The Cheese #92 🧀 - Best Month Ever, Season 4 Venue, and Preparedness Goes Mainstream

October was the best month in company history. July held the previous record, and our top seven months ever are all in 2026. This year, the team has just been straight dominating, and I couldn't be prouder of everyone.

On Whatnot, we finished October at $493k. We shattered the August record of $447k. Not bad for a month where our big exclusive knife drop didn't even show up in time lol.

November is off to a fast, fast start. Without any special events, the forecast after the first 5 days has us doing $487k. It'll be interesting to see if this is sustainable.

All of this seems to be part of a bigger picture. For the first time in our history, a news cycle is affecting our sales, and it has nothing to do with politics. It's all the stuff in the news about being prepared. The U.S. government gave instructions to army bases about having a 90-day supply of stuff, and some other countries, including the UK, have put guidance out for their actual citizens.

People are buying gear to be prepared, which is pretty cool. It's further movement toward the normalization of preparedness, which has always been the goal.

Membership has had some of our best days in several years over the last week. It's been a wild week scaling on Meta. Between some good copy, good ads, and the current environment with people buying our stuff, we're getting close to the number we can't sell past, which is amazing. After how choppy things were last month, I'll take it.

Amazon came up $5k short of being the best month of the year in October. Still a stellar, stellar month.

The software apocalypse continues. We got our Adobe bill down to $264 a month from $1,100, which is wild. Will reevaluate in a few months to see if we can chop any more of it down.

On BattlGames, we did a site visit Tuesday to the leading spot for Season 4. It is definitely the coolest venue we've ever, ever been to, and it would completely switch up the BattlGames experience. Super excited to see if we can work through it.

Several of the people who went out to the site are working on independent drafts of what the events could look like. We're all going to compare notes and see if we can make this work. Very exciting.

As for Season 3, we're working with the editing team to get it in a good spot to start releasing. We were hoping to start this month, but it's looking like the first episode might not drop until December.

Quick Supply Run update. It has no traffic yet because it hasn't been crawled by the LLMs or Google. We've submitted it, and it's indexed, but nothing has picked it up yet, which is disappointing. For now, we're just waiting for them to find it. Let's get into the rest!

Allison Ellsworth: How Poppi Grew From a Homemade Drink to a $1.95 Billion Brand

Lhea's latest. Allison started selling her apple cider vinegar soda at farmers' markets in 2016 as Mother Beverage, took a $400,000 deal from Rohan Oza on Shark Tank, rebranded to Poppi, and sold to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion in 2025.

Tom and Judy Love: How Love's Travel Stops Grew Nationwide

Also from Lhea. Tom and Judy leased an abandoned service station in Watonga, Oklahoma, in 1964 with $5,000. Today Love's has 681 locations across 42 states and is still family-owned.

My Trading Card Is Dropping

My trading card is dropping. All the details are over on LinkedIn; go give it a look lol.

New York City With a Toddler: Our 3.5-Day Itinerary

The full itinerary from our NYC trip with Colleen and Johnny. Top of the Rock, the 9/11 Memorial, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park Zoo, where we stayed, and what actually works with a 2.5-year-old. The NYC burger and chicken finger rankings are up too lol.

It's time to set up your holiday streaming campaign

Are you ready to reach holiday shoppers on CTV? For many streamers, the season is already underway.

Last year, according to Roku internal data, holiday content searches on Roku saw an 86% increase during October. And in November, those searches rise an average of 39% weekly. This surging holiday spirit is mirrored by consumer activity, as about half of Roku streamers shopped Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals in 2025.

Meeting those shoppers is easier than you might think. Begin with the seasonal outcome you hope to drive: awareness, online sales, leads, store visits, or another measurable goal. From there, define your audience, upload your creative, set the budget and campaign dates, and establish measurement before launching. You can even create a shoppable ad unit that lets streamers buy with a click of their remote.

Our holiday playbook offers a month-by-month guide to reaching shoppers during this all-important time of year.

First-time spenders get a $5,000 match on the first $5,000 spent with code BEEHIIV5K. Terms apply.

Launch your campaign today.

The Cheese is Served, and It’s Time to Share the Fun! 🧀

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Stay cheesy, and we’ll catch you next week with more!

Queso-Love,
Team Online Queso