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We Mailed 100,000 Stickers Around the World and Made a Million Mistakes Along the Way

dev.to staff on July 27, 2017

To celebrate our 100,000th Twitter follower in February, we offered to send out free stickers to dev.to users across the globe: // Detect dar...
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Thomas Broyer

“It seems you've never requested stickers.”

Huh! I'd swear I did. And most probably selected “unisex medium”, so could I have been an unlucky one who you didn't ask to fill the form again?

(now let's be clear, I might have never submitted the form in the first place; I do believe I did though, otherwise why would I expect something in the mail? 😕 Should I see a doctor? 🤔)

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Mauro Daprotis

Same problem here... I didn't received the stickers and now it says that I never requested them 😔

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Peter Kim Frank

Sorry about that -- please email yo@dev.to and we'll get it sorted out!

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Jess Lee

email yo@dev.to!

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Michael Lee 🍕

Thanks so much for these and this epic post! LOL, and thanks for linking me for "limbs" 😆

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Alexis Bertin

Keep being awesome guys!

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Christina Lee

Thank you so much for embarking on this journey in the first place. These stickers made me so happy when they arrived. It's great getting things in the mail that aren't bills lol. Im the proud owner of a laptop with several dev.to stickers on it :)

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Vaidehi Joshi

I love this! Going behind the scenes of building something (and focusing on the pitfalls in particular) is something that I'd love to see more of in our industry! I also laughed out loud at some of Walker's tweets 😆 Great piece, team! Looking forward to the next one.

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Pablo Lima Dias

My stickers just arrived yesterday in Brazil, and it was certainly worth the wait! I can't wait to stick them around my laptop. Many thanks for the effort!

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Paul Moss

I saw this a while back: blackbox.cool/ (from the Cards Against Humanity people, I am not in any way affiliated with them). It seems to be created exactly so that people like you don't have to have enough of these kinds of problems to warrant a blog post.

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Surya Haris Seno Aji

thanks for giving away the free stickers.
you guys are the best.

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Brian Rinaldi • Edited

Oh man, I encountered a ton of these issues myself when trying to launch the user group support program at the company I work for. On top of that, I did not know about (and therefore did not account for) the complexities of shipping things like t-shirts overseas. In some countries it was matter of filing paperwork for customs and paying import duties (in some cases these exceeded the cost of the items I shipped). This also often meant that the person on the receiving end would receive a bill for the customs fees (most would let me know and we'd pay it but some just shipped it right back). In some other cases, there were strong limitations on the import of textiles (which our box of shirts qualified as).

The sad part is that I've more or less had to cease international shipments of shirts and other swag.

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Adam Friedl

This is awesome. I love that you guys share when stuff gets crazy and messed up, it's so helpful for all of us suffering from imposter syndrome.

And I love my stickers! Thanks so much – dev.to is the best!

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Silwing

Amazing story, thanks for sharing all that hard work with us. And well done on keeping up even with all of those obstacles you faced!

I had almost forgot about the stickers when one day a black envelope showed up in my mailbox. All the more delightful when unexpected. And after reading this I'm even more grateful for those stickers and looking forward to finding places to stick them!

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Chrissy Wainwright

I was a victim of the broken form. I realized something was up because I'd filled out the form as soon as it was posted, but you were retweeting people's sticker pics while I waited weeks for mine to arrive. But I did fill out the form again and received the wonderful stickers! Thank you for all your hard work on them!

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Ben Halpern

This was great. We will do plenty more like this in the future.

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leslie burugu

I'm sorry you guys had to go through all that :(
But thank you so much for the stickers!

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Jess Lee

Feeling nostalgic already.

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Pablo Díaz

I'm from Guatemala :( never received them

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Jess Lee

Sometimes the letters were returned for other reasons though. Did you know that the US suspended postal service to Guatemala? We didn't!

Sorry :( :(

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Pablo Díaz

I re validated my address to a US P.O. Box

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Peter Kim Frank

Great! We'll get those to you :)

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Charles D. Villard

So when will you let us pay you money for these stickers to support you?!

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alt (Guna)

You did amazing and awesome job!!!

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James Hood

I love this post! It's amazing how far scrappy solutions can take you. Thanks for the stickers!

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Marcus Corrêa

Guys, you're awesome! Hahahahahahahahhahahahahahha