The Cheese #49 🧀 - Lost Luggage, Projectile Vomit, & AI Agents

2026 is here!

As I write this and you likely read this, I am headed back home from Lisbon.

This trip started out about as rough as possible. We woke up on Christmas Day (a day before our flight) to a message from Delta that our flights had been cancelled and we were rescheduled to the following day.

Leaving a day later than planned was less than ideal for a multitude of reasons, so I called Delta, and they found a new flight path for us on Friday (the original day). Instead of going ATL -> JFK -> LIS, we would now be going ATL -> AMS -> LIS. Not the best scenario as it’s longer travel time, on KLM instead of Delta, and zero chance of an upgrade (previous flights were selected because of likeliness of an upgrade). Our flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam ended up landing about an hour after scheduled. KLM knew that meant we would likely miss our connector, so they rescheduled us to a later flight leaving 8 hours later on Air France. The other problem being it was not a flight to Lisbon, but a flight to Paris. Once in Paris, we had another connector that would take us to Lisbon. Chatting with KLM, Air France, and Delta, we realized this was our only path to get to Lisbon the same day. We finally made it to Lisbon that evening, Almost 24 hours of travelling and no sleep with the exception of about 3 hours of sleep Johnny got on the first flight.

Next up? Air France never grabbed one of our bags from Amsterdam. The bag with all of my stuff and half of Johnnys. Long story short, they found it, put it on a flight to Lisbon on Sunday, and we had it delivered to us on Monday. At this point, we were pretty mentally beat, surely this was the end of surprises and challenges…

Food Poisoning. All 3 of us. We are pretty sure it was from some Gnochi that we had ordered for Johnny at a restaurant near the hotel. We got to experience some firsts for Johnny this trip. His first (and second) projectile vomit and his first major and worst (and second, and third, and fourth) blowout.  I could keep going (and will), but will drop it on the site as an article, not for the newsletter. Let’s move on.

Whatnot - The crew made it happen again. Another record month. They beat the previous month in the literal last show of the year. As we look into January and where improvement needs to focus, it’s on margin. While December set a revenue record, margin was 4 points lower than where they should have been.

Amazon - While 2025 Amazon was overall phenomenal and November was on absolute fire, December fell a little lighter than I had expected. December ended at $194k (while December 2024 was at $206k). To be fair, Curtis still beat his forecast of $180k, I just don’t like to see revenue go in the wrong direction lol.

Membership - We are still a tad below where I would prefer us to be at, especially given that we are taking our production up by 8% in early February.

Looking back at 2025, I could not be more proud of what my teammates executed on. From launching our second largest channel from scratch, to growing Amazon, maintaining membership size, to BattlGames, to growth of both top-line revenue and profit. I will spend almost all of next week working on the final pieces of our 2026 plan for the business. 

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What Does It Really Take to Keep Customers Around?

Episode 22 of the Retention Edge by MobiLoud dropped with yours truly as a guest. You can check out the episode here!

Little Caesars was born from a broken baseball dream!

Lhea broke down the story of how Mike & Marian Ilitch built a billion-dollar pizza empire and bet big on Detroit; it’s worth the read.

Meta acquires Manus

Taylor gives a pretty good breakdown of the what the deal could possibly mean for the future of advertising on the platform.

Your Weekly Dose of Cheese is Now Complete! 🧀

If this week’s cheesy journey left you craving more, don’t keep it to yourself! Share the newsletter, and let your friends dive into the cheesy goodness with you.

We’ll be back next week with even more cheesy magic!

Warmest Queso Wishes,
Team Online Queso