Reinventing Backyard Play with Crossnet Creator, Chris Meade | Digital Social Hour #45

Have you ever pulled up to the beach and you saw a knockoff net?

Bro, one time, I was so mad.

And it's this like $15 junk one from China.

We went back into the beach house and we took down their net and we gave them like the OG.

I want you to, if you open up that product, I want you to be embarrassed and I want you to send it back to Amazon.

Dude, I'm still pissed because you hit me up to invest and I just lost all my money in Celsius.

Oh my god.

All right, welcome to the Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

I'm here with my guest today, Chris Mead.

What's up, bro?

How you doing, man?

Good, dude.

Dude, it's been coming.

What, four years?

It's been a long time.

Holy crap, you've come a long time.

Long time.

We both have.

Yeah, man.

So give people the rundown.

I'm looking.

Give you the rundown.

First, Sean Kelly used to live on my couch

about six years ago.

We moved from Connecticut to Miami, and it was about, what, like, we had like a hostel of like eight dudes living in this two-bedroom apartment.

It was fun.

It was the come-up days.

But, no, it's been good.

We, uh,

so people that don't know me, of course, I invented CrossNet, which is the world's first four-way volleyball game.

Uh, I've been out now for six years.

We sell into like over 5,000 retailers, and

the fastest growing backyard game on the planet.

Dude, every time I go to a Walmart, I see it or Dick's.

It's incredible, man.

I literally watched you guys create it.

Yeah, I know.

That was the early days.

Yep, on the couch, and then to Miami, where we had

the proof of purchase, proof of concept, yeah.

So back when I met you, though, you were working at Uber Eats, right?

Yep.

What was that like, and what did you learn there?

It was cool, dude.

So Uber Eats was my first technical sales job.

And so I was the first ever account executive or sales executive at Uber.

And my job was to build Uber Eats for Rhode Island and Boston.

So

those that don't know, like, essentially, you're picking up a phone and you're cold calling for eight hours a day.

And you're like, yo, Sean, can I get your restaurant onto Uber Eats?

And I negotiate, and eventually I get you on the platform.

So I did that every day for six months.

And I got like hundreds of restaurants, which was really cool and rewarding.

But it was also the type of job.

And I don't think you've ever felt this way, but when you live that corporate job, you work at nine to five and you just get exhausted.

You're doing the same shit every single day and you're just completely burnt out.

And at this time, I was like 20, I was like 24, 25.

I was like, dude, is this all my life is going to be?

Like, am I going to wake up and cold call for the Legrette?

Like, and there's no knock to that.

Like, it's a great career.

Like, could have made a ton of money, but that's just not.

I felt burnt out.

And I was 24, 25.

That's pretty pathetic.

So.

Yeah, at that age, were you getting a commission on each of those?

I was getting commission and I was getting a full-time salary.

So for me, I mean, I graduated school with like $200,000 of student loan debt.

Jesus.

Tried to become a filmmaker.

Realized they didn't want to do that really quickly.

And so I'm like, all right, how can I try to stack cash?

But this was before Shopify and all this stuff.

And

i was probably making like 120 140 which is good money for college dude for a 24 year old i was i was doing pretty well so uh but it just wasn't enough and i knew i had to start thinking more long-term rather than just what can i do for the next six months so would you say going to college was worth it for you yes i would say it was worth it due to the connections i made okay i would say the schooling was absolute shit right i'm sure that varies from school to school uh mine it was not the best education but the people that i met there there were instrumental into my career.

Where the first job out of college was somebody I knew from college, from college.

Second job was somebody else.

And it kind of just all led to the Uber job, which then led to, yeah, even I started working on an Amazon drop shipping business in college, and that got me into all of e-comm.

My first founder was my college roommate.

So it's like, if I hadn't gone to Quinnipiac, and it sucks that I spent $200,000 to go to the school,

I wouldn't have met the people to shape my life to where I am today.

Yeah, I'd say if you're taking advantage of the networking and the alumni, it's definitely worth it.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like you paying for masterminds, right?

Like, if you're not, if you're going to go there and be social and meet people, it's worth it.

If you're going to sit in the corner and not talk to anybody, you're just wasting your money.

Yeah, let's dive into CrossNet because I'm just so fascinated by how you scaled that.

So, the first year was just e-commerce, right?

Yep.

And then, when did you start getting into the big retail?

So, 2020.

So, we launched in 2018.

I think those are the Miami days.

And so, 2018 was direct-to-consumer only, 2019 as well.

And then 2020 came, which was a COVID year.

And that's when the Walmarts of the world started knocking at our door.

They were looking for, they were honestly just looking for any products.

At that point, they didn't even have toilet paper, let alone crossnets.

But yeah, there's a massive spike in kind of just human interest.

Like you're telling me on podcast number seven today.

Like you're banging out a ton.

You're so excited to get fresh air when we get out of here and just walk around.

For me, like my mindset is the best time outside is like my 20 minutes outside or my 30 minutes outside.

America's mindset has shifted to like time outside is more important than ever.

Disconnecting from our phones, disconnecting from our laptops.

And I know you don't get to do that too often, but when you do, you probably feel a lot better.

So we're kind of selling to that narrative.

And the retailers have been on board.

So 2020, we started getting like the dicks, the Walmarts, of the world.

And the orders keep coming, like they keep flowing.

And we keep making new SKUs to kind of build out like more of an LTV model and build out more shelf space.

I saw you guys just dropped a pickleball product, right?

Yeah, we got four-way pickleball.

So it's kind of like I was trying to play pickleball tonight, actually, and there's no courts available, there's never courts, right?

Uh, because like

we're working all day, we get to the court, and there's that grandma who's retired, and she's been there since two o'clock, and she's hogging the court.

So, we're selling a four-way pickleball net that could easily be switched to a normal pickleball net.

So, Middle America, they could just set it up in their driveway back home in Jersey.

You could set it back like in your driveway, yeah, but then you could also play the crossnet spin and add another side of the net, so it's super fun.

So, we launched that two months ago, and it's doing really, really well for us.

Pickleball's hot.

It's very hot.

It's a heavy product, which is kind of interesting to work out the cake.

Like shipping it costs like 30.

Yeah, shipping it costs so much money and like people's mindsets change.

Like you don't want to spend $30 on shipping.

Hell no.

But you also don't want to spend an extra $30 into the product cost.

So it's kind of hard to decide.

It's finding that balance.

Yeah, especially when products are $150 already.

So it's like...

Whether it pay $150 plus $30 in shipping or $180 no shipping, it's finding the fine balance for the customer's wallet.

I love the story about how you guys acquired the patent.

Could you tell that story?

Oh, yeah.

In short, we

so we have patent on CrossNet, the four-way volleyball net system.

So essentially, we literally Googled it all night long trying to find, like, does on the inception night, right?

When we're brainstorming these ideas, we were writing down ideas all night long.

We wrote four-way volleyball down, and we googled it, and we couldn't find a damn thing anywhere.

Not on Google, not a photo, not anything on Instagram.

We're like, this is too good to be true.

So eventually, we kind of searched through the patent database after we built our prototype and we're like, ah, shit,

there's this patent troll out there.

So we found this guy out in San Diego.

We told him that we were like heading out to a meeting.

Like we were going to be out there anyway.

We had never even been to San Diego at that point.

We're like, yo, we're going to be out in San Diego and messaged him on LinkedIn.

He wrote back.

He's like, all right, cool, let's talk.

So I flew out to San Diego and kind of...

wrote struck a deal for this patent that he wasn't using that he was just like kind of hoarding so that's kind of it but uh we've had it and it helped us really build a moat.

Like, a lot of my friends are like, yo, do you think the patent, like having a patent is worth it?

And I think it is to an extent as long as you build velocity really quickly.

Like, there's always ways to get around patents nine times out of ten, like, unless you have a crazy, indefensible patent.

Yeah.

But it helped us build a moat for three years where people didn't want to deal with the bullshit of the litigation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If we happened to have mommy-daddy money to back it up, which we didn't.

But it helped us build the moat and CrossNet became like a household name before any of these knockoffs tried to come into the space.

I've seen the knockoffs.

How do you deal with them?

I get Facebook ads for them.

It's annoying.

It's really annoying.

Do you go after them or you just...

We've gone after them.

We've won a few cases, but ultimately, like, brand always wins.

I'm trying to think about it.

What do you mean, brand?

So I'm trying to, you're actually...

You're not as bougie as JR is, but

so we have a friend named JR, but

there's a million Gucci knockoffs, right?

Yeah.

But you still go out and you buy the Gucci slides for a thousand dollars because they have Gucci attached to them, right?

We're trying to have a brand that is so strong and crossnet has been so strong for six years.

Like, we're the inventor of the product, inventor of the brand, inventor of the sport that I want you to be embarrassed if you had to save ten dollars and bought that red shitty knockoff.

Gotcha.

I want you, I want you to be so mad on Christmas morning that your mom had to be cheap and save ten dollars and they couldn't get you the original.

So it's about having that strong brand and like our product is damn good.

Like the Gucci knockoff is never going going to be as good as the Gucci because it's just like the original Gucci, like crossnet, the product's great, the design's great, it's sturdy, it holds up, it's weather-resistant.

Everything else on the market that we've seen is absolute trash, right?

And so, I want you to, if you open up that product, I want you to be embarrassed and I want you to send it back to Amazon.

Have you ever pulled up to the beach and you saw a knockoff net, bro?

One time,

I was so mad.

I was so mad, dude, because I saw it in a distance and I was like, oh shit, that's our net.

Like, I run up, like, dap them up, say, thank you for buying, thank you for supporting and it's just like 15 junk one from china so uh no we we went back to this is when we were living in san diego we went back into the beach house and we took down their net and we gave them like the og so uh it felt good but yeah it does suck seeing that but at the end of the day it does spread our sports still yeah because a lot of people aren't getting the nice thing about cross network it was so viral back in miami when we moved here is nobody's seen a four-way volleyball net before yeah and so when you stop and stare you want to watch and look at it and learn Yeah, so even if there is a knockoff out there, you're more getting education around four-way volleyball than you are about Juju's volleyball net from China, right?

The knockoff.

So, yeah, every time we played back in the day, a huge crowd would there be a line of 30, 40 people, you know?

So, and that narrative still exists.

So, like, this year it's been more about spending less on Facebook ads and hoping that the six years of overspending on Facebook ads has done good to the brand and has enough customers out there.

So, now hopefully, there's a million Sean Kelly's out there playing in the spring and summer, creating that line of 30 or 40 people.

Right.

You guys just go.

Dude, I used to get your Facebook guy literally every day for like a year straight.

Oh, so, so hard.

But now we're toning that back.

Just, I mean, you just need to, based on the economy and how things are.

So, yeah, facts.

How did you get that USA volleyball partnership?

Street reaching out, dude.

One of the good things about Uber and the sales jobs, like before and after, were just learning how to get in contact with people that you probably shouldn't be getting in contact with.

So we were able to strike up a conversation with the CEO of USA Volleyball, which is like a massive deal.

And you just cold reached out to him?

Cold reached out to him on LinkedIn, and

crazy enough, he was a fan of CrossNet and already had one in his backyard with his kid.

That's dope.

So

it's always easy to sell somebody when they have your product.

So we're like, yo, like we want to make things more professional.

We're trying to tap into volleyball players because for CrossNet,

the ideal persona is not a volleyball player.

It's a mom mom in their backyard looking to get their kid off of TikTok and to have them do something in the backyard and be a kid again.

So we wanted to become a little bit closer with the volleyball world.

So what better way than making it with the NBA of the volleyball world, you know?

So yeah, we built like a three-year partnership with them.

We have access to their email list and their social media so we could send a bunch of content, like make money off of that.

That's huge.

And then we have co-branded products nationwide now in Academy Sports, which is like 254 locations.

Yeah, that's massive.

And you're probably one of the best people I know at LinkedIn.

Yeah.

So what's your strategy there?

Like, say you want to get a product in Target.

Are you just reaching out to people that work there?

Yeah, I mean, essentially, yes.

But first and foremost, like getting sales at Navigator.

It's like, I think it's like 70 bucks a month or something like that, which gives you a lot more DMs than just the basic plan that you're run out of really quickly.

But then going from there and going into, so for Target specifically, I'd be searching Target, buyer, and then trying to find the demo that I'm in.

So Sporting Goods for us.

and then hitting them with a connection and on the connection is a short note like for us i try to keep it really casual like hey man i created the world's first four-way volleyball net or played on the spn and have over a million players right we're also going to do x amount of sales this year let's talk and so something that casual and not like robotic like how many emails you get a day like you could disqualify them in half a second just looking at it so it needs to be sharp there yeah but then also getting after the assistant buyers um these are people who have just started with the store are trying to make a name for themselves.

And like, just like any other type of employee, you want to move up, you want to impress your boss.

What better way to impress your boss than bringing in a hot product that they have may not seen?

And then you look good right at the end of the year.

You're doing your review.

Crossnet was one of those.

I got CrossNet and okay, let's talk about that bonus, right?

So reaching out to them and also marketers.

I remember when I was at my first job, I spent so much time on LinkedIn.

One, because I was looking for another job, but two, because I was bored as hell and I was trying to find LinkedIn was like, kind of looked like I was working, but I wasn't really working.

So

sharing my story on there every day.

And so LinkedIn's my biggest platform.

I post on there two to three times a day.

I try to.

And it's cool because the buyers have seen CrossNet grow in their newsfloop feed just from when we were hustling it on the beach five years ago to where it is today.

Like there's been buyers who have been along for that entire story.

That's insane.

And one of the things you guys also did was bootstrap the company.

Yeah, we bootstrapped the whole thing, man.

I mean, how did you pull that off?

Great

perseverance, not buying stupid shit that we didn't need.

But it was as simple as, man, we pulled out our 401k.

Like, you know, the story, like, we pulled out our 401k, we put like maybe 20,000 bucks between me, Greg, and Mike into a bank account.

We bought 50 units, moved down here,

and we sold the 50.

We would take that money for like beer money for the night or for rent, and then we

invest the money back into buying the next hundred from there we'd sell a hundred buy back 250 sell 250 buy back 500 and we just kept scaling it like that and didn't pull out money to buy Lamborghinis or

fancy nights nights out in Miami it was just how much money do we need to pay our rent how much money do we need for like eight dollar sandwiches for dinner and and that was it and it was a grind so it worked up until a point where it didn't like our first walmart order for almost a million dollars we did that all on our own with our cash without without banks or anything like that

yeah

we floated that for about a year oh well not a year sorry uh six months damn so we have to put up the money to manufacture it put up the money to store it then to ship it and then you have to wait 90 days to get your money whoa so uh that's insane yeah that was tough but then we started pairing on walmart dicks academy paired on like 10 different retailers right and that's fun that's funny that's when the banks kind of started we had to start working with banks for that right what do you mean with oh oh, like you got financing?

Yeah, we had to get financing.

I mean, at that point, there was just way too much inventory we had to make.

Right.

And then we were just out of the cash for so long.

It would have been too risky.

It would have been way too risky.

And then last year, you recently partnered with Danny Duncan.

How did that happen?

So, yeah, we launched this new company called Good Sport.

And the way I think about it is there's very little innovation in backyard sports or in sports overall.

Why are we still buying the same baseball glove from Franklin that you did when you you were a kid and when your parents were kids, they were buying from the same company?

Yeah.

Wilson, Spalding, Franklin.

It's like the big three.

There's nothing else.

But every day there's a new happy dad or a new coffee company or a new clothing brand.

Nothing in sports.

So that's what we're trying to do at Good Sport.

And so we've partnered with Danny, who's one of the biggest YouTubers in the country.

And his prime demo is 16 to 24-year-old kids, boys,

like 98% male demo, which is perfect for us.

And he gives us access to this, almost for lack of a better word, like cult-like audience that follows him every time he drops a video of a million views in the first 10 minutes.

Like,

he does a meet and greet, and there's 5,000 kids at the mall waiting for him.

It's absolutely insane.

So, being able to,

we've done so good at building incredible products and knowing Facebook marketing really well and driving traffic.

He does something we've never been able to do, which is organic.

Organic.

Which organic combined with you guys?

Combined with us.

It should be a, yeah.

So

we roll out to Walmart in May with our first

Walmart three months in.

That was fast.

Yeah.

So that was kind of our agreement with Danny: was like, yo, you bring the organic, I'm gonna bring the retailers and the good products, and we'll do it together.

So, yeah, we launched in Walmart, Dillard's, Wegmans, and Shields.

I love Wegmans, bro.

Yeah, so we're in nationwide with Wegmans.

Isn't that mainly groceries, though?

It is, but

they have a backyard section.

And if Danny could drive traffic to their store and they'll buy a Smashnet and then they'll go buy $100 worth of groceries, it's good for them.

Dude, that's sick.

What advice would you give to someone looking to work with a creator and start a brand with them?

I think for us, so giving you the backstory of how it actually happened, like, I didn't know Danny.

Danny's a massive, massive, famous YouTuber, and I'm just a nerd in my bedroom.

So

we reached out to our social media team, like reached out to Danny being like, yo, we want to do a video with you.

We want to offer you like 45,000 bucks.

He's like, nah, like 250.

Whoa.

I was like, yeah, exactly.

Whoa, Whoa.

Like,

that's rushing roulette with my own money.

Not a shot.

That's happening.

I don't care if it is profitable.

But he's like, yo, if you ever want to come over, like meet me somewhere, I'll call your bluff.

I'll come over.

So

I went to his house in LA and we showed him this product we were working on.

And he loved it.

We sat outside in his backyard playing for a couple hours.

Manager came over, and right then he's like, dude, let's start a company together.

Whoa.

I was like,

say less.

Damn.

Which product was that?

Actually, a product we haven't even launched yet.

Oh, okay.

So TBD on that one.

But

yeah, so that was about a year and a half ago.

Working every day together with him as manager, Stefan.

And yeah, we were just staying up to date, like talking every day, grinding, building the products, like going through the R D, which we did back in the day with CrossNet.

Yeah.

And yeah, so we've built this brand new company called Good Sport.

Essentially, it's all the products that don't fit under CrossNet, but fit under this new sporting goods company.

And we want to change the way like backyard sports are created and played.

That's sick, sick man dude i'm still pissed because you hit me up to invest and i just lost all my money in celsius yeah so i was like oh my god i was so pissed it was good but yeah i mean back to your back to your question though about what would you what would i advise i'd give i think it's really important to i mean these these creators are offered a hundred different ideas every single day like business opportunities i think it's really important that you're bringing something new and different to the table because they could get

they could get the infrastructure for a crossnet or like sporting goods from somebody else, and somebody that does it better than me, or somebody that's richer than me.

But the ideas that I'm bringing to the table and the sports that we're creating is so new and innovative that other people aren't doing that.

And also backing it up with a track record.

Like, if you're a new entrepreneur, like, why are the Nilkboys going to want to work with you?

You know, they have access to the smartest people in the world.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like being also very realistic and building something for yourself before you try to even take that leap with it.

Saxe.

I feel like people try to just jump straight to the celebrity.

Yeah, like that's, that's not going to happen.

Why would the celebrity ever want to work

you know you gotta you gotta prove yourself and crossnet we proved it for six years we built the fastest growing backyard game and yeah you know every seller's everywhere and i think that's why prime did so well 100 because those guys already did it exactly with the lani new guys yeah yeah um so what's next are you focused on crossnet and the company with danny yeah it's really just parlaying both of those.

Crossnet is much more of a B2B play these days where we just have orders from dicks and the academies.

It's really focused on B2B where Good Sport is like, it's very energetic right now.

We have Danny, we're rolling out to Walmart.

I, as the marketer, like, I'm the CMO for both companies.

Like, it's my dream to be able to create these activations where I could actually get a thousand people to show up and I know they're going to show up.

Right.

So that's really, really fun.

So we're sick.

We're thinking about doing like creator backyard leagues in the summer.

Like, Danny has this massive property.

I can get all these celebrities out there playing the games.

Yeah.

Great content for us.

Like, yeah, it's super fun.

So the energy has been restored after grinding on the same product for six years.

Yeah.

So, we're, we're stoked to be dropping, like,

by this time next year, we should have like 10 or 15 games out for Good Sport, which I'm really pumped for.

That's dope.

Yeah.

How do you balance all this with your personal life?

That's a good question, Sean.

I think it's having the non-negotiables are really important.

And for me, that's going to the gym almost every day.

So, I have a trainer I work out with three times a week.

I have a beautiful wife at home.

I do my best to try to disconnect by five or six every night, and that's laptops down.

I am not, like, I'll be on my phone answering emails throughout the night, but I am not in my office tucked away.

I'm spending time with my wife and our dog and just being in the world.

Whatever work I get done from nine to five or nine to six, that's enough for today.

Right.

And I'll get to it tomorrow.

That's awesome.

And I mean, maybe crossnet would be 20% better if I worked till 11 o'clock at night, but I'd also be miserable, depressed, and probably single.

And so I'll take that trade-off.

Yeah, yeah.

That's awesome, man.

You got married in Italy.

How was that?

It was great.

It was a great wedding.

83 people.

A lot of my best friends were there.

Again, it happened during the Celsius.

I'm so sorry.

It was awesome.

We had a great time.

I saw the photo.

That was a really joke.

Dude, it was unreal.

Beautiful.

Yeah, we had shut down this little town in the Amalfi Coast for three days.

And it was just like, it was just awesome.

83 people.

And it was fucking amazing.

Dude, that's literally a dream, right?

Six-month anniversary today, actually.

Wow.

Congrats.

That's good.

Damn, it's only been six months.

Yeah, it is.

Whoa.

Yeah.

I thought it was longer.

Life is quick.

Yeah.

Man, any closing thoughts and where people can find you?

Yeah.

So you can find myself on LinkedIn, Chris Mead.

I write a weekly newsletter, actually, called Cross Commerce.

It's pretty much, I've been really a big advocate of building in public and sharing the good and the bad, which I think is really important because we typically only glamorize the good stuff.

So I've been writing this weekly newsletter, which means a lot to me.

So go follow that.

There's like 10,000 readers at this point, which is great.

And if you want to support the games, goodsuport at playgoodsport.com or crossnet at crossnetgame.com.

You heard it here, guys.

Digital social hour.

I'll see you guys next week.