Sara Du @saraduit Twitter profile

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

asian parents still in denial....

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

my parents immigrated w/ literally $100 & raised me in ATL. i taught myself to code, barely got into Harvard (ask me abt the ripped👖), & dropped out so im v grateful & excited to share that @a16z did our $20M series a 😭 truly feels like a 🇺🇸 dream

Investing in Alloy Automation | Andreessen Horowitz

In 2010, global ecommerce sales were $572 billion. In 2020, it was $4.2 trillion, and it’s expected to grow by $11 trillion between 2021 and 2025 – accelerated by the pandemic, which drove many...

a16z.com

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

funny how nonprofits can actually make profits, while most startups are straight up not-profits

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

wild 1st day in NYC - accidentally slept in a stranger’s bed after my redeye 😳 somehow my keys worked for someone else’s apartment…

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

someone pls help this marketing man

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

in high school, i read somewhere that tony xu starts work at 5 AM every day, so i scheduled an email for 5:23 AM to ask for an internship. i remember being so excited when he actually responded that morning 😂 cheers to the $DASH IPO 🥂

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

niche api memes for rate-limited teens

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

better late than never, grateful to be named a thiel fellow 🤠

Thiel Foundation Announces Next Thiel Fellow Class

The Thiel Foundation today named 20 individuals as the next class of Thiel Fellows. The Fellowship program, which launched in 2011, encourages talente

www.businesswire.com

Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

asian parents still in denial....

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

so much happens behind the scenes of your favorite ecommerce experiences, this is just the tip of the iceberg

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

TIL you can bring chicken drumsticks ($1.40/lb) and a cage ($10) to the pier in SF & catch dungeness crabs (market rate = $15/lb raw) at a rate of ~24 crabs/hr now deciding if this will be my: 1. diet for 2020 2. new shopify side hustle 3. path to tiktok stardom

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

reaching out to all my past recruiters like, 'hey i don't want a job, but do *u* want a new job?'

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

little brother went to college 2 wks ago not knowing a thing about crypto, and now he's texting me abt mev strategies? uc berkeley crypto onramp is unparalleled 😂

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

going to the gym instead of therapy bc 1 month of equinox is cheaper than 1 therapy sesh ✅

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

reading about zk proofs while everyone else is at the club

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

wknds for theory, wkdays for practice. balance is important. apply this to sports, startups, etc 🤓

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

did a16z get a content distribution deal w united 🧐

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

starting to believe that most, if not all, founders either have adhd or are undiagnosed for it. prove me wrong 🤧

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

1 year ago my cofounder & I were spending the holidays alone, eating frozen burgers & grinding out Alloy v1 Just this week, we welcomed 2 new team members & dozens of new customers (& we're no longer surviving off frozen food!) So much can happen in 1 year 😂🙏🏻

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

speed is so often conflated w/ activity, ie full calendars. real speed is prioritization, execution w/o excuses, & constant re-evaluation

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

ppl are more valuable than capital. easier to raise $ these days than hire the best. harder to keep great ppl for 10 years than have 10 years of runway. so treat your team well 😇

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

in honor of yc szn, some ways you can slide into a founder’s DMs 🤡 - Intercom - Venmo (100% you'll get a meeting🤑) - IG (if gen z) - Twitter (1st hit them w a follow tho) - FB (if mutuals > 3) - Email - LinkedIn (lame) - Mail - Snap (uh) - Wait in South Park till you see them

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

brands in soho are on shopify & they're hip to nft's brands on 5th ave are stuck on salesforce commerce cloud & they're ngmi

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

being a dropout has never mattered for raising money or getting a job, but it's been tricky with visas & leases. just a psa to all prospective dropouts...

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

👀

Alloy raises $4M to build out its e-commerce automation service | TechCrunch

Alloy Automation, a startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced today that it has closed $5 million across two rounds, the

techcrunch.com

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

i think a lot about the nintendo family office's website. still unbeaten as the best vc website out there -

Yamauchi No.10 Family Office

We are Yamauchi-No.10 Family Office. Our mission is making a contribution to the society through our activities. https://y-n10.com/

y-n10.com

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

gonna get rejected by the UAE tmrw bc some covid app developer doesn’t think 2-letter last names exist 😔

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Sara Du

@saraduit

5 years

YC be sliding into ur DMs like

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

if you're a founder and you can sleep > 6 hours a night, pls send me product recs, recommended melatonin dosage, or something... 😢

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

selling b2b saas products is kinda like being a therapist - if your customers open up and tell you all their problems, you're probably doing your job right

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

during a downturn, the most valuable form of capital is not VC funding, but trust. employees need to trust enough in the startup & the founders to trudge on thru the winter ❄️

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

sundays are for manically organizing the closet in figma

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

this is the software stack your favorite brands use to run their ecommerce stores behind the scenes 🌈

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

part 1 of "the apps behind your ecommerce experience"

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

i used to sketch on the plane now i draw ... modern ecommerce tool stacks 🎨 would love ppl's thoughts and hot takes

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

a successful w21 demo day consisted of 4 “Shopify for X” 4 “Plaid for X” 3 “Stripe for X” startups

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

going to drop some big news in a sec...

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

yc is hosting a virtual forum for current & aspiring female founders. tons of great speakers, & i'll be doing a breakout session as well.

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

learning to live in nyc is learning to say no (a lot)

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 month

moved back to sf after 3 yrs in nyc (not an april fools joke)

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

doing css cleanup today and horrified to find so many #000000 's as a big proponent of b&w brand design, im making a guide for my team to understand the nuances of grayscale 🌚

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

wired my 1st angel check today 😇 they’re building no-code tools in a very legacy space 🤭

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

alloy crewneck 1.0 in the works 💎

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

so shook. was telling my grandfather about my week and mentioned i was watching the new kanye documentary. TIL, not only does he know who kanye is, but he was coworkers w/ donda when she taught in china and even saw young kanye ?! 😱

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

premade meal plans are unrealistic. we need AI / automation that reads calendars, processes lunch & din mtgs (ie scrape restaurant menu), & outputs choices for you to stay within your macros. maybe overkill but i would pay

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

quietly watching the sun rise on monday, best way to start the week

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

been typing (on mobile) with left thumb & right index since i started using a smartphone. it’s probably 1.5x double thumb typing speed. have recently converted a few friends to this

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

visited the mecca, completed my pilgrimage to SF, now headed back to 🗽

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

renaming a company is hard and $, so before you pick one make sure to check: - international crimes database (when i was 14 i accidentally named a project after a scam and got many angry emails 😬) - WHO diseases list (sorry corona 🍻) - urban dictionary (just in case!)

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

ironically it's anti-signal if you apply for a head of x, dir of x, etc role at a startup instead of getting a warm intro or sending an email to the founder. we literally never look at the pile of resumes 🤐

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Sara Du

@saraduit

10 months

After a long hiatus from Twitter / X, I’m back, with some 🗞 As of today, @AlloyAutomation is no longer just commerce-focused. We’re now industry-agnostic, and have a slew of new integrations we’re announcing soon. If you’re in SaaS and you’ve been thinking about integrations,…

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

not sure if im more shocked that harvard clubs are turning into DAOs, or that they directly ripped off my company logo 😪

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

we've reached the day i have to hand off control of the company twitter to a real marketer 😂

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

i make looms in the kitchen, my roommate makes tiktoks in the bathroom. we share a 1b apartment. such is life in your 20s.

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

today marks 3 yrs working on my company… feeling much more reflective than on my own bday

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

i’m excited to see how ecomm evolves w/ Web3. some early parallels: email mktg ➡️ discord msgs post purchase upsell ➡️ adjacent nft's / add-ons drop mktg ➡️ airdrops soho popups ➡️ roblox events pkg tracking ➡️ blockchain explorer shipping fees ➡️ gas fees

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

it’s been awhile since I’ve been so excited that I can’t sleep— tmrw, on 2/22/22, I ’ll be sharing some big news ✨

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

signed some new team members, since we're small we basically grew 10% today 😂💪

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Sara Du

@saraduit

10 days

getting 'enterprise-ready' as a founder means rewiring your brain's dopamine function to work on longer timelines & to not over interpret positive signals. the only things that matter are signing and $ in bank

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

hot b2b startups know how to leverage community as a moat - github actions marketplace - asana automations marketplace - figma community

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

looking back at the past 1.5 years of alloy and realizing i grew up a lot as a person just feeling randomly grateful for both the joys and struggles of being a young founder

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

it's ok to feel exhausted at the end of a wk. manifesting something into existence - aka building a company - isnt easy 🫠

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

spline is truly mind-blowing 🤯 now millions of amateur designers (aka me) can leverage the power of 3d design, and do things like 👇🏻

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

at a point in life where today is not 9/30...it's Q4 eve

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

this poparazzi app ( #1 on app store rn) is riding the perfect wave of trends - ppl coming out of quarantine & needing an excuse to kick it (my friend: "let's hang so u can pop me") - ego (other ppls' pics going on ur profile means u dont need to stick to 1 post per day etiquette)

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

thank you @alex for not exposing my age, keep sending the champagne folks 🥂

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

managed to snag a visa to 🇯🇵 before the official reopening next wk. quick trip to see tourist-free, peaceful kyoto ✈️

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

for fun, i designed a stockX for groceries i dont think it's too far off to believe some features of the streetwear economy will be adapted to groceries: - automated bots for copping items at drop time - proxies that purchase IRL for you - bidding wars

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

cto energy >>

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

just concluded 6 mo in LA. learned some great diet & fitness habits here, & finally feeling like im in peak health again (first 3 yrs of startup were rough on me) now ready to work on mental agility + go deep into building mode, so im returning to SF today, staying till TBD 🤓

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

the best xmas gift i got is alloy's FIRST product designer 🎨 so excited to have her join the team 🤩

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

one way flight to nyc tomo - wonder who/what will convince me to go back to sf 🤔

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

ringing in my bday w the alloy team 🥰

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

a solo brunch w/ a murakami book

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

someone applied to be a designer at alloy and made us this beautiful animation 😍

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

if you need yc interview help my dm's are open :-)

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

with tonight’s meal I’m 3% closer to my life goal of eating 1% of all fish species

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

tldr my friend didn't send me their apartment # so i brute forced a few doors and 5B actually worked 😅

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

broke - *layoff everyone* woke - attend every bank’s webinar to figure out how to apply for the PPP loan bespoke - start a startup to help ppl apply and take a cut out of every loan

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

one of the most underrated optimizations: startup names that start with "A" can't count the # of times Alloy looks like it's featured on a list 😂

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

fri night = absorbing design inspo from 1996 sun microsystems UI guide

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

consistency & commitment are all you need in the beginning

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Sara Du

@saraduit

1 year

i love finding examples of co's that kept headcount low in their early days. robinhood was only 30 ppl when they raised a $50m B 💪🏻

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

kind of crazy that b2b saas doesn't exist in china (explains why ~90% of Chinese unicorns are consumer, ~50% in US) on one hand, consumers pay premiums for content (ie gifts to TikTok livestreamers, news subscriptions) while businesses pirate SAP and JIRA off Taobao

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

tough reality: if you’re starting a company young, you will lose years of sleep, endure random back pains, and deal w all sorts of other BS. if you’re ready for that, then yes, drop out and do a startup 😪

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

felt like drawing headless commerce tonight

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

im very excited to share our 2nd major product release at alloy! it's actually not a product for brands, but the saas companies that serve brands. check it out () or read on below 🙈

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

one of the most underrated qualities in founders is patience - even when moving fast it’s important to have patience w your product, your team, your customers... & your vision

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

same energy today 🥲

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

thinking abt ecomm rollups on this rainy night

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

absolutely hilarious to read forrester reports from 10 yrs ago, with their predictions on ecomm trends "watch out for the explosion of T-Commerce"

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

extroverts with little patience for BS will often mislabel themselves as introverts

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Sara Du

@saraduit

4 years

you know what’s as important as an A+ founding team? great founding customers. nothing better than working w smart, thoughtful customers every day - so shout out to you all! 🙏🏻💯

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

TIL hawaii's state govt is way more into tech than sf's - they have a state slack: - they subsidize remote workers: - their covid app is on firebase

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

“automation engineer” will be a role, or even an entire internal org, that most companies will have in a few years w that said, we’re hiring an automation engineer to work w/ our merchants. come & build the skills you’ll need for the future job economy. apply or DM me 👉

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

we just made our 1st customer hire - no better way to have customer empathy than to have an early alloy user on the team 🔥

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

weekend sketches - a portrait of the top 1M websites, where the dominant ecommerce platform is actually (not) shopify

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

best books, articles, primers on crypto / defi / web 3.0 to read on the ✈️? assuming some familiarity

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

2020s ecomm saas landscape feat. alloy

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Sara Du

@saraduit

2 years

brought some sho shibuya back home w/ me, iykyk 🌤

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Sara Du

@saraduit

3 years

feel like the world has healed, now that im getting offers to crash on ppls’ couches again 😌 couchsurfing is honestly one of my fave activities to stay humble as a founder...

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