The Cheese #39 🧀 - Miami, Vegas, and Carbs

Last week when this was sent I was in the air to Miami, this time I am in the air to Vegas.

Last weekend we did our collaboration Whatnot show with Blade City. It was an amazing 48 hours in Miami (minus zero handpays at the Hard Rock Casino).

The trip gave us a lot of learnings on putting on a Whatnot production. This all day show was not a normal show at all, this was absolutely a production. 

Miami Recap Montage -> https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jW2iewuRpsU

The crew at Blade City are cut from the same cloth as us. They believe that everyone can win.

Overall amazing people that made us feel right at home. We were on the air for a tad longer than 2 hours and did $31k in revenue. An absolute record in revenue per hour ($13.6k per hour), but profitability was less than ideal. The dust is still settling on expenses from 6 of us going down to Miami for the trip, but all roads lead towards close to breakeven. As I said, would still do the trip 100% of the time purely for the relationship and learnings.

Other Whatnot updates… we are basically half way through the month and it looks like we will destroy our previous monthly record from September of $213k. We are currently right at $150k. We will have some extra focus on profitability this second half of the month as our current overall margin on the business unit is around 16% and we need to be north of 20% (September was 23%). We are also working on an exclusive knife drop with another big channel, EDC Gripper. Excited to see how it turns out (will take several months to get through the finish line).

Membership side of the business all is going well. We had our monthly renewal on Wednesday and it was the highest renewal (membership and revenue wise) this year which is exciting. 

BattlGames progress is paused for the moment until we receive some additional videos and pictures from our potential location next year. I am going to also have to make a site visit later this month or early November to understand if our vision is feasible with the property we have in mind. 

On a personal front, dealing with some drama with my car. It’s out of warranty and had 7 of the 8 injectors fail on me. Replacing all 8 and the spark plugs was quite costly ($7k). It was a borderline decision on throwing good money towards bad. After the work was done it was discovered that my catalytic converter is cooked from the incident. Another $5300 to have that replaced and I said NO. Now I have to figure out what I want to do. I enjoyed not having a car payment for the last few years. I guess that is about to change.

Will be in Vegas with the wife and some friends through Tuesday. Going to the ‘When We Were Young’ music festival for the third year in a row. Vegas means some questionable food choices (carbs), which leads us into the final segment…

Carbs Carbs Carbs. I had my fair share in Miami, came back home and was good for a couple of days, but here we are again. I was at 138 when I got back from Miami, got back down to 135, but assuming I will be over 140 post Vegas. I have not had multiple days above 140 since June… Going to have to really get this under control lol.

Let’s get into the rest!

I’m a Toys R Us Kid!

Bringing my childhood back! Go into a little bit of a deep dive into the fall of the iconic Toys R Us.

I walk through the history and get into the meat and potatoes of why they failed (it’s not what you think).

DTC Golden Child was straight lying!

Lhea did a deep dive here, and I was shocked. I obviously heard all the buzz when Forbes crowned Kylie Jenner a billionaire due to Kylie Cosmetics, but I did not know that the whole thing was a lie. I am talking forged Tax Returns, kind of lie…enjoy!

From Monastery Life to the Steve Jobs of Leather.

ASOM is back with in-person live interviews. This time, we spoke with the founder and CEO of Portland Leather. Curtis Matsko has built an amazing business that has already doing multiple 9 figures a year in revenue with a path to a billion dollars a year. Absolutely worth the listen.

That’s a Wrap on This Week’s Cheesy Delight! 🧀

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Stay cheesy, and see you next week!

Warmest queso wishes,
Team Online Queso