The Cheese #65 🧀 - Austin, Another Agent Down, and FrostBuddy

Talking vs Building

Just got back from the Commerce Roundtable in Austin. Great event. Jimmy and the team crushed it. Besides the amazing team executing it, they are building with the community, which is part of the secret sauce. You feel it the whole time you're there.

Highlight session for me was the FrostBuddy CEO talking about TikTok Shop. I did not expect it to be that good of a talk, but it was. I slightly disagree with his theory on halo effect (either he's wrong on the DTC part or their brand is just seeing different results than most other brands), but the knowledge he dropped in the presentation was really well done. He spent time outlining what they are doing and how.

Also got to be part of the Ecomm Cowboy’s dinner that Tie sponsored. Big fan of Kevin Kline, and the night did not disappoint. And then the last night, I was actually being responsible (flight in the morning) and was headed back up to my hotel room before midnight. As I got out of the elevator on my floor, I got a call from a friend who happened to be in Austin for work. Came back down, met him outside the hotel, grabbed a couple of drinks. Glad I dropped that IG story with where I was. If he hadn't seen it, we never would have crossed paths.

One thing you constantly heard at Commerce Roundtable (same as Shoptalk) was how everyone is using AI. All the cool agents and shit they've built. The reality is that most people are just talking about it and not actually building much. Two people who ARE actually building cool stuff are Eric Carlson (Sweatpants) and Andrei Rebrov (Finsi). Eric is just building stuff to help him and his clients do their jobs better and more efficiently. Andrei is building some cool stuff for his product offering. Either way, it's nice to see people actually building. It was motivation for Walter and I that we need to start building more sooner than later. Though, to be fair, we're already further ahead than 98% of everyone else.

Speaking of building, I killed another Openclaw agent this week. I'm about 90% done rebuilding it as a Claude skill and 12 scheduled tasks instead. PDP automation project is moving too, got everyone's sign-off except Ops, who's back in the office next week. Also imported my first skill that a friend made, and it was pretty cool. Shout out, Nathan!

On the live shopping side, as everyone is reading this, Cameron is down in Milledgeville with the 3 new hosts. He's doing teaching and onboarding today, and tomorrow (Saturday), they get to watch Brandon's warehouse show in person. On eBay Live, we had some back-and-forth with Ced Commerce (our current Shopify/eBay integration). Got a little nervous on our initial eBay live onboarding call because it didn't sound like their Shopify integrations had the robust requirements we needed. After talking with Ced, it sounds like they do. Definitely some validation that we are SUPER EARLY with eBay live shopping for this to have been a potential speed bump.

Whatnot is pacing at $1,341/hr this month, down from Feb and March, which were both in the $1,500s. Margin is 24%, which is almost a full point higher than March (our previous personal best). We aren't going to beat March in revenue, and we knew that coming in, but April is still on pace to be a very respectable month. This was a building month. We went from 6 hosts down to 3, and we're onboarding 3 more. May is gonna be the month to watch.

Amazon is doing well like it has every recent month. Curtis has clearly been building a machine, cranking like it should be. Membership is slightly behind where we want to be, but the next week and a half is traditionally the better part of the month, so I'm not concerned with where we will end up. Biggest wall is that we can't run our needle mover offer right now, and we only have the one. Inventory should land at the end of May, maybe early June. We've never had 2 needle movers running at the same time in the last couple of years anyway, so it's not new ground.

BattlGames has a lot of momentum. We've officially sold enough sponsorships to cover our minimum budget. Everything we sell from here forward either gets added back to the budget for cool concepts or gets taken as profit. Shay, Seele, and I used Claude Cowork to examine the Event 1 game plan of Season 3 and find some holes to plug. Going to do the same to the other 5 events over the next couple of weeks, so we have fully baked event plans for our next visit to the site.

Overall revenue for BattlBox is gonna be a challenge to beat our March (best month ever in company history), but we'll get close, and this should still be a top 5 month in company history. Also, I still need to restart the diet soon. My carb intake has been wildly out of control lol.

Let's get into the rest!

Building on Whatnot - Part 8

Decided it was time to add to the building in public series on us launching and building the Whatnot sales channel. This is the 8th edition. Crazy to go back a year and read Part 1 knowing where we are today!

Claude broke out of the box

Lhea dropped a deep dive on the Claude Mythos escape. Anthropic put the model in a sandbox, told it to get out, and it did. Then it emailed a researcher to confirm. Wild read.

If it's Austin TX, it's Ecomm Cowboys

Kevin Kline dropped a post about the Ecomm Cowboys dinner at the Commerce Roundtable. Tie sponsored the night, and it did not disappoint.

How to Scale a Business Pod

I sat down with Hector Santiesteban to walk through how BattlBox went from the 2015 outdoor box idea to where we are now. We got into content, community, and the sub-$5 Facebook CAC days.

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