bit more about this head of e-com. It’s an increasingly popular title. What does it entail? 

The job is strictly to work with the media buyer to make sure that the media buying plans are going according to plan. To make sure we’re running ads profitably. and that the website is optimized. 

For example: If they see TikTok performing well, they’d be the ones gathering the troops to push harder on it and coordinate a cross-collaborative effort to create content with the head of brand and the other team members. 

It's a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to: Are we making more money? And are we still profitable? 

Let’s talk about Amazon - How meaningful is the channel to your online sales? 

For every CROSSNET we're selling, we're selling 2 on Amazon. So it's very important that that listing is optimized and that PPC is kept in check. So while it does suck to lose customer data, you just have to do it otherwise your customers might buy a knockoff. 

Are you mainly bidding on branded CROSSNET terms or are you also advertising on volleyball terms? 

It’s primarily through the branded CROSSNET terms. We have done some tests where we bid against competitors such as Spikeball. but we always found those clicks to not be as profitable. I would get a kick out of ranking higher than our competitors, but those clicks cost us too much money. It was an ego-driven decision rather than a business move.  

Talk to us about asset creation. If the viral video worked, did you double down on that strategy? 
We used to have a thing called CROSSNET U where we had 286 college athletes on our roster, all curating content for us. And it got super hard to manage. 

I'd send out our nets to them, and people wouldn’t post. So we decided to move forward with a more targeted approach, where we’d only pick 10 influencers that we love working with - and focusing on just getting 1 really good piece of content from them.

At the end of the day, when you look at your ad manager - you’re only running with a small handful of ads. So you don’t need 300 assets, you only need a handful. 

Let’s talk about your favorite tools that are powering CROSSNET. 

I love Okendo: A powerful review tool that's really affordable. We switched from Yotpo, which was a ridiculous amount of money per month. Then we use Gorgias for customer service. After that, it’s Triple Whale for analytics and tracking performance across the whole operation. 

And then, we just started working with Kno Commerce, for post-purchase reviews. We lack attribution on Snap and TikTok. So Kno’s helping us reconcile that data. 

Last question from me: What do you attribute most of your success to? 

Persistence.

I'll give you a pretty sad example. I buy and trade NFTs - and when I make or lose a quick $1,000 - I get so mad, and I want to just give up. It’s very fickle.

But with CROSSNET - we’ve been on a slow grind since those early days selling 1-to-1 on the beach. On the team, we don’t shoot for the stars, we shoot for small incremental wins. How do we get from 100 to 110 visitors? Not “How do we get from 100 to 1,000?”. We didn't pay ourselves for 18 months. We didn't start hiring people until we had cash in the bank. We took everything slowly.  

Everybody starts a brand and they expect to be millionaires in 3 months, and that's just never going to happen. Unless you're Kylie Jenner.

So I attribute our success to having realistic goals, patience and persistence. 

Chris! Thank you! I’m sure many D2C founders feel comfort in hearing that. Appreciate you sharing all your insights, and will be cheering you on!