We will buy close to $30,000,000 worth of goods from China this year with an average of 85 day payment terms blended.

These are 9 frequent mistakes I see founders make when sourcing from China 🧵 1. Don’t be an obnoxious foreigner

Don’t discuss politics, religion or state of affairs. You’re not there to win hearts and minds. You’re there to make money

We pay on average $450 per Virtual Assistant (and no recruitment fees).

We have more than 100+ VA's around the globe.

I have never understood why people pay more than $1K on Twitter.

Below I'm sharing our 5 step process for hiring Virtual Assistants at scale.

I hope this helps you save a $ and fuels your growth like it has mine. Step 1:
Understand if your work can be asynchronous or not.

You can find VAs in Asia who can be up all night to mitigate the time zone difference.

However the best VA hires stay with you for years and forcing them to work at night sucks for their social lives.

This will decide where you focus your recruitment efforts geographically.

AI will create so many new opportunities in 2023. How do I avoid being left behind as a #D2C operator?

Here is a thread 🧵of ideas I’m ideating right now as an AI dummy.

What am I missing? #1: Cut customer service response times with AI-powered emails

Response time & conversion rate = directly correlated

Many sites use a chatbot to optimize response time, but this can lead to slower load times.

How do we get faster response times for email (e.g., for @LinjerCo)?

In high school, I got a D on a math exam.

Dad: Who got an A?

Me: Solveig.

Dad: Why can’t you be more like Solveig?

Mom: WHO’S YOUR TEACHER?

Sister: YOUR TEACHER IS AN IDIOT!!! My sister, Saera, was 22 at the time. She hired the smartest person she knew — Taher, a med student — to tutor me in math.

She paid for the first class. My mom made me take up a newspaper delivery route to pay for the rest.

Here’s how losing 24 pounds led me to $24 million in revenue.

It’s also a story about why I buy “transformative” businesses at Peak 21.

A very personal thread 🧵: Some background.

2018 was a rollercoaster.

I had narrowly avoided personal bankruptcy (thread for another day).

@LinjerCo nearly killed me with stress.

How to turn $5m into $100m+ in a few months:

What Copycat King Oliver Samwer taught me during my early days at Rocket Internet.

Trust me, the story is crazy.

🧵: To jog your memory:

Rocket Internet was the German copycat known for cloning American brands.

We sold $200,000,000+ worth of earbuds in 3.5 years.

All bootstrapped with zero funding.

Here’s how we did it. 🧵 In 2017, Ray Lee contacted me on @ecommercefuel (a platform for ecommerce pros).

Ray wanted to start a shoe business.

I told him not to.

That was the end of our interaction.