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Chris Meade

Chris Meade

From an Uber account executive in a Brooklyn share-house to co-founder of CROSSNET, the world's first four-way volleyball game.

Country
USA
Known for
Co-founding CROSSNET
Industry
Sports, consumer products and e-commerce
Role
Co-founder & CMO

Background

Chris Meade grew up in a farm town in Connecticut and studied film. Before CROSSNET he worked as an account executive at Uber, living in an inexpensive apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with housemates he found on Craigslist. He describes himself as a lover of e-commerce, live music and New York sports.

A $12 domain and a rope-and-pole prototype

In 2017, back home in Connecticut, Chris sat down with his brother Greg and their friend Mike Delpapa to brainstorm business ideas. Most were bad until someone said "four-way volleyball". A quick Google search turned up nothing, and they bought the domain the next morning for $12. The first prototype was Walmart poles and rope rigged into a cross, carried to the beach so strangers could play. Videos of it filmed on an iPhone 6 collected millions of views, even though the three still had nothing to sell.

Betting a 401k on inventory

They cold-messaged factories on Alibaba, learned what minimum order quantities and freight quotes were, and ran the business from a 900-square-foot former record store in Willimantic, Connecticut. Chris funded the first inventory by pulling about $7,000 from his 401k. None of it went to a website, branding or ads, only to nets. Then the three drove to Miami and sold the least scalable way possible: set up on the sand, get people playing, and sell a net from the trunk on Venmo, putting each sale straight back into the next batch.

The slow first years

At first they sold about one net a day, sometimes one every other day. A net sold for $150 with roughly $70 in profit, split three ways, so Chris was earning about $20 a day. For two years there were no employees: Chris handled sales, Greg customer service and social media, and Mike product engineering and suppliers. There were no investors; they reinvested every dollar. By 2019 Chris was close to quitting and going back to a salary.

The viral clip and the push into retail

What broke the business open was not planned. A volleyball player in Europe, who had been sent a free set months earlier, posted a clip of himself diving and spiking on a CROSSNET. It reached millions of views, site traffic jumped about fiftyfold overnight, and every retailer holding stock sold out within 72 hours. That opened doors at Scheels and Dick's Sporting Goods nationwide. Chris is clear that the video was luck and the work around it was not: retail came from cold LinkedIn messages written in plain language and cold calls until a buyer picked up, leading eventually to Target. CROSSNET also became the top-selling volleyball net on Amazon.

Close calls

The business came close to ending more than once. A missing shipping container left a warehouse billing them close to six figures they did not have, their Instagram account was hacked and years of content were deleted, and they had to fight cheap knockoffs and defend their trademarks country by country. Chris's biggest lesson is to track every dollar, every day: some weeks that felt like printing money turned out to be near break-even once costs, shipping, returns and discounts were counted.

The sale to Vivere

By mid-2025 CROSSNET was in more than 5,000 stores and, by Chris's own count, had sold hundreds of thousands of units and generated over $35 million in revenue. On 19 August 2025 he announced the sale of the company to Vivere, a Canadian outdoor brand that had been acquiring backyard-game brands and had been in talks with them for two years. The price was not made public. Chris now runs a private community for e-commerce founders and writes openly about what the eight years cost him.

Timeline

Recognition

The takeaway: put your product in people's hands in person, and track every dollar daily. Early sales from a trunk on the beach were slow, but they taught the team what customers wanted. When luck arrived in the form of a viral clip, they were ready to capitalise on it.

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Sources

Written from public information, including Startup Founder Stories and Chris's MentorPass profile. Further reading: LinkedIn. Sales and revenue figures are founder-reported; the sale price was not disclosed.