- Greg Meade
- Co-Founder of CROSSNET
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Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talk with Greg Meade about how to identify your target market. This is a business eCommerce episode one 24
Charles (00:15):
Today’s episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It’s of world’s first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you’re ever in an eCommerce store, you need to have drip a try and here’s why. Tripp offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There’s robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing, one of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation rules visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It’s powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools and offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that’s drip.com/b O E now onto the show. Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Charles
[inaudible]
and I’m here today with Greg Meade. Greg is a cofounder of cross Nash, a full way volleyball game that merged official volleyball with Foursquare that he created with two of his childhood friends. I asked Greg on the show tonight to chat about his process and identifying a target market. So, Hey Greg, how are you doing today?
Greg (01:31):
Doing well, how are you? Thanks for having me.
Charles (01:32):
Yeah, awesome to have you on. First real quick about the product actually. So kind of explained in the intro but, and I’ve seen videos and for people that are kind of just listening in what, what is the product exactly? It’s a game that’s, and I’ve played Foursquare, I remember playing and I was a kid from new must be around the same age I guess. I guess in the eighties. Foursquare was like a big thing. So, so I remember that, but people who don’t remember that, I haven’t seen the site. What exactly is the product?
Greg (02:02):
Yeah. So crossing it is the world’s first Foursquare volleyball game. Like you said, it is traditional Foursquare, but we incorporated volleyball. So you gotta hit in there this time instead of bouncing on the, on the ground.
Charles (02:13):
Okay. So it’s something a lot of people play. Like I’m guessing, I looked at the site people hit the beach and stuff like that, right? So it’s kinda, you know,
Greg (02:21):
The beets beach grass, we just got an indoor model. So what we’re going to get in a lot more physical education curriculum in schools. So yeah.
Charles (02:30):
Yeah. So I think kind of the idea of identifying your target market, I feel like this is one of those things where if you come up with a product for us, then you’re trying to figure out like, how do we get it in the head? Like, like you could see the product, right? You could see exactly how this happens. You get the product and you’re like, Ooh, this is fun. We can play this. And you play yourself and you’re like, who are those people that want to play? Like, who are the people like us that want to play this game? I’m guessing that’s how that kind of started.
Greg (02:54):
Yeah, exactly. So we would bring it to the beach to start off and we’d get a lot of traction. A lot of people will come up to it. Get in line, ask questions, take photos, take videos, want to play. It gets crazy. So when you set it up it’s the first time seeing it for the majority of people in the world. So they’ll, they’ll, they’ll create this rush and energy around it, which brings other people. But besides organic growth like that, you have to do the social media side, the marketing side, the, the obviously the internet side. So that took us a little while to figure out our actual target market, I would say about a year to officially find it and hone in on it. And at the end of the day, it turns out our best sellers are moms and dads.
Greg (03:33):
So parents, I guess essentially we’re purchasing it for the kids and we thought it would be volleyball players, athletes the college kids we went in because there’s this large demographic we can hit and it seems like the volleyball players would be our first bet to just hone in on those and try to try to attack them. But we didn’t really get as good as a turnout as we wanted. When it came to volleyball players, we’re not sure if it’s cause they would have used the volleyball and they think they’re too cool for it. We don’t know. So, so we really locked in and we saw a lot of moms purchasing, purchasing over the holiday summer. And then we just really focus on targeting moms when it comes to marketing, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, all that YouTube.
Charles (04:13):
Okay. So you basically, when you launched it, it was very organic, right? So you probably just put it on your Facebook and you know, how many co-founders is that three of you guys?
Greg (04:22):
There’s, yeah, there’s three of us, my mess and Mike and my brother.
Charles (04:25):
Cool. So you probably just showed her on your Facebook and organic orders started coming in, but you can only go so much from there. So it probably, I’m guessing plateaued at some point where you’re like, all right, now we need to actually like tell, tell people outside of our circle about this.
Greg (04:38):
Yeah. So w we had a plan to obviously get it, make it global game. And when it did happen fairly quickly actually since this only our year to officially of selling. So we, we did start it with our friends and just bring it to the beach, getting traction, getting just organic reviews and listening and hearing people’s a little about their flaws are to try to fix the game and what not. And then eventually we, we really had to take it to the next level cause it was just staying stagnant. Obviously. Like you said, we really need to push it in and that’s when we honed in on different targets and trying to figure out what the best.
Charles (05:09):
So what was that process like? When you say you honed in on different targets, like what did you do first to reach the volleyball players and how did you realize and how did you come to that process of like, Ooh, did not, like, it’s not like resonating with them. And then how, how’d you, like how did you decide to make a shift and how many shifts do you have to make to actually jump to parents?
Greg (05:27):
Yeah. so we’ve always targeted just a vast majority of everyone. Right? But when you, when you’re doing Facebook ads, do you want to target certain demographics, age, gender by their income and then by the ad copy itself on the actual the Facebook ad, you know, so you want to talk about it towards a mom saying, Hey, your children’s spends X amount of time outside a year. If you get crossing it, you’re going to get your kid out there even times to, you know, so simple things like that. But we first started struggling when we first launched. We were going to like volleyball, volleyball tournament, which is still good to go to obviously, but we weren’t getting the, you know, the reception like we wanted it. So when we bring in front of parents and moms, they’re always interested because they want to get a new stuff for their kids and I want to get their kids outdoors. We’re living in the craziest century of all time with on our phone. So parents were trying to get their kids more active.
Charles (06:18):
Yeah. But how did you, like, how did you make that mental leap? Like you sit in there and you’re going to these conferences, you’re talking to volleyball players, and then how did you one day just say like, Ooh, like these mums are sitting over here and they seem like, like these volleyball players aren’t getting that excited, but these mothers are getting excited.
Greg (06:35):
Pick that up mentally. Like in person, you don’t really register that. But once we went through our data through our online platform, we just kept noticing there’s an attraction of snowball effect of parents ordering and female moms. So, and we really like, then, then we’re like, okay, we got to really hone in here.
Charles (06:53):
How did, you know, so you dumped through, I’m guessing just old order data basically and just like, yeah, exactly. Yep. And then how did you come to that conclusion of saying like, like, you know, all these, like you basically seem random names, but how did you realize like, Oh, these are, these are moms buying for the kids, not these aren’t volleyball players taking typical play with them, their own, yeah.
Greg (07:13):
You see that in the, in the data, obviously the age and, and the times and where they live and all that. So we, we, we honed in on their gender and their age and we could see that. And we also see in there like our messages, Instagram direct messages, Facebook, it’s always parents just like asking questions about height, height, sizes where can you set it up, stuff like that. So we, we, we pick it up after a year. It probably should have done it earlier.
Charles (07:38):
No, it’s, it’s one of those things where I feel like at first, like wandering around the desert and you’re like looking for like the little speck of water somewhere and you’re like, we can’t find, you just have to kind of wander until you find that that spec. It sounds like, so basically you just had all this data. You can’t tell from ordinator alone. Right. You can’t tell who they are, why they’re buying. You can just tell, Oh, Sally bought this, like, and she lives over here and you know, maybe she lives in San Diego, so, but you can’t tell, Oh, Sally’s going to the beach with our kids. And that like, it’s hard to make that leap. But then when you start looking at, you know, probably I’m guessing like emails, like customer emails, questions like that come in. That’s where you start kind of putting it together and go, Oh Sally, she, yeah, she’s asked about the height. She asked him if it, is it 36 inches tall? Not because she’s not 36 inches tall because she has a kid that is so, yeah,
Greg (08:26):
Exactly. And then like Christmas, stirring holidays, it’s always getting gifts, gifts, gifts. So who you getting guests for? Obviously your children and your cousins and he says no.
Charles (08:33):
Okay. That’s that. So it’s interesting. Yeah, it really takes, it takes like a year of data then it sounds like to actually basically you just at first it’s almost like you’re just selling to anyone that wants to buy. Like it’s almost just like you have money, buy this thing. Sounds great. Okay, cool. But then you start, actually, it sounds like you’re going through and actually figuring out, okay, who are the groups that are buying a lot more than this other group?
Greg (08:59):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we, we started off just selling everyone. Like I said, it don’t get me wrong, people still love it. Volleyball players love it. College kids, students. And then, then the kids obviously too, but we really realized that a majority of our sales are coming from this adult category.
Charles (09:15):
Yeah. And that’s the thing, right? So you only have, you have X amount of marketing spend each month. Right. So yeah, you can, you could throw a little bit, you know, put 10% of volleyball players, 10% in college students, 10% here. But if you just know, okay, we just sell five to one with moms who have parents, that sort of thing, let’s just go a hundred percent. Let’s like, let’s go all in. And they’re far it sounds like. And then at some point, once we’ve kind of figured out we’re tapping that niche, now let’s go now. Let’s actually start exploring the next one and the next one. Exactly. That’s our game plan. So how did you kind of dial in the marketing message? How did you know at that point? So now we want to talk to moms. What’s kind of the next step of saying we want to dial in that marketing message with them?
Greg (10:00):
We’re, we’re still contained to improve that daily as we speak. So it would be more of an ad copy, like I was saying earlier. Just make it sh, make sure it’s honed in on, on a message that these parents are receiving it and then it’s, it’s triggered, triggered into their brain that it’s actually for their, for their children and not them. You know what I’m saying?
Charles (10:16):
Yeah. So now it’s ad copy and I’m guessing like post-fall so now it’s like the whole funnel basically. It can be tailored more towards that demographic.
Greg (10:26):
Exactly. Yeah. So we have different demo funnels for demographics, you know?
Charles (10:32):
Hmm. Okay. So are they off a parents or what’s that gonna look like?
Greg (10:36):
Yeah, so I mean, when we’re running the fund, it would be based off pants. Yeah. And then we’d have our parents, one would have just the female parents one, you know, so there’s a whole bunch of different things we, we test and continue to test and share. We’ll continue to test for years.
Charles (10:49):
Yeah. Okay. That’s, this is very very, very like math driven marketing strategy. It sounds like. This isn’t just like, Oh, we write some blog articles and hope they come. This is like, you have a funnel and you’re testing each one.
Greg (11:02):
Yeah. We pushed everywhere. It’s emails, we still have to get better and everything. Social media there’s a whole bunch of different aspects that we’re continuing to grow in and hopefully we do better and improve in the years to come.
Charles (11:14):
Where does that come from? Cause I feel like that’s not natural for a lot of people. Like some people just want to do the, Hey, I came up with this cool product, I’m just going to kind of like talk about it and see who shows up at the door. But it sounds like you guys more like we came with the product but now we gotta like focus. Like where did that come from?
Greg (11:30):
I think that just stems from the us. Three of the founders. We have a passion for creating stuff. Mike’s engineer from North he went to Northeastern in Boston. So I like smarts. I went to Walmart next door. There you go. Nice. So that’s cool. So he’s very intelligent. So he came to me one day and he’s like, well, let’s do something. So we came up with cross knit after like sitting at a couch for like 18 hours watching ESPN highlights and it finally clicked. And then we built the prototype. The next day we went to Walmart, bought two nets, put them against my mom’s shed in a tree, and then we just continued to play and play and obviously developed prototypes that took a few months, eight months I would say. And then and then we, then I do some social media and my background before this also, I, I knew how would you get a little push more than the normal user. And then Chris, my brother, he he used to work at Uber. And he would do like the minute management for the whole district of like the Boston and stuff, Uber eats. So he’s, he’s a great salesperson. So our team is pretty pretty dynamic and we cover all aspects.
Charles (12:33):
Yeah. So it sounds like you guys kind of had some marketing chops before this and you’re kind of now leveraging that on. Okay. And how did you know how to get the product actually kind of built and that whole logistics side of the business? I feel like that one’s not, some people are a little heavier on that side and other people are a little heavier on the marketing side.
Greg (12:51):
Yes. So for me, I’m the marketing guy and my brother a sales and Mike’s an engineer from Northeastern. So he got the, he got the Putnam head. Gumbo is fun for him. Obviously it was a headache as well. Just constant improvements until it finally was the one that we wanted. And we continue to develop an improved product cause we want it. Customer satisfaction is our number one importance. But Mike, Mike is definitely our guy for creating, developing and getting prototypes done.
Charles (13:15):
Okay. Gotcha. So yeah, so having the well balanced team, cause I definitely see folks that kind of work with a lot of startups and you see folks that maybe don’t have a marketing background or don’t actually have the prototype and background. And then that’s usually where we’re, whatever that missing pieces. That’s obviously where people kind of get hung up. But it’s hard to kind of know that ahead of time that you know, if you’re good at marketing, that’s not why you’re gonna fail. If you’re good at prototyping, like you’re not going to fail there. You have to double down on this decide to be a weak ass. But it sounds like the nice part is having kind of the three, it’s a very well rounded team.
Greg (13:49):
Yeah. And we definitely, we outsource too. So definitely take advantage of that. If you’re up and coming business, make sure you’re outsourcing, getting virtual assistance. They, they do hard work and make sure you find good people that work with your team and, and like your interview.
Charles (14:02):
Do you outsource any of the marketing side or is that, do you guys, is that something you all do in house?
Greg (14:06):
Yeah, no, we definitely, we outsource here and there. So for like social media, we’ll have someone on our messages running our social media platforms for messaging people on LinkedIn, connecting with them. Just simple things like that. It just, it just adds up. Helping with creating templates for the emails. Outsourcing our email campaigns, everything. Cause you can’t do it yourself if you want to get to the company to where you want it to be, you can’t do it yourself.
Charles (14:30):
Mm. Okay. So you’re bringing in a lot of different, all kinds of VAs or different,
Greg (14:35):
Yeah, yeah. VA’s part time folks. Yeah.
Charles (14:37):
Okay. And then, so what’s kind of the next step? So now that you’ve kind of found that one vertical, is it just constant double down in that vertical or do you spend some time looking for new markets?
Greg (14:52):
No, it’s, it’s definitely a double down once we figure out what’s going on in that, in that, in that target demographic, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing. And then, then the next step is let’s, let’s go bring this to the next level somewhere else. So we were lacking all last year. We were lacking in doing trade shows, events, all that. Cause we were busy just doing the interior stuff across that. So this year we have a whole world tour of the whole year. We’re going on tour to go to events, festivals. We have everything lined up from cramp camps. So it’s cool.
Charles (15:22):
Okay. So now you’re basically trying to target the same, you’re basically selling the same product to the same type of person but in different top of the funnel channels. Okay.
Greg (15:33):
Exactly. Cause we have everything running in the backend completely fine. And obviously we improve that, but since we have that handled now we gotta take it to the next step and then after that tournament so that more tournaments. So there’s a lot, a lot to cover.
Charles (15:46):
Yeah. It sounds like this is the part I feel like a lot of people like try to like skip steps. But it sounds like you guys have really built this whole like let’s just build one funnel that works. Like just find, it doesn’t like just anything that works and now let’s start plugging other stuff into that and see, Oh, does that convert better? Does that convert worse? But it sounds like you guys could really kind of just like built that one piece at a time.
Greg (16:07):
Yeah. That’s what we did. We where you stay patient. We don’t, we don’t make mistakes as much as I guess other companies. So we’re very smart when it comes to spending money and I’m just planning for the next step.
Charles (16:19):
What was kind of the the process that did you start with, you know, when you kind of look at the whole funnel, right? There’s definitely a debate on should we start with the top of the funnel and just bringing people in and then figuring out how to kind of warm them up a little and then figure out how to convert them? Or do you kind of figure out the conversion piece first and go that direction? Like do you start at the bottom of the top?
Greg (16:41):
That’s a good question. For us, when we started just bringing everyone in, right. And then, then we honed in on on certain channels and aspects. So I guess that’d be the top of it. Right. And just bring everyone in at once.
Charles (16:53):
Yeah. People with money, people, but people don’t want to buy things. Just like come on in. Let’s see.
Greg (17:00):
Yeah. Our game isn’t the cheapest product. You see other products in our niche, they’re cheaper, but our game is also to volleyball and that’s, people have to realize and it’s the first of its kind. So it’s innovative and it’s not too expensive, but it’s definitely out of a 12 year olds. You know, it’s one 49 99 or now.
Charles (17:21):
Okay. So more than like a tennis ball sort of more than like the standard, you know, ball that you bring to the beach. Okay. So it’s more of SUMAR looking like apparel, buy this as like a gift and not like at the, not like at the gas station like right before you go to the beach sort of thing. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Very cool. What kind of ways have you found that have been working so far to actually target folks? You mentioned Facebook, Instagram as well.
Greg (17:47):
Yeah, definitely. Facebook’s one for sure. For us. For our, for our demographic as this stated parents love Facebook, so we’re going to cap cube, capitalizing on that. We also need to start getting into other channels. I kicked off. That’s extremely popular now. Of course, I mean among the kids. So we’re gonna start trying to hone it into that too. It’s a lot of channels to try to capitalize on, but to tops our next mentor for sure.
Charles (18:14):
Yeah. But it sounds like since you have the nice part is now that you have that one funnel working, you could basically do the same with a tech talk and just at that point you’re just running numbers, right. And seeing this converts at this rate has, has spent on the top, has the bottom analysis run a talk version? Is it doing, you know, the same double double the rate of half the race. So, you know, kind of have some benchmarks at this point, which sounds pretty awesome.
Greg (18:41):
Yeah. Which is great though.
Charles (18:43):
Everyone kind of complains about rising Facebook rates and you know, you can’t make money anymore like running Facebook ads. What are you kind of say to that?
Greg (18:51):
I don’t agree at all. Facebook’s definitely solid. As long as you have the right videos, the right ad copy and, and you’re, you’re not, you’re scaling appropriately and smart. You’re not just going in there one day and spending a thousand dollars like you gotta lose it. We start at $20 a campaign skeleton the next week, the 50 and then we see it as well we scale to one 50 and then after that it’s at 300 then 500 you know, so we, we scale it properly and if it doesn’t work, if we’re at one 5,300 it doesn’t work. We, we focus on that and we, and we hone in and we say, what can we do to fix this? Should we shut it off? Should we a little bit spend? So we raise the spend. So it basically works for us. We do have a like a higher price product so it can work in our favor I guess a little more than a $8 product, $10 product, whatever it may be.
Charles (19:40):
Yeah. So you probably have, it’s a higher priced product and I’m guessing since you make it yourself, since you kind of are employing them decent margins, so you have enough there, right, that if you’re taking X percent from, you can actually, you have enough margin to say let’s put 10% of the purchase cost towards ads or whatever that is. And like, so there’s something there versus folks that are just kind of saying we have this like, you know, 5% margin, there’s nothing left over to actually,
Greg (20:05):
Yeah, for sure. And at the end of the day, obviously return on all ads is great, but if we’re just getting our name out there and breaking even, we’re causing brand awareness. So at the end of the day, we want this game in everyone’s heads and they know what it is they see at the beach. They know what crossed out. So that’s our game plan.
Charles (20:23):
Yeah. Okay. I can kind of, yeah, it’s one of those things where you like, you can’t do this game in private. Like it’s not a game. You can take them like play, you almost like can’t play it in private, so you have to play in public. So other people just by definition are gonna you’re gonna be at a park, you’re gonna be at a beach, people have to see it and you’re gonna play with like a random stranger to most likely, like some other kids are gonna come in line and say, can we play next? Yeah. And then, yeah, I could definitely see. Then the other parent of that kid is going to want it. And it’s just kind of, there is, yeah. You have this nice viral component time, I’m going to guess on the net and the ball. There’s some sort of branding. Yeah,
Greg (20:59):
Of course. Yeah. It has our logo and social media and stuff. Yeah. So it’s cool.
Charles (21:04):
Okay. So they, Oh, so they all see, they go right to like a Facebook page at that point.
Greg (21:07):
Yeah. So, so on our net we have the Facebook logo. Instagram, we have, we have our social media app on the, what do you call it, on the bottom of the net. So if parents, every time a parent sees it, they’re like, what’s this called? It clearly says cross net and it’s like, Oh, it’s crossing it. And then they’re like, Oh, how can I buy it? It’s like Greg, I once I start here and then that so you can follow this messenger will answer.
Charles (21:29):
Ah, I get it. And the nice part is it’s like like the name of the game is the name of the company. Like there’s no other like, like it’s not like Foursquare, it’s like this generic name and like, Oh I need a Foursquare ball. And like, Oh there’s like, you know, 3000 people on Amazon sell a four square ball. Like whatever that is. This is like, Oh, what’s that game crossing out? How do you get crossed out? You got across Nash like basically, yeah, so like the game is the name of the company. So like it really is building a brand it sounds like. Yeah, for sure. That is very cool. And then it kind of allows you basically at that point on the brand, on the name of the game own pretty much you own the sport at that point.
Greg (22:12):
Yeah, exactly. And that’s, that’s the whole concept of it and the whole idea of getting this global,
Charles (22:18):
That is very cool. So yeah. Then you’re able to basically, so at this point, are you mainly U S mainly North America or have you kind of,
Greg (22:26):
We’re mainly U S yeah, we’ve definitely hit three 30 40 countries I think now. Which is awesome to see it. Shipping prices are a bit tricky, so we’re working on that this year. But we do get a lot of them from Australia, South America, Mexico, so it’s cool to see those places.
Charles (22:44):
Okay. But you target your marketing efforts all to us, but it just happens to kind of virally.
Greg (22:49):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s, yeah. So yeah, we target us and Canada. Canada shows a lot of love. They showed more love than the USA at first, so, Oh wow. Canada. Yeah. They want, they want volleyball. So I didn’t know that. I’m not the biggest volleyball fan, so I wasn’t really aware of the demographics,
Charles (23:07):
So okay. So, so then at that point you’re basically saying like whatever works in the U S you could almost just keep like apply that same playbook at this point next year in 2020 and kind of just start going to, let’s go to Mexico, let’s run campaigns in Brazil and kind of just attack it that way.
Greg (23:24):
Exactly. Once everything’s funneled properly in the United States, then hopefully we can just start taking over different channels and different countries.
Charles (23:31):
Is that what the big plan is for 2020 or what’s kind of coming up next?
Greg (23:36):
That would be ideal. But I don’t foresee us really capitalizing too much internationally this year. Definitely, definitely a little towards the end probably. But to really take over a whole country, it takes a lot of time. So we’re going to still continue to do U S make sure everyone knows who we are. I’m at end of the year, hopefully. What is the plan that in the U S then for 20, like what is like right now running ads, are you trying to explain expand channels or what’s kind of a goal? So we’re going to continue, we’re going to continue our Facebook ads, all those type of ads. But our next goal is to get to these events and trade shows and we’re looking to expand into camps. We’re looking to expand it to more physical education curriculums in schools.
Greg (24:20):
We definitely want to be in every classroom in the United States. We know gym teachers they have a very hard time getting kids to focus on games sometimes. Typically, you know, the basic sports basketball people will all kind of join in cause it’s, it’s known, but some sports they try to make up and it’s tougher to the physical education teachers. So we want to bring something to the curriculum that gets everyone involved. So when a physical education teacher plays volleyball, a lot of kids are just standing there and don’t touch the ball. Sometimes you know the skeleton, but what’s crossing it? They get to touch every two seconds because there’s only four people, you know, and you can keep it rotating.
Charles (24:55):
Oh, okay. I see. Yeah. So this is a nice, so no one’s like pick last. No one’s like you kinda forced where you just kind of like rotating basically constantly.
Greg (25:02):
Yeah. So my knowledge as a physical education teacher, you just want your kids active and constantly moving and involved with the sport. So across that they can set up for nets and the whole class can play constantly, keep rotating, boom, easy. How long would you start the business to end? Mid 2017 but when it starts selling until mid 2018 like one of those processes, you feel like we’re kind of onto something here. Like when does it, when does it become more than like, Hey, we’re selling a ball and have that till like, Oh, we have like a, we have a real business it sounds like. I mean, we get that question. I got a out, I would say as soon as we got the first prototype in we knew, we knew we had something. So we took it from there and we, we knew we got to take it serious. How’d you know that? Cause we set it up at a beach and we had 20 people around it instantly. And then when we were just like, we’re like, what is happening? So it was cool feeling culturally it still is every time. Sometimes we get annoyed cause we’re just trying to play our own game and we have people come up and kind of play. So it’s funny.
Charles (26:04):
Wow that’s, that’s a, that’s a high class problem to have where you’re like, Oh we’re just trying to test this prototype and people are like, what can I buy that? Like ah, it’s just a prototype. Go away.
Greg (26:13):
Yeah. That is that, that is not a problem you have people having often. But it’s a very, what was that, what was that like actually having that experience? It does happen here and there. We don’t play as much as we want to anymore cause we’re kind of all in on that, on the computers and stuff. But every time we do we set it up. Some people want to join in and it’s like, Oh we’re just trying to play cause we kind of play competitively with the founders and like our friends, we’ll play it for like dinner that night whenever, when it gets free dinner. So it gets fun. You guys were talking before the show, you’re on the West coast, right? I’m in San Diego. My partner Mike, he’s in Colorado and my brother Chris is in Miami.
Charles (26:50):
Okay. So completely, completely distributed.
Greg (26:54):
Yeah, we’re all, we’re all from Connecticut originally, so we moved from Connecticut to Miami as a team for a year and then we grinded for a year straight and then we all just kind of went our own ways because we work from our computers.
Charles (27:06):
Wow. Okay. So you, so you started, you don’t have that one off in either a starting as kind of a in-person company and then just like just like changing a remote one day.
Greg (27:16):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s fun. What was that like? I mean does it make it more challenging? Not really. Cause we have face time nowadays like we can do, we just call each other every check and we’re just like on the phone with each other. So it’s the same as in Paris and we get less aggravated with each other. If you’re with someone the same day for two years straight, it can get annoying regardless of it is your friend, girlfriend mom. So I think it helps in some aspects too.
Charles (27:42):
Yeah, it definitely, and probably nice too just having West coast and East coast, it kind of gives you a little more time overlap as well. Just kind of something needs to happen. You can kind of,
Greg (27:53):
I just moved here so the time things and kind of getting struggling from me cause everyone’s on the East coast and I’m just like, I’m waking up last and it’s like everyone’s had to me.
Charles (28:02):
You’re doing, you’re doing the night shift over there on the West coast. Yeah it was get the phone calls in with the West coast folks and they’re like, yeah. Can you talk at like 7:00 PM and like, no. Very cool. Awesome. I think that’s super helpful. Definitely an interesting story. Any kind of, any kind of other things you kind of want to mention things to plug places people can find you.
Greg (28:25):
Yeah, I’m crossing it. Game.Com is our website. You can message us on Facebook, Instagram at crossing a game. We’ll respond within the day. If you saw us on this podcast, let us know and lock you up. Awesome. Great. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Greg (28:43):
Yeah.
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