The Cheese #32 🧀 - Paraplegic Dogs, 100+ hour work weeks, and Mr. Wonderful

100+ hour work weeks until BattlGames

First full week having 2 full-time jobs (normal job and my inherited runner of BattlGames job). To make things even smoother, my wife is in Seattle for a conference all week (sarcasm). Faye (Johnny’s nanny) is here all week from 9-5 so that I can work semi uninterrupted during that time (besides also caring for Dobby who at this point cannot walk at all, needs meds 3x a day, needs food/water at least 3x a day, and since he cannot walk, that means he needs help going to the bathroom too). Once I get Johnny down around 8pm, I have then been putting the bunnies away and bringing the dogs downstairs where I am working until 12 or 1. This is not sustainable, but wife gets back on Friday and BattlGames is in 2 weeks. There is absolutely light at the end of the tunnel.

Whatnot Update: As of Wednesday night, we are sitting at $158k in revenue for the month with 5 shows left so unless something really bad happens, we should absolutely destroy our record of $166k in July. We baked the September schedule this week and there is no reason why September does not beat August. Exciting times for sure for this new channel. We actually had a really good call with Whatnot this week talking over the technology we need to further scale (their CTO/Co-Founder was on it) so feeling really bullish about the relationship at this point too.

Chuck (our new Director of Sales that starts in 2 weeks) will make his Whatnot Debut at BattlGames and we have a couple of interviews setup with potential additional hosts.

Keeping the LIVE SHOPPING theme going, we did a test of TikTok Live Selling this week. Only an hour and a half show, but the results were not great. We will figure it out, just have not yet. Will do a full write up of this soon.

Member Acquisition Update: We received a new batch of premium duffel bags so we launched our much needed third iteration of the Survival Bag Promo. Hopefully it performs at the same rate as the previous 2 runs of it. Related side note, all of our other intro offers have really hit a wall and performance has been far from scalable. We absolutely need to be thinking of another banger intro offer.

BattlBox is making some serious moves on the hiring front. You know about Chuck. Michael accepted the offer to come on as our new Content Coordinator this week and Seele accepted her offer to join our procurement and events team (spoiler - we are doing a slight re-org with existing team members that will absolutely dominate BattlGames planning on future years).

No Carb Update. I thought I was going to go last weekend without carbs. My mom came over on my birthday (Saturday) and spent the night to help me with Johnny. We had my famous almost no carb Italian chopped salad for lunch. Then something happened. Double Uber Eats Order. Burger King for some Double Whoppers and Dunkin for half a dozen donuts. They were good.

I kept the carb loading into Sunday when Johnny requested my also famous Banana Bread Muffins. I made 12 and I had to taste test 3 of them to make sure they were acceptable to feed to him. Monday hit and I went back to no carb mode and have been in that mode since. Current weight is at 131.2 (down half a pound) so I basically just maintained with my weekend choices (and still have not rebounded fully from Connecticut).

Let’s get into the rest of this!

Hack Your Buyer’s Brain

Sales Expert and friend, Leslie Venetz stop by the queso to drop some serius knowledge bombs. Topic? How to hack your buyer’s brain. It’s good stuff.

Pizza Review: Modern Apizza - New Haven, CT

Continuing the illusion that I think I am Dave Portnoy, I dropped another pizza review. This time I breakdown 3 pizzas from Modern in New Haven (8.8 score from Portnoy).

Spoiler: I did NOT score it that high.

A card was sold for $12.9M this week

Whether you are into Sports Cards like me or not, a card was sold for $12.9M this week (most ever paid amount for a card before). Purchased by Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful).

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Keep it cheesy and see you next time!

Cheddar Cheers,
Team Online Queso