CROSSNET – Inventing a New Sport and Hockey Stick Growth – Greg Meade, CEO of CrossNet

Greg Meade of Crossnet:

Sushant Misra: Hey entrepreneurs My name is Sushant and welcome to Trep Talks. This is a show where I interview successful ecommerce entrepreneurs business executives and thought leaders and ask them questions about their business story and also dive deep into some of the strategies and tactics that they have used to start and grow their businesses. And today, I’m really excited to welcome Greg mead to the show. Greg is the co founder and CEO of cross net, which is the world’s first four way volleyball game. The product is a revolutionary four way volleyball net, where four players compete in a hybrid version of Foursquare and volleyball in a competitive game to 11. win by two. And cross net has proven to be a really great product and business growing from 74 k in revenues in 2018, to about 2.2 5 million in revenues in 2019. And I’m sure it will continue to grow. And today, I want to ask Greg a few questions about his startup story starting cross net, and some of the strategies and tactics that the team has used to grow the business. So thank you so much for joining us today. Trep Talks Gregg.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Thank you for having me. Perfect.

Sushant Misra: So let’s get right into it. I know your business is really, really interesting, really exciting. I’m very interested to know your startup story. How did you get the idea? When did you start? And how did it all come together for you?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so cross net, which originated in 2017, the early half of it when my partner and my brother Chris Hoare, also the co founders, we develop the prototype cross net in my mom’s backyard. One night, Mike came over to me and he’s like, hey, let’s make it let’s make something together. He knew I was entrepreneur already. So he was an engineer from Northeastern, and Chris is great at sales. He worked at Uber. He was a Uber executive of Uber Eats. So we all we had a good dynamic asleep together. We made it one night in my backyard, and we bought two badminton nets from what we call it from Walmart. And then we went the next day and packed into my mom’s tree and in the shed and the rest was history.

Sushant Misra: Perfect. And so it was really that you guys always had the idea that you wanted to be your own boss, like, you know, as a team, and that motivated you? Or was it like that you already had some idea of playing this game like we were already playing it and you said, you said, you know, why not turn it into a business or something?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: No, we actually just thought about it one night, we’re like Foursquare volleyball popped into our heads, and we make the prototype The next day, and then we ended up playing it just just to check it out, you know, just to see if it would be fun. And it turns out, it was fun. We had a line of like five or six friends over and we were just playing all night. And then we ended up developing it.

Sushant Misra: Cool. Was there and you know, what were some of the big challenges like when when you said, Okay, this seems like an interesting thing. You know, you invited your friends, they were playing it. It’s been fun. You know, going from there to do building your first product. What were some of the big challenges that you face.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Definitely was the manufacturing of the first prototype of cross net just to make sure it was a sellable product. It took us about three to four samples, every time we get a sample, we’d have to it would be a long waiting process. So that was definitely the most frustrating time period of cross I would say is developing the product and making sure it’s good to sell, which took about four four samples before we actually started selling it. And then we’ve improved it after that numerous times. But just from what standing up because it’s to cross the two volleyball nets. So it’s hard to for them to balance properly, without it without a poll and also making sure the tension stakes are on enough making sure the polls clipped into each other perfect. It was a long process.

Sushant Misra: So can we dive a little bit more deeper into that process of manufacturing. So the manufacturing you did it in the US or whether it’s somewhere else. And for anyone like you know, a lot of entrepreneur Like they get this idea and they want to create their first sellable product. Like what what are? Can you outline some of the the main steps that you did in terms of bringing that idea to reality? What can others learn from your experiences?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: For sure, so if you have an idea, you find it you find a manufacturer, whether that’s overseas, well, that’s what we do, or you find one in the United States, depending on your product, some are better in the United States, some are better overseas. And you have them sample it, you have them test it, you make a prototype. So in our situation, Mike’s engineer, my partner, so he, he made a blueprint of what we wanted or design and then it was created for us and then we had to make edits to it changes to it. So once you get that down, you have you have a manufacturer or supplier, someone who can do it. So if someone’s someone’s trying to build a water model, you find someone who a supplier who has made previous water bottles, or something similar in that category.

Sushant Misra: And and for you when when you were getting started, the supplier that you chose waswhat was that in China? You said overseas? How did you find that that manufacturer? Like what what was the process for you?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, we just use a website called Ali Baba. It’s pretty famous. And it’s great for outsourcing and manufacturing. Okay.

Sushant Misra: Now you’ve been running your business for about two, three years. Who do you? Who are your main customers like which demographics are your main people who buy your product?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so our main demographics are definitely families. So our purchase consumer would be the mom or the dad. More in like the ages of 35 to 50. They’re more the purchasers. And the active players are usually the kids the teenagers who don’t usually spend their money on it, but their parents will So our active users are your millennials, and then the families. So it’s a great target to hit, which because it’s a hit for the families, everyone can play.

Sushant Misra: And I think I saw on you also on your website, and I, when I was doing the research, like, you’re also I think you’re selling in schools and or they’re like your wholesale customers.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so 30% of our business is wholesale. Now, we just got to deal with Dick’s Sporting Goods weren’t shields, we’re an academy sports, you name it, we’re in a bunch of places. And then some of those wholesalers go to schools or in 5000 plus schools, obviously, schools are not really operating right now. So it’s a little bit of time for us to push that market. So that’s, that’s our demographic split for 30 to 70 for online consumers versus wholesale right now.

Sushant Misra: And does it also does it also like is there a factor of like geography or like seasonality that People who are closer to the coast would you know would buy your product more because you know, they would want to play on the beach? Or and is there like a seasonality to it? Of course, I know I think in the winter people would buy this list. Do you see that?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yes. That’s a good question. Everyone asked that and you would, you would think all in the warmer weather everyone’s going to buy more which is Yes, that’s true. see a lot of sales just in the winter for, say a state like Utah, it’s very strange. Bad question gets to us all the time. We our best sales are in California, Utah, Texas, Florida, and New England’s which were all around. If, if the winter comes. We have a indoor base model that is used for inside or summat. So it’s good for the gymnasiums. So people can play inside during the winter season. So that’s what a lot of people do for volleyball.

Sushant Misra: Now one of the really interesting thing about your business and I think Anyone like any entrepreneur who goes on the journey of creating a new product is, and you basically created like this new sport. And this was like a completely new product is how do you go about educating the market about this? So can you share, like your experiences and the beginning days of, you know, you created this new sport that nobody knows about you, you have this new product? Of course, you know, when people came together, they were excited to see it. And it’s a fun game. But as a business, like how do you go about telling people, you know, I have this new sport that would be interesting to play. What was your experience in terms of, you know, getting the word spread in the market and getting the field going?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so that’s a good question as well. Once we develop the game, you set it up on the beach, there’s gonna be a line of 510 20 people sometimes just wanting to play or asking questions about it, not knowing exactly what it is because it’s the first time they seen it. So this is still ongoing. Not a problem. But in a situation that cross net and our team are trying to develop and really push out to the consumers who don’t know what it is. We want to make sure at the end of the day and a few years from now that if you walk by across the net, you know how to play it, that your mom knows how to play it, that the 14 year old kid knows how to play it, you know, I’m saying like, they don’t like if, you know, if you’re gonna play basketball, everyone else has a basketball, you know, they know the rules, shooting hoops. So that’s at the end of the day, we want our consumers to know what crossing is and to know how to play at the end of the day. So we’re going to start with more launching of campaigns and the back end. So once the consumer gets their product, send an email blast about the rules set up tournament’s. We just wanted to get a world wide smart where people are familiar with it without even having to play it before.

Sushant Misra: But but in the early days, like once you had your like first set of products, whichever, you know, whatever number like maybe 500,000 of the products that you got from manufacturer, like how do you push like how did you sell those products like What were the How did you make yourself?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, sorry for the confusion there. Yeah, so definitely Facebook ads. Our Facebook ads have been tremendous. We target, say the mom demographic and we can get numerous sales throughout the day. So that’s our main target is using Facebook ads and word of mouth so like I said, You sent up on the beach, there’s a lot of 30 people. Everyone that’s walking past is like what is that game? So they’ll go home and research it look it up. You can tell if you really do some research you can we set it up for the beach one time in the earlier stages. It’s like the first year we launched we’ve set it up in in the speech in Florida. And after that day, we realized we picked up three sales just from that, that demographic that area. So it’s all all about that and then pushing it forward with the front myself with Facebook ads.

Sushant Misra: When I was when I was reading through like some of your other stories on the internet, like one thing that I found really, really fascinating. It was it was like I think a pivotal point. In your business was when some team some somewhere I think Lithuania or Latvia somewhere. They created a video or something like that. And they I think they probably published it on Facebook and that gives you like a viral sales. That sounded really interesting. Can you share? Like, how did that come about? Because everyone you know, any new business would want to know hey, how do I go viral?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Exactly, yeah. So that’s something you can pay for or haven’t be organic for are fortunate. For for us. I was fortunate that it happened organically. It was the Lithuanian Olympic gold medalist. There’s four of them. And they made this crazy rally, like spiking on them and then crazy saves. It was a really cool video. And we continue to run that to this day, three years later, and we woke up the next day they posted it just for organically. We woke up it was like 2 million views. So once we saw that it was like alright, let’s put video

Sushant Misra: and so Like, did you actually send send your product out to them? Or, like did had they bought it from some somehow from you? Like, how did that come about? Like, how did they even get it?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: If I recall, I believe they just purchased it. Okay, I don’t think one of us sent it to them. But after they made the video for us, we reached out to them to make more videos and to really just get good terms with them.

Sushant Misra: And is that like, our sports team, one of your target customers now that you know people use this as like a as a practice for volleyball or something like that?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, for sure. So So initially, we thought this game would be a lot of the consumers would be based around volleyball and athletes. It turns out it’s not it’s more for like the family friendly user. But for volleyball, it’s great. People have come to us teachers coaches, they’ve said they’ve used it for the classrooms. For the bump set spike basic drills. Bring it, Knuckles, all that. So it’s definitely using the volleyball community and it’s starting to get more respected in the volleyball community, especially with our help from we have a gold medalist Ryan Miller working with us using our doing our podcasts. So he gets a lot of volleyball players associated with it and really recognized and respected.

Sushant Misra: So this I didn’t know about that the the gold medalist who’s working with you? Is he like you’re a brand ambassador. Is that like a strategic decision to have someone from the sport to come and work with you or?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yes, so he’s close friends with my brother right now. And they’ve been working on a podcast the last few months and it’s, it’s been taken off. We’ve got some of the top volleyball players in the world on the podcast. He’s a great face for us and we want to continue using him moving forward because he enjoys the product generally and he likes it.

Sushant Misra: Okay. One thing that I’m really interested to know because I know your business has three co founders. What Are Do you find that it’s easy to work? You know, when you have three people working? What are some of the challenges and benefits that you find? And maybe if you can also share, like, what are the responsibilities like who does what?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so myself I handle all all overseeing so I work with my brother on the sales team, which Chris works on email marketing, talking to Dick’s Sporting Goods or website maintenance. And then I communicate with our other partner Mike who’s our engineer and our brains behind the whole cross net product. He develops it he talks outsources, it speaks to our suppliers nightly up to 3am. He doesn’t customer service or fulfillment or warehouse so I manage all those as long as as well as the legal stuff, financial stuff, all that. Okay.

Sushant Misra: And the product one thing that is interesting from like an e commerce perspective is that your product is it’s not a light product. It is a Have the product right it’s I believe it’s like 20 pounds or something. Yeah. So can you please share a little bit about you know, warehousing and fulfillment because one thing that I’ve heard is you know when someone says okay start an e commerce business, their fingers, you know, finding an idol ideal product, you know you should a light product, a small product is better than a big product. So I’m very interested to know, how do you find working with a product that is heavy? That is a bit bulkier? How do you warehouse it? How do you fulfill the product?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so we start out with our warehouse in Connecticut, on the east coast. And we started out just lifting every box ourselves all 20 pounds 5000 of them a week. very tiring. Got me in the shape. I tried to stand it

Sushant Misra: was your own. It was your own world. This is not like a third party.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: No, no, it’s our own warehouse. We rent our own warehouse. And now we’ve moved to California. It saves us on shipping and save some time and we are able to get bigger space so we just moved into a new warehouse in Escondido, California. Now we have a forklift pallet jack, all that good stuff. So we unload load into our warehouse. You can see like our LinkedIn, we post our our back end story stuff on our LinkedIn and Facebook. But you know, and you can see that there’s 7500 units in our warehouse now and they’re about to be shipped out this week. So it’s cool to see having a product Yeah, makes it more difficult. You have to take up more space. But that’s the that’s the journey across it. It’s it’s a big product. And you’re also like you’re doing this the whole full forklift and all the thing like you’re doing it yourself or like, do you have other now? We have? Yeah, we have. We have workers for us. We have employees. We have a good team. We have a four or five strong employees are now working with us. Great team right now.

Sushant Misra: Okay. And in terms of shipping, like do you ship it yourself? Also like you when you get the order ecommerce order. Yep, you’re basically packaging it and shipping it out yourself?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yep, our same guy Kevin, Kevin and Chris. They they handle our friends. dominant in our warehouse, so the same person who’s taking off the trucks is slapping on the labels and putting it back in the truck.

Sushant Misra: And in terms of like shipping, given that this is a heavy product, shipping within the US versus shipping like to, I’m assuming you you sell like in foreign countries also. Do you? Because I, you know, this is a question that I get a lot of time is, do you include the price of shipping in the product itself? Or is it like, the customer pays it separately? Because a lot of times like when the customer says so that? Okay,

Greg Meade of Crossnet: yeah, we have a customer pay the shipping? depends on where they’re going. So if we ship it from California to Maine, it’s going to cost a lot more than California to California.

Sushant Misra: Okay, and is most of your business within the US or like? Yeah, the word like?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yes, it’s mostly in the us right now. We’re trying to expand it to Australia, UK. We just got a nice Kuwait distribution deal. So we have a nice addition Coming over there who’s gonna get exclusivity to Kuwait? Very big market right now for us, which is cool to see. There’s just some countries that we know, we didn’t even know they played volleyball or like crossing it and then they come to us and say they want to work with us long term. So it’s really awesome to see. Okay.

Sushant Misra: Could you please talk a little bit about your hockey stick growth, you know, previously I’ve mentioned, which is quite impressive, you know, 2018, you started in 2017 2018. You did 74 k 2019. If I read correctly, it’s 2.2 5 million. It’s like a pretty pretty steep growth, which I believe a lot of businesses will would really want. I mean, it would be like a stuff of greens. What What were some of those main things mean? Is it like the marketing that you’re doing right? Or is it that you got your product inside? You know, brick and mortar stores, big box stores that gave you the push like how did you go from 74 K to 2.2 5 million.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yes. So from that aspect, it’s a little bit of both, I would say a little bit like 35 40% brick and mortar. And then the rest was just turning on with marketing burners. So don’t be scared to spend money on Facebook. If you see ads working properly, you see ads, giving you good ROI as scale them up. Don’t be scared. If you have inventory, crank them up, start spending $1,000 a day, crank it up to 5000 and see what happens. And that’s what we did. And once you do that, you get more eyes from the brick and mortar side as well. So everything just starts rapidly growing.

Sushant Misra: Okay, and you think that there is like there is a there is still a lot of opportunity in the market like you You’re still growing at a fast pace.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yes, yeah, for sure. We I don’t think we’ve even scraped 1% of the United States yet. So I’m super excited. Yeah, I’m super excited to see what happens. Okay.

Sushant Misra: So So This, could you talk a little bit about your strategy for selling to big box stores? Because previously I’ve spoken to entrepreneurs and a lot of times you know, when someone is creating their own private label, they’re they’re kind of hesitant and going to you know, big box retailer because they say there’s a lot of asks from that their side, you know, and then on the back end, there’s a lot of like things, challenges like chargebacks and things like that. So at the end of the day, they’re they’re actually paying them to to sell their product rather than making any, like significant profit. What is your experience? Working with big box stores? What was the strategy behind it and is it working well for you?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah. So big box can be challenging. We’ve seen it in the beginning. We see it here and there now. But if you have a novelty product like we have no one’s making it. We’re patent protected. Companies like Dick’s Sporting Goods they need us to shelf there on their stores. They need new product lines. So we stay firm on our pricing and if they try to undercut us or they try to give us a deal that we don’t like, we will not end up working with them because it It reduces our our net income at the end of the day when we could be selling online to consumers through a.com fine or do different block store

Sushant Misra: and you’re working inside the US you’re working with big box stores through a distributor was what is the what is the benefit or challenge of working through to a distributor rather than like going directly to some of these big big box stores? Because I would assume that

Greg Meade of Crossnet: now we’re we’re working with the big box store directly.

Sushant Misra: Okay, okay. We got somewhere I think I read the we’re working with like some some sort of a retailer or something Spreetail

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah. So that’s, that’s a different, that’s a different entity. So retail is a great business that we work with. They purchase wholesale from us and large quantities, and then they distribute it through Amazon target Walmart online. So those Online they do our online they do our online channels. Yeah. They’ve been a great help.

Sushant Misra: And if you had tried to do that yourself you I would assume the only reason you’re working with them is because they have made it really easy for you to so you don’t have to manage that that part of the business but I would that take a certain percentage of the

Greg Meade of Crossnet: field. Yeah, so they definitely help out in the customer service aspect and the shipping. They make sure all orders are shipped out within like two business days. They arrive fast, smoothly, they have their own tubs for shipping out and they deal with all that stuff that we couldn’t even get on sometimes like so getting on Walmart comm Target. com home depot.com like those things are challenging and they presented the opportunity to us and they purchase large quantities so helps us out with purchase orders, you know, financially

Sushant Misra: and is it that you know, your product is a bit unique and this company’s retail recognize that you know, you Have a fight selling product. That’s why they wanted to work with you, or is it that anyone who creates a new product can simply go to them? And they would be okay with working with them like, well?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so we’re fortunate that CrossFit is like, it’s like I said it, I think it’s, I believe it’s a novelty product. So it’s something that no one’s ever seen before. It’s something that someone really wants to play at the end of the day, once you see it for the first time.  Spreetail recognized that they distribute razor scooters, they’re like the number one seller for them. So they they know good products, and they reach out to us before anyone’s shown love to us. So we we jumped on that and we’ve been working simultaneously since.

Sushant Misra: So they reached out to you. So the recognize the first selling product, they reached out to you they made a proposition and you said okay, that doesn’t make sense. What does your I know your three co founders, what does your team look like right now? In terms of like, beyond the co founders

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so our team structure right now as we have a social media manager, we have a marketing director. We have warehouse operations manager, customer service team. And then we have another warehouse fulfill operations manager who handles the shipping. So there’s about one to three, six of us right now underneath me, Mike and Chris are all we all work together daily to get get things done? And we have a bunch of agencies we work with about five I believe, off the top of my head. Who are social media and marketing team correlate with every day? Okay.

Sushant Misra: So basically, you are you have the in person logistics team, and then you work with agencies on the marketing side. Exactly. So I know you mentioned Facebook ads quite a bit on the marketing side. Are you also doing like Google ads? Like what are some of the marketing activities that are working really well for you and With like new customer acquisition

Greg Meade of Crossnet: for new customers, definitely Facebook. Number one, we do Google ads, Facebook, sorry, Twitter ads, Snapchat ads are performing pretty well right now for us. In the back end, once we get to consumers and we want to retarget them, emailing is great. We have a great email agency, boundless labs that we’ve been working with for the last eight months, I believe. And they’ve been phenomenal. With our with our merge clinic, we’re about 30% of our sales come from emails now, which is crazy.

Sushant Misra: So basically, you do some of these ads, people come on your site, maybe they don’t buy but they give you your email, their email address, and then you have a whole bunch of a whole email sequence and that ends up converting 30% of those people.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: About my child, Yeah, it does. Great.

Sushant Misra: Okay. And in terms of your social media, I do see that you know, on your Instagram and Facebook and other places, you do have large audience, is social media more or less a way for you to engage the customers? Or do you see that you’re able to convert people like when people come to your Instagram, they actually end up buying a product. How do you see your social media?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: I feel like our social media is kind of lacking at the current moment. We just hired a new social media person who’s done a phenomenal job in the last two weeks since then on boarded and we’re going to continue to grow our social medias, get really get into influencer marketing. We haven’t even touched that yet. So I believe once we touch influencer marketing, it’s a whole different different section of their business where we can grow.

Sushant Misra: One thing one thing that I’m really interested in, as you were saying, that is, how do you like when you think about these different marketing ideas and things like that? How does your team work? Like do your three co founder like you have daily meetings where you say, okay, you know, these are some of the new ideas that we should work on. What does that team dynamic look right look like in terms of If you’re deciding where should we be investing our money, our time or effort? Can you share that?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so it’s definitely It’s a wrap as we’re rapidly growing like so fast, where there’s so many new tasks we have to do daily. We make it we make a list of what we need to get done. We get it done for my aspect from Chris’s aspect from Mike’s aspect as founders and the leaders of the business. Mike’s in charge of Kevin and Chris are were outside and our Chris is in charge of Lindsay and mitko and Jay are other marketing side, and I oversee everyone too. So daily, I’ll be giving Chris a call, like five times a day, Mike call five times a day, and then I’ll call Jay and have been twice a day just to make sure that we’re all doing our task and if something comes up, we need to handle it. We okay.

Sushant Misra: So what happens when you sell your product, you know, it’s Across net game and this product what happens so, once a customer has made a purchase like this, this is I would assume this is a durable product, you know, a person can have for a few years they can play and you know, what happens to that customer offer? Is that the end of the customer journey for them, or are you selling Are you thinking about you know, selling to them some other additional things later on?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, so it’s definitely not the end of the customer journey we want people to really get engaged across not fall in love that come out to our tournament’s create their own leagues, develop an app where they can meet up with random people in play. And then they can also go to our website or to hopefully to our big box or soon in purchase our doubles net, which is 2121212. So it’s a team based game makes it more fun. Some people think it’s more fun, I like singles, but it’s like not to rely on a partner. But it makes it to a team game which is which is awesome. And then we also have the cross net HTML for from the pool.

Sushant Misra: From from the e commerce side what are some of the strategies and tools that you find work really well for you in terms of like when people come to the website and you know, they end up converting to a customer

Greg Meade of Crossnet: so yeah, just using using Klavio has been great for emails, Privy to start off with the capture the emails, as far as adding more, you know, revenue to your top line order using upsells upsell apps are great. So if someone purchases across net, don’t get offered a ball or a doubles net, and it increases the DOB of each order.

Sushant Misra: Which which upsell up are you using

Greg Meade of Crossnet: right now we’re using better cart, but it’s a new, it’s a new new upsell. It’s

Sushant Misra: so basically you someone makes a purchase. They have already been bid for this item and then see the see does this upsell not not before? Yep. Okay. After? Okay. So what does what is the one one question that I will I will have, you know, when I, when I was reading about your business, everything seemed like it within three years everything, it’s like all the pieces coming together really quickly and, and I’m sure there’s a lot of hard work that went into there. And, and I’m sure you know, there’s a lot of luck in there also somewhere. But I was also thinking like, you know, a lot of these ideas, do you have like mentors or advisers or, you know, people more experienced business people that, that you go to and ask for advice and, you know, and they help you out? Or is it just, you know, three people, three co founders, you know?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, to answer that straight up. No, not at all. It’s just us three. We’ve been grinding for the last three years. We’re all pretty smart at what we do. And we all are We all, you know, check each other to make sure we’re doing the best possible thing. So if Chris has an idea, me and Mike, we go over and say, Is this a good idea? And then usually is because Chris is smart, and then vice versa for Mike. So we make sure it’s go we adapt them and we learn on the go. Do we have people we reach out to legally for legal stuff? Yeah, we reached out to like our lawyers, and stuff like that. I know Chris and Mike, like the read, I’m not a big reader of like, reading like the mentorship books and stuff. So no, to answer that question, no.

Sushant Misra: Okay. And where do you see your business growing? I mean, of like, what is the future for your business? Where do you see your business like in five years? And what are some of the ideas that you, you know, that you want to pursue?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, that’s awesome question. I see crossing that in five years in almost every country, that’s a fully developed sport. That’s something we’re really really trying to do and develop. And then next next year, the column is really pushing out to different Countries I know, it’s different answer for some of our founders, Chris, he might want to see cross net in every school district in America, right? That’s different for him. But it’s a really just rapidly grow crossing into it to explore, evolve into a sport, not just a game that people play, it becomes a sport. And everyone knows what crossing the edge.

Sushant Misra: And with this, like this very unique experience that you had of creating this new sport. Do you ever think, Hey, I can take this and maybe try creating a new sport and building a new business? Or you’re like really just focused on this business like right now?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, we have, we have a lot of ideas. We’re ready to jump on anything next. That may come our way or another business that you know that that catches our interests, we might be able to work with them, which would be cool. But right now we’re really focused on cross net. We see the vision we see what’s going on this year. We see people need help with that. Coronavirus so we’ve been helping families throughout the whole year and we see the rapid growth and we haven’t even turned on the burners I keep saying that to our team. We haven’t even turned on like on the Jets yet. We don’t have a sales team in play. So once we get everything developed, it should be Christmas should be pretty darn pretty good.

Sushant Misra: By the way, the chrome the whole Coronavirus situation Did it hurt your business or did it help your business because you know, there was a lot of instructional restrictions on you know, people going out and things like that,

Greg Meade of Crossnet: ya know, helped us significantly we grew a business by like 500 x It was crazy. ourselves through went through the roof. We went into a backorder in the last few months which hurt us customer customer service wise and like customer like appreciation wise, it was unfortunate. People are waiting for the cross nets and we’re trying to get out of those situations moving forward. We have our supplies handled. And we want to make sure our customers get the best satisfaction moving forward with cross net and not having to wait for Across net due to high demand, and the chronic virus really just spiked it up. Like we would have never thought in a million years, we never detected a global pandemic.

Sushant Misra: So now we’re going to move on to our rapid fire round where I’m going to ask you a few questions and you have to answer them in one or two words or maybe one or two sentences. So I know you said you know you’re not a big book reader. Do you have any recommendations for book for entrepreneurs or business people and why?

Greg Meade of Crossnet: No, I don’t I that’s how I am. I know a lot of people would like to do that stuff. But that’s not who I am I learned from my friends and colleagues.

Sushant Misra: Okay. And innovative product or idea in the current ecommerce retail or tech landscape that you find exciting.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: repeat that question sorry,

Sushant Misra: innovative product or idea in the current ecommerce, retail or tech landscape.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: So there’s a product called new ball, our friend, our friend made it. We’re he’s a cool guy and go check it out after it’s a bad beach beach game. So it’s cool.

Sushant Misra: So that folks when you go Yeah. A productivity tool or software that you recommend

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Klaviyo email marketing.

Sushant Misra: Like do you What What software do you use for like collaborating with you know,

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Slack your team? Yeah. Black Yeah. flaxman great. I have our team actually was really designed Oh, sorry. It’s not rapid fire. But our team wasn’t really good with like communicating in like a slack or like an organized thing. Until like the last three weeks, which is funny. We’ve always just like I messaging for like for the longest time, okay.

Sushant Misra: a startup or business in e commerce retailer tech that you is doing great things right now.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Truff hot sauce, guys over there two parts, okay? https://truffhotsauce.com/

Sushant Misra: A peer entrepreneur, a business person who inspires you.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: I gotta go with my partners, Mike and Chris.

Sushant Misra: Cool, best business advice that you’ve ever received or you would give to other entrepreneurs.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Um, don’t be scared to tear up to risk on adspend. So spend money on if you see anything, push it up, push it, push it, push it, keep going.

Sushant Misra: As long as you see that you’re making more money than you’re okay. Yes, of course. And, and the final question and this would be very interesting for me. How what percentage of your success up until now, you attribute to luck worth of like, hard work.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: 99% hardwork 1% luck.

Sushant Misra: Okay. All right. Well, those were those were all the questions that I had for you today. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today here. In the next, you know, if you want to share your website, any other products that you want to promote your contact information, please go ahead.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah, you can, um, you can reach out to us at cross net game on social medias. Cross net game comm is where you can pick up a cross site support directly from our.com website.

Sushant Misra: Perfect. Thank you so much, Greg, for joining us today. Trep Talks really enjoyed talking to you and thanks for sharing your story and some of the business director insights. Really appreciate it.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s been a blast. Perfect.

Sushant Misra: Was that okay, do you do i know i know you did. I thought a lot of interviews. So this must be like a regular thing for you. I guess.

Greg Meade of Crossnet: Yeah.