The Cheese #86 🧀 - Braintree Froze $266k, BattlGames Wraps, and Commerce Roundtable

BattlGames is a wrap, and we finished it out perfectly. Great ending, great week. Everyone absolutely crushed it: Shay, Seele, Joey, Brandon, and everyone else involved. Epic, epic success. I cannot wait to show you guys this season.

Halfway through the week, I got a sore throat, then my ears went, then allergies piled on, and by Sunday I was basically dead. Cam and I drove back to my house, showered, packed, and headed straight to the airport for San Diego. We got in Sunday evening after a slight plane delay, and both just crashed to bank some extra sleep before Monday and Tuesday of the event.

For the last 18 months, I have talked about how well everything has gone for the business. No major fires, no big issues. Part of me was always waiting for something to happen, since we have been running hot for so long. I was afraid that when it finally did, it would be multiple things at once.

I woke up Monday to an absolute nightmare. Being on West Coast time, I was 3 hours behind everybody, and I already had messages from Richard and Walter. Multiple things were going wrong.

It started with Braintree, our secondary processor. We use them for some of our older cohort of members. We had $266,000 that was supposed to be deposited into our account that Monday. We have worked with Braintree for 7 years; it has always been a great experience, and the money shows up like clockwork. This Monday, it was not there.

When Richard tried to log in, it told him he was suspended. When Ben tried to log in, same thing. I was able to get in as the primary, but the account was very limited, and there was zero communication about what was wrong. It did not take long to figure out something had happened to our account.

We opened a ticket. It was closed with zero communication. We opened another one asking for any kind of explanation, and this time we were told the account was under review, compliance would be in touch, and they were closing the ticket because compliance has its own ticket system. Cool.

We could not reach compliance. We tried every which way, and that bled right into Tuesday with zero success. When I finally got a real person at Braintree, they could not communicate with the compliance department either. It seems almost completely siloed from the rest of the organization.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I took it to LinkedIn. The post went viral, and that evening Braintree reached out. Since then, they have been absolutely incredible, just like the old Braintree I have grown accustomed to, minus this blip on the radar.

As I write this, it is not fully resolved, but the money did hit our account this morning, and they are fixing a few loose ends on the account right now. The whole thing was a big misunderstanding, which is what I assumed from the start. We are good.

At the same time, our checkout decided to break. Starting Sunday night, roughly a third of our traffic trying to check out was hitting an address error. Their address would not validate, which meant we could not ship to them, which meant they could not check out.

Everybody was pointing fingers. Was it Shopify, Shop Pay, or Advanced Shipping Manager? It looks like it was Advanced Shipping Manager. We made a slight band-aid tweak to our setup that has everything working again, and we are working with them to find the full solution.

Then on Tuesday, like clockwork, one of those law firms hit us up with the usual threat of lawsuit BS shakedown they all do. Great start to the week, lol.

Through all of that, Commerce Roundtable was absolutely great. It was Cam's first time in San Diego, and even though we were both on empty from BattlGames, we made the best of the trip. Amazing speakers, good networking, and of course some good friends.

On the numbers, Whatnot picked up the pace a little. We are currently at $260k for the month and expected to land somewhere in the $350k range.

Amazon had a slight slowdown, but it is still going to be a respectable finish and will continue the trend of 12 straight months over $100k.

Membership is the one I am watching closely. The campaign we pulled forward did not do what we hoped it would. We are probably about 8% below target at this point, and it is starting to become possibly problematic. We have really got to figure this out in the next couple of weeks.

On the AI side, nothing too crazy. I ran some of my agents from BattlGames and from San Diego, and some just ran on their own because they were scheduled to. I have also been playing around with Opus 5.5 this week, and it seems to be a major upgrade from 5.0. I personally was not a fan of 5.0 and was still using 4.8 because I felt it was better. Opus 5.5 is my go-to at this point.

Next week we switch places. Colleen heads out to a vet retreat for the back half of the week, so I will be single-dadding again until Saturday. Here's hoping this round starts a little smoother than the last one, lol. Let's get into the rest!

The LinkedIn Post That Got Braintree's Attention

This is the post I put up when we could not get a single person in Braintree compliance to talk to us about $266,000 of our money. It went viral, and they reached out that same evening. Sometimes you have to make some noise.

BattlBox AI Support Agent

Luke wrote up the CS agent we talked about a couple of weeks back. It works the unassigned queue every night, handles the routine Tier 1 stuff like order status and login resets, and escalates anything involving money or an at-risk customer to a real person. Our CS team no longer opens a cold queue every morning.

Satoshi Tajiri: How Bug Collecting Inspired Pokémon and Built the World's Biggest Media Franchise

Lhea's latest. A kid who loved collecting bugs turned that obsession into the best-selling media franchise of all time, with roughly $147 billion in cumulative revenue. Wild origin story.

Daymond John and FUBU: How a Queens Hustle Became a Global Fashion Brand

Daymond John was working at Red Lobster to fund handmade hats and shirts out of Queens. By 1998, FUBU was doing $350 million a year. The Samsung partnership piece is the part most people do not know.

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