Sam Blumenthal

The core of the Pinduoduo experience is team purchase, where buyers form a group in order to receive discounts from suppliers. The user experience, as laid out in the graphic below, is as follows: (1) for each item, merchants decide two prices – one for individual purchase and one for team purchase. If the user opts for a team purchase, he or she... See more

A few weeks later, a designer brand that was moving its headquarters reached out to the couple to help sell excess inventory. The brand had about 700 pairs of shoes it wanted to unload. Within three hours, during a livestream on Taobao, Yuan and Zhang sold all the merchandise.

Social DAOs: Users form communities over shared sets of values and interests. Social DAOs give the community the ability to coordinate towards a mission, program roles, and incentivize contributors. One use case could be a Creator-fan club that co-creates content and grows brand value together.