He Left The Daily Grind Behind And Launched A Fast-Growing Backyard-Games Startup
Chris Meade was looking for a way out of a soul-sucking corporate job when he co-founded CROSSNET, a four-way volleyball game, about seven years ago. Today, the Miami-based company brings in $45 million in revenue.
Chris (top left) teamed up with his brother, Gregory (middle), and friend, Mike Delpapa (right), while working for a ride-share food delivery service in New York City, where he spent long days making cold calls. “I realized I just wasn’t cut out to have a boss and the nine-to-five grind in a cubicle,” he recalled.
Chris spoke at a panel I moderated on May 12 for the New York Public Library in the “Tiny Business, Big Money series on “Income Streams That Will Keep Your Business Going No Matter What.” He joined entrepreneurs Sonsoles Gonzalez, founder of the hair-care brand Better Not Younger; Angie Raja, co-founder of the sporting goods maker RIMSports; and Steve Ferreira, founder of Ocean Audit, an ocean freight auditing company.
Although Chris needed to make a living—he was living in Brooklyn, N.Y., at the time and saddled with student loans—he decided he didn’t want to hand over control of his life to his company, no matter how much effort it took to break free. One day, he and his brother, Gregory, and their friend, Mike Delpapa, stayed up until the wee hours of the morning brainstorming ideas for a business they could start.
That was when they dreamed up the idea for CROSSNET. Mike, an engineer, designed a prototype, and they found a manufacturer on Alibaba, an online marketplace for makers.
“We liquidated our 401ks and just went for it,” recalls Chris. “And we said, worst comes to worst, we’ll go back to this job that we hate. And fortunately, we never went back to our jobs.”
Chris’s cold-calling skills came in handy when he reached out to SCHEELS, a Midwestern sporting goods chain. SCHEELS opted to stock the new game in several stores. When the product sold out, SCHEELS reordered it for even more stores.
Now, customers buy CROSSNET in 5,000 retail stores across America, from Amazon to Target; the brand has since developed a suite of approximately 15 products. Beyond that, Chris is co-founder of Founders Club, an invitation-only entrepreneurship community with approximately 400 members. It receives nearly 250 applications per week. “If you’re not a social butterfly, it’s really hard to meet somebody who’s going through the same pain points as you,” he said.
If you’re looking for a way out of a job that’s just not working for you, Chris is your man. Here are some of the tips he shared at the panel:
Focus on one revenue stream at a time.
Chris started out as an entrepreneur in dropshipping, selling books and Fisher Price toys on Amazon. At first, he used the shotgun approach, which helped him build momentum: “I’d list 150 products a day on Amazon and come home, and there’d be sales every single morning when I woke up, which was an incredible feeling,” he said.
Gradually, he learned that it was better to focus on one revenue stream rather than many. “Stick with one until it’s working,” he advised. “If I did not go all in on CROSSNET, it wouldn’t have allowed me to get to the other opportunities.”
Protect your energy. Although Chris’s business makes millions, he decided early on that work wasn’t his only reason for being. “You can’t be spending every single minute of the day making money or focusing on work,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll just burn yourself out. I’m married. I try to have some downtime after six o’clock every night with my wife and my friends.”
Cut your losses early. When Chris and his partners opened a warehouse for CROSSNET, as a source of side income, they had approximately 15,000 square feet of space but were only utilizing 10,000. “So, naturally, the entrepreneur in me said, ‘Let’s fill the 5,000 square feet with other people’s products and ship their stuff,’” he recalled.
That backfired. “What ended up happening was just nonstop complaints,” he said. “It was so much focus and attention away from the products that were actually making us money in the business.”
They shut down that operation quickly, but he has no regrets. “Not every business is a good business, but at least I could say, ‘I tried,” he said. “I don’t have in the back of my head, ‘Oh, what could have been. I did it. I checked it off, and it was time to move on. And it allowed me to position myself for better businesses in the future.”
Don’t believe the hype about passive income. If earning passive income were as easy as some say, wouldn’t everyone be raking it in?
“Things like drop shipping are good to dip your toes in and to learn the fundamentals of business and how e-commerce works and how running a business works,” he said. “But I’d also be wary of the snake oil salesmen online, trying always to get you to do stuff because you’re going to make a quick buck. If it seems too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true.”
Stay in the game. Many entrepreneurs fall prey to the desire for instant gratification, working on an idea for a week, a month, or two months and then quitting when they don’t experience overnight success. What’s more important is developing the mental toughness to stick with what you’re doing, according to Chris. “The hardest thing about entrepreneurship is that you need to learn how to stay alive and not give up until it works,” he said.
Chris and his partners didn’t pay themselves for the first two years of the business. “I was working odd jobs by night or by day just to keep the lights on,” he said. “And one day, we had a break—we made $2 million in a year after making 90 grand the year before. We had that lucky break because we didn’t give up. It took two years. And had I given up on any of those days, I wouldn’t be on this panel. I wouldn’t be building this business. I would be back at my job that I hated.”
Keep it real.
Although Chris uses time-saving apps and tools like Notion, Google Notes and Slack, he says there’s no substitute for an authentic conversation, whether with potential customer or a retailer who might stock your products. That can’t be done with ChatGPT or “crazy, Harry Potter novels of sales pitches,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”
He keeps his communication short, sweet and to the point. For instance, in sending an email to a buyer for a retail chain, he might send a note along the lines of “Hey, why don’t you have the world’s first four-way volleyball game at your store? You’re missing out on thousands of sales.”
Ultimately, he found, customers want something that can’t be faked: a
genuine connection. “People want to be spoken to like humans,” he said.
Interesting game!