The Cheese #90 🧀 - Software Apocalypse, Supply Run, and a Thank You to George

As this hits your inbox, I'm on a plane to New York City with Colleen and Johnny for the weekend. Tuesday, I'm at the SubSummit Mastermind, then I head home Wednesday and get back to a normal Thursday and Friday in the office.

The software apocalypse is among us. We had two software contracts coming up, HubSpot (which came up yesterday) and Adobe (which comes up in a week and a half), and we took a hard look at both.

We'd mainly been using HubSpot through the MCP. Going into the renewal, the plan was to drop down to just two users, Chuck and me, and uncheck some of the contacts as marketing contacts to get the cost down. Even keeping the marketing opt-in emails, that alone was going to cut our bill in half, which was pretty exciting.

Chuck, who's been building our sales engine, took it a few steps further and eliminated a lot of the need for HubSpot at all. He then talked to Richard, who had been building something similar to a CRM for us on the vendor side, and they put everyone's powers combined: our documents, lead lists, and contact lists, now all managed and maintained by AI.

I use the word "we" very loosely here, because I was not involved lol. Richard launched the CRM, and it is so much better than anything we had in HubSpot. Not saying HubSpot wasn't capable of it, but we would have had to put the work in. Richard built this around exactly what we needed, with everything already in there. Just amazing to see. We killed HubSpot completely.

Next up is Adobe. Our bill has been about $1,200 a month for the past couple of years. We did a deep dive on who was using it and for what purpose, whether any of the new vibe-coded competitors that have popped up were good enough, and whether free tools like CapCut or Canva would meet anyone’s needs.

We're not fully done with diligence, but right now it's looking like our $1,200 a month bill will be less than $300 a month moving forward. Truth be told, I think we can get it down further. People are naturally against change sometimes, even when the change is right. If a free tool can do the same thing as a $100/month tool, you've got to suck it up.

All of this ties into one of the main things I'm thinking through right now, which is better EBITDA. With so many things on the horizon for BattlBox that could be big swings that might need cash, the more profitable we are today, the better.

My side quest of building a fully automated site got done sooner than I expected. My goal was to launch it by last night, but it was ready to go Tuesday morning. I introduce: Supply Run. https://getsupplyrun.com/

It's a work in progress. A very AEO and GEO centric website, so I'm excited to see how it performs. Even if it doesn't, I was able to build something fully automated, and I mean fully automated. The entire website, all of the images, all of the listings, all of the pop-ups, and all of the email flows, series, and automations (there are quite a few). All managed and maintained by AI. In theory, nobody is needed for the website anymore. It should get better and smarter as time goes. The only humans we need are for fulfillment. Shout out Omnisend on the email side.

Whatnot is still tracking along. The forecast actually came down a little more. We're right under $300k for the month with an expected finish of $417k. What's not in that number is two tent events, as Whatnot calls them: a warehouse special tomorrow and a Halloween special exclusive knife drop next week.

Both of those should be considerably bigger than any show we've had in October. $500k is on the table. I think it'll be tough, but we shall see. If we can beat August's record of $447k, I'm a happy camper.

The Amazon machine is cranking. Curtis is back, and October has a real shot at being our best month of the year so far. That's a record I'm hoping November and December both beat.

Membership is still choppy. We've seen possibly a little momentum the last couple of days, so hopefully we can carry that through the weekend and the rest of this selling window. We're not at panic, but we're definitely not where we want to be.

On BattlGames, we already have some soft commitments for Season 4 from the email Chuck sent out, which is nice. At the start of November, we're doing a site visit to one of the places that might be the home of Season 4, and I think we'll have a lot more direction once we see it. Season 3 is moving along and still on schedule to drop its first episode in November. Let's get into the rest!

Who's the George in Your World?

Part two of the Braintree saga, and the conclusion. $266k of our money was stuck, and nobody would talk to us until George from Braintree stepped in and basically held our hand for almost 4 weeks. He was running test transactions with me on the line at 7 pm the week of his wedding. He deserves every bit of this shoutout.

AI Search Visibility for Shopify: What I Set Up to Get a New Store Found by AI

The free setup I used to get Supply Run found by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the rest. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, GA4, Merchant Center, and schema. I reran the same checklist on BattlBox and found gaps there too.

How to Use AI for BFCM Prep Without the Q4 Scramble

AI is most useful in the quiet weeks before Black Friday, not on the day of. How I'd use it to audit last year, build segments, plan the send calendar, and check your flows, while people still own the offers and every go-live.

Why Can't I Buy Sports Cards? An Open Letter to Michael Rubin

Premium cards almost never make it to normal retail. Most of the allocation goes to a handful of big breakers and online sellers, and collectors are left losing lotteries or paying aftermarket markups. Here's what I think should change.

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That’s a Wrap on This Week’s Cheddar-tastic Journey! 🧀

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Cheddar Dreams,
Team Online Queso