The Cheese #75 🧀 - $46K in One Show, Lazy Clippers, and an Agent for My Wife

A New Single Show Record

The warehouse show delivered. Joey and Chuck ran it without Brandon, the goal was to beat our best show ever mark of $41,032.80, and they blew right past it. $46,249.20 for a new single show record. Really proud of them for making it happen.

Maya, our new host, is off to a great start. Two shows in, she's already put on a solid performance both times. Excited to keep ramping her up.

The rest of Whatnot is pacing well too. We've got 74 shows on the July calendar, and we're on track for a new monthly record. The forecast has us crushing the old mark, though it's a little misleading with that warehouse show sitting in the mix. The volume is back, and the team is rolling.

We ran a TikTok Live show Wednesday, and it was a challenge. Same issue we've hit before in testing, the number of actual buyers on a show is just a fraction of the viewers. That tracks with the platform, so no huge surprise, but there are a lot of learnings to keep building on.

Our second crack at clipping is off to a rough start. This time we're testing clippers on some of our semi-viral product demo videos, the idea being they drive sales straight to the products. Most of the submissions this round are noticeably worse than the last campaign. A lot of lazy clippers just ripping a portion of the video and posting it with zero edits, which is really disappointing. Even scarier, a decent number are getting approved on a video and then immediately having bots push their view counts up to game the system and scam us. I can't tell if something changed on the platform, if it's a new wave of get-rich-quick bros trying to let AI do the work, or if we changed something in our ask. I'm still hopeful and bullish on clipping overall, but this one was a step back.

Amazon is off to a nice start for the month. Membership had been inching in the right direction, though this week has been a bit of a challenge. Hoping the ads start performing better as we head into the weekend.

BattlGames had a great planning call this week. Everything is moving along, and we might actually have our Season 4 location locked in before Season 3 even happens. Wild to type that.

I also spent time with Walter and Richard building out the contents of our first 3 retail boxes. Getting closer on that one.

On the agent front, nothing major this week. Built a few small ones and fixed some bugs I ran into with the existing bots. The fun one, I built an agent for Colleen to use in her business. It's just simple reporting dropped into her Slack, but I'm excited to see if she actually likes it.

As you're reading this, I'm getting an MRI to finally figure out what's going on with my back. Fun times. Monday, we head to Orlando for a week at Disney, so I'll be recharging with the family and letting the diet take a well-earned pause.

Let's get into the rest!

In-N-Out Burger: How a Small Drive-Thru Became a Billion-Dollar Fast Food Empire

Lhea's latest. How a single drive-thru turned into a billion-dollar empire by staying small on the menu, slow on the expansion, and stubborn on quality while everyone else chased growth at all costs. Good operator read.

BAD SALES EMAIL ALERT

Another one for the teardown pile. A hump day special that was too good not to roast. If you enjoy watching a bad cold email get taken apart line by line, this one's for you.

Shop App "Bought in Past Month": Is Shopify Leaking Your Sales?

My take on the Shop app quietly adding a "bought in past month" count to product pages. Half the internet panicked that Shopify was leaking their sales. The number is bucketed; it only shows above a floor, and Amazon and TikTok Shop have done a version of this for years. If you're sweating it, the real question isn't how to hide it; it's why your product doesn't clear the floor.

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

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Warmest queso wishes,
Team Online Queso