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| | HOUSEKEEPINGĀ šØ | Spent the day today exploring my home town with my partner, Taina. I grew up in a small coastal area just south of Melbourne called the Mornington Peninsula. In particular, a little beach side suburb of St Andrews Beach. | Itās a really pretty part of the world and one that everyone should visit at some point in their lives. Clean coastline, great waves, friendly people. All that good stuff. Itās cool to be down this way, as I get to visit my fam and do a bit of tour-guiding.
Unfortunately, itās just a quick stay for me while I head back to Argentina to organise getting our dog back to Australia. Wild times. |
|  | Exploring. |
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| Anyway enough about me. Onto todayās post. Itās one Iāve wanted to write for a very long time, as a power user of Duolingo. And now, Iām finally finished it. I had a blast researching and learning about such a cool company. I hope you get something out of it too! |
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| | COMPANY DEEP DIVE šµš» | El Ascenso De Duolingo (The Rise Of Duolingo) | It gives me great pleasure to write this piece today, as I am a loyal convert to team Duolingo. Not only a convert, but a power user with a 78 day streak on my favourite powder room pastime. Well, technically itās the combined streak of me and my partner, but you get the point. | I risk hyperbolising this happy little iPhone app, but I literally love it. Itās like Headspace (design), Wordle (playability), and real-world crack cocaine had a baby, and taught it 40 languages. And then taught it how to teach you. You can hear it in my voice I am mixing the vats at the Kool-Aid factory as we speak. |  | Duolingo duo. |
| But if the story of Duolingo is impressiveāthe story of co-founders, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker is even wilder. Luis in particular was the founder of reCAPTCHA, the verification tool used to make sure you are human when signing into your favourite websites. | Today the two founders have built a giant business that 1% of the world uses on a monthly basis. It teaches over 40 languages to 500 million users, is loved by Bill Gates, Khloe Kardashian and Jack Dorsey, and has a market cap of a cool $12 billion. Letās take a walk down memory lane to figure out exactly how the hell they did all of that. | Early days + CAPTCHA + reCAPTCHA | Todayās story starts with the aforementioned Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan-American entrepreneur and computer scientist, famous for his work in crowdsourcing and human computation. Called a prodigy in his field, von Ahn earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and went on to become a professor there. His innovationsāpre-Duolingoāhave quite literally revolutionised how we interact with technology today. |  | Minesweeping. |
| Luisā fame begun with CAPTCHA, or the āCompletely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apartāāyes thatās really what it stands for. CAPTCHA was invented in 2000 by a team at Carnegie Mellon University, including Luis, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper, and John Langford. The goal was to create a test that humans could easily pass but computers would find difficult, helping to prevent spam and abuse on the web. |  | I believe the answer is āmoming.ā |
| A few years later, in 2006, our boy Luis and his colleagues developed reCAPTCHA, an improved version of CAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA served a dual purpose: it not only provided security against bots but also helped digitise books. The system would show users two words, one known to the system and one from a book that optical character recognition (OCR) software failed to identify. Handwritten texts, and print with faded ink or yellowed pages, are often difficult to scan, sometimes with as little as 20% of the words being recognisable. By solving the CAPTCHA, users were unknowingly helping to digitise the world books. | Real world estimates for the work done by unknowing meat puppets like us **using reCAPTCHA around the world range in the hundreds of thousands of hours, per day. In 2009, Google bought reCAPTCHA for more than $25 millionāof which Luis still owned more than 50%. | But not only did Luis and his inventions improve the worldās digital memory while creating massive shareholder value, they also added to todayās meme culture. CAPCHA hit official meme status, as did the incredibly weird and wacky Inglip CAPTCHAart. Which really is a story for another day. | | | Severin Hacker, a Swiss computer scientist, who met Luis while pursuing his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellom, shared a passion for using technology to solve global problems. Their complementary skills and shared vision for making education accessible to all led them to co-found Duolingo, combining von Ahn's expertise in crowdsourcing with Hacker's strong technical chops. | Spanish for Dummies, Duolingo's genesis | The idea for Duolingo began in 2009 withĀ Carnegie Mellon professorĀ LuisĀ and his Swiss-born post-graduate student,Ā Severin.Ā Luis had just soldĀ reCAPTCHA toĀ GoogleĀ and, with Hacker, wanted to work on an education-related project.Ā Von Ahn, also saw first hand how expensive it was for people in his community inĀ GuatemalaĀ to learn English, a language that could greatly improve their employment opportunities, and therefore their quality of life. | If you look at language learning in the world, there are 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language and two-thirds of those people are learning English so they can get a better job and earn more. The problem is that they don't have equity and most language courses cost a lot of money. | | | | ā Luis van Ahn |
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| Armed with this idea, and the inspiration to make a positive dent in the universe, Luis and Severin set about launching Duolingo. | Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. | | | | ā Duolingo's Mission |
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| What came first was some sort of a bastardised version of CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, and the Duolingo you know today. When the app launched in 2011, with just two languages, Spanish and German, the business model was the following: Duolingo would find customers who needed texts translated, then it would find users who were studying English on Duolingo to translate passages into their native language. Knowing that it was possible to do crowdsourcing grunt work with reCAPTCHA, it was a viable idea. And it worked, kinda. |  | How I Built A $6.5 Billion App Called Duolingo | Founder Effect |
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| It was 2012, and the app was live, free for users, but with only two customers for the translation serviceāBuzzfeed and CNN. āIt was like a Rube Goldberg machine,ā Luis would says. It was an idea that had some legs, but after some time, the market was saying no. It just wasnāt there. | *Note: For those of you, like me, who donāt know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, itās basically an overly complicated invention to do something that should be very simple. | So it was back to the drawing board. One of the existential issues was Duolingo claimed they had a culture of āanti-monetization.ā
NoĀ ads,Ā subscriptions, orĀ in-app purchases, ever. But with some impatient investors, the team would slowly move away from this anti-capitalist line in the sand. |
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| The bird growing itās wings | As of the second quarter of 2024, Duolingo boasted $178.3 million dollars in quarterly revenue, but it was a slow burn in relation to revenue growth in the early days. Duolingo really struggled to find itās feet in relation to monetising the attention it garnered with that cute little green bird, and VCs were happy to go along for the ride, for a time. | The partner that was on our board, Laela Sturdy, took me out to a bar and she said, 'āListen. Youāve been raising a lot of capital, and your valuation keeps going up and up.ā At the time, I think we were valued at something like half a billion dollars or something. āBut right now, youāre just raising money from Google. Let me tell you, there is no bigger fool. Youāre not going to find another bigger fool to raise money at a higher valuation with no revenue. Youāve got to figure out how to make money.ā | | | | ā Luis van Ahn |
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| Knowing that the VC free lunch coming to an end, they decided to take the decision to insert ads into their service, something that went against their core ethos from only a few years earlier. But this monetisation strategy worked, and it paved the way for their next major monetisation pillar, Duolingo Plus. | | Duolingo Plus was the flagship product they had been waiting for. It offered users an ad-free experience, offline access to lessons, and engaging progress tracking features. The product took off, and in the same year, Duolingo closed their Series E fundraising of $25M dollars led by Drive Capital. By this point in time Duolingo had raised over $100M and had a valuation of $700M, bolstered by itās growing user base of 200 million registered users. | Duo at scale | So this bird was officially in flight. Duolingoās ability to maintain its mission of a āfree education for allā stayed true while scaling globally, a testament to their smart execution. They soared past milestonesā100 million, 300 million, 500 million usersā thanks to a blend of data-driven rigour, a playful learning experience, and a genuine community spirit. |  | Luis von Ahn, Co-Founder of Duolingo ā How to Be (Truly) Mission-Driven, 10x Growth, and More |
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| During this period, they were able to continue to launch new monetisation channels for the brandāwelcome news for their stable of VC backersāwhich at this stage included the likes of Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, GV (Google Ventures), NewView Capital, General Atlantic, and Ashton Kutcherās Sound Ventures. | From 2020 onwards they rebranded Duolingo Plus to Super Duolingoāadding more exclusive features to the subscriptionāsuccessfully launching Duolingo Family Plan, and Duolingo for Schools along the way.
And most recently the team released the most premium of tools, Duolingo Max. |
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| The new Max planāin which you can actually chat live with the characters like Lily the emo teenagerāis leveraging AI for two key features: Explain My Answer and Roleplay. Explain My Answer is precisely what it sounds like it is. Itās an AI tutor that walks you through where you went wrong with your answer, akin to how a real world tutor might do. | | Roleplay gives learners the chance to āpractice real-world conversation skills with world characters in the app.ā Although these conversations arenāt with a real human, they are leveraging the best of the latest LLMs, meaning they are absolutely life like, and no two conversations will be the same. | | HIRING ZONEĀ šĀ | Today we are highlighting AI talent available through, Athyna. If you are looking for the best bespoke tech talent, these stars are ready to work with youātoday!Ā Reach out here if we can make an introduction to these talents and get $1,000 discount on behalf of us. | |
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| So how is the product so damn good? | From everything we have read so far one thing is clearāDuolingo is a monster. And an app like this can only become so popular because of incredible product strategy. Luckily for us, the success of said strategy was broken down really effectively in other parts of the internet, in two examples by both ex-CPO, Jorge Mazal, and later again by VP of Engineering, Sean Colombo. The former being the most popular post of all time on Lennyās Newsletter. | | The uber-popular post by Jorge broke things down clearly. In order for them to re-accelerate user growth, the team pivoted to a crazy dedication to improving one core metric; Current Users Retention Rate (CURR). The CURR was the lead domino in order to refine the product decisions, leading to a 4.5x growth in daily active users in the lead up to their IPO. | I hypothesized that we could use these metrics at Duolingo as a starting point to create a more sophisticated model, and use that model to identify a North Star metric. Working with the data scientist and the engineer manager in the Acquisition Team, we came up with the model.Ā | | | | ā Jorge Mazal |
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| After incredible lengths of testing they focused on three things; leaderboard gamification, push notifications, and the streak feature. Letās take a dive into these one by one. | Leaderboard gamification | The leaderboards bet was inspired by the mobile game FarmVille, and was an incredibly important feature to gamify Duolingo.
You could always compete against your friends, or small groups inside the app, but this was the first time you could truly be part of a competition. The rush attached with being promoted to the next āleagueā and the agony attached with being demoted, led to an overall learning time increased of 17%.
Add to that the number of highly engaged learnersāusers who spend at least 1 hour a day for 5 days a weekātripled after the revamped leaderboard. Launching the leaderboard feature was an incredible way to leverage human psychology. |
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| Push notifications | The next win was push notifications. The team at Duolingo knew push notifications would work. But they were hesitant to drive the channel too hard because; a) it could be seen as very spammy, which b) would lead to users turning off the notification channel, meaning c) the channel would effectively be dead. | As we started diving into this, there was one principle that became paramount. It came from a cautionary tale from Grouponās CEO. He explained to Luis von Ahn, our CEO, that for a long time, Groupon stuck to one email notification per day. But their team started wondering whether sending more emails would improve metrics. The CEO eventually gave in and allowed his team to test sending one more email to each user each day. This test resulted in a big increase to their target metrics. Encouraged, Groupon kept experimenting, sending more emails, even as many as five a day. Then, in what felt like a change from one day to the next, their email channel lost most of its effectiveness. Over time, the accumulation of Grouponās aggressive email tests had basically destroyed their channel. For our push notifications, we established one foundational rule: protect the channel.Ā | | | | ā Jorge Mazal |
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| The notification feature was effectively the goose that was laying the golden eggs. So although they had āgiven the team a lot of freedom to optimize on dimensions like timing, templates, images, copy, localization, etc.,ā they could not increase the quantity of notifications without strong justification and approval from Luis, the CEO. Fortunately for the Duolingo product team, they were able to walk the tightrope that is notifications and reignite growth in that channel. | Streak feature | The third big win through this period came via the streak feature. As an avid user myself, you can see below my relationship with my streaks thanks to my Duolingo iPhone widget. |  | My iPhone notifications. |
| The concept of a streak is really quite simple: show users the number of consecutive days theyāve done any activity on the app. But it turns out that there is a surprisingly large number of optimization opportunities around streaks. | | | | ā Jorge Mazal |
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| The streak saver notification was something that worked particularly well. This is the notification a user would get to remind them to get their daily lesson done to carry their streak on to the next day. Many of which you can see in the previous image. The notifications on my widget in particular, get more and more aggressive up until your final streak saving hours. āTo date, the streak feature is one of Duolingoās most powerful engagement mechanics,ā Jorge would say. And I totally see why. |  | This is fine. |
| Myself and my partner for example, are ultra competitive with our streaks. She is learning Italian and German right now, while I am learning Spanishāand am about to start High Valyrian.
I would rather marry my dragons to Dorthraki horse lords than to cede my streak to my partner. |
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| BONUS: Sense of urgency | Engineering VP, Sean Colombo, would also go on to spill more of the Duolingo beans by opening up to what he sees. One of the main tenants being to āMaintain a sense of urgency to drive compound growth.ā | | Duolingo is not the first to understand the concept that āmoving fast and breaking thingsā is actually good for business. According to Sean, that sense of urgency when applied to day to day operations looks like the following: | Make a decisionĀ as soon asĀ youāre confident you have the data to do so. Roll out experiments to as many learners (aka users) as you can, as quickly as you can. Donāt pull your punches. Consider return on investment when determining the order of experiments. Launch on your biggest platforms first. Port the wins.
|  | How Duolingo Turned a Free Language App Into a $7.7B Business | WSJ The Economics Of |
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| To get the best long-term gains, you should always have a sense of urgency. The quicker you launch winning experiments, the quicker those changes impact your growth. Not only that, but these improvements compound!
At Duolingo, we are very fortunate to have strong word of mouth. Even with our extremely successful marketing (and partially because of it), about 90% of our DAU growth comes when new learners hear about us from friends, family, teachers, coworkers, and others. Because of this, DAUs benefit from some compound growth automatically. An even more pronounced compound growth effect is seen in retention metrics. | | | | ā Sean Colombo |
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| Sean also went on to credit a few other things that stood out to him as to why the product is so sticky; theyāve managed to double down on their advantages, they copy before they innovate, they donāt kill their golden geese, and lastly, they take in the whole long-term picture when making strategic decisions. | When youāre comparing the expected impact of potential feature changes, remember to factor in how often those features will be seen.Ā ThisĀ can maximize your impact so that instead of focusing on 1% improvement on 1% of users, you canĀ focus on 1% improvement on 100% of users.Ā | | | | ā Sean Colombo |
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| Side note on Duoās community & social strategy | If you think about two of the most important things an app can have, you could say: product and distribution. Itās not that simple, but for todayās piece, letās run with it. And if the product, data, and engineering teams nailed the product side, then holy shit did the content, market and comms side nail distribution. | | Duolingo churn out some of the most consistently viral bangers on the internet, particularly across TikTok and YouTube, where they have 13 and 4 million followers respectively. The credit for TikTok goes to Zaria Parvez, the 24 year old social media phenom that gets credited with reignited their social strategy singlehandedly.
āI re-evaulated our failed strategy and pitched the idea of Duo [Duolingoās owl mascot] being a creator himself. At the time, it was almost a sense of satire that a big green owl could participate in internet trends and be an influencer,ā Zaria would say. Safe to say it seemed to work. | | The overall playbook is simple; donāt take yourself too seriously, humanise your little owl mascot, and trend-jack like itās going out of fashion. A great example of this was Duolingoās recent fake reality tv show Love Language, (not) set to premier on Peacock. Another was their April Foolās āfour hour multi-lingual skate dancing extravaganza,ā Duolingo On Ice. | They also do a masterful job of trolling their audience just the right amount to be loveable in the comments.
The brand of Duolingo seems to be in the perfect position today for their audience. I am excited to follow along more now and into the future. |
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| Playbook | Relentless experimentation: Duolingo employs constant A/B testing and experimentation in every aspectānotifications, gamification elements, even how often Duo the owl appears. Community-driven localisation: Utilising crowdsourcing to expand course offerings, fostered organic growth and deep user engagement. Gamified engagement: The app is designed to be a playful learning experience with streaks, leaderboards, and incentives that made the app addictive as hell.
|  | Watch now on TikTok | @hai.yanna | hehe this used to be my addiction #duolingo #duolingobird #learninglanguages #german #germany #deutsch #deutschmemes #fypć @Duolingo @Duol... See more |
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| Freemium monetisation balance: A careful balance of ads and subscription products that did well not to alienate important free users that they hope to upgrade over time. Focus on user retention: The team employs a strong focus on retaining the most important cohort, current users, through personalisation and smart use of notifications, making sure the user feels rewarded. Have fun: And finally, this is a company that has fun. It doesnāt take itself too seriously and that feeling of fun, playfulness and brevity is contagious. There isnāt a person out there that has a negative connection to that loveable little owl.
| Future | Studies seem to show that Duolingo really does work. Some claim that it is as effective as in classroom study. And some do not. But one thing is true, there is some value there as a language learning tool, and there is a hell of a lot of value there as a daily habit, when put up against mindless scrolling of social media.
Luis himself only promises to get users to a level between advanced beginner and early intermediate. āA significant portion of our users use it because itās fun and itās not a complete waste of time,ā he says. | | I will leave you with a thought that Benjamin Franklin wrote in his famous 1789 letter that; "In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." But for me life is now more that. For me there is a new constant in this world. | In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and me continuing my daily Duolingo streak. | | | | ā Bill Kerr |
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| Fun facts | It's the GOAT education app: Duolingo consistently ranks as the most downloaded education app in the world, with over 500 million users globally. Duolingo offers over 40 languages: Including fictional ones like Klingon from Star Trek and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones.
|  | Valar duolingus. |
| Tiny cards: Duolingo once had a separate app called Tinycards, which was like a flashcard game for everything from language vocab to science facts. The feature has since been integrated into the main app. Incubators for new languages: Duolingo users can contribute to the creation of new language courses through the Duolingo Incubator. Volunteers help develop courses for new languages.
| Extra reading | | And thatās it! Check out Duolingoās site here or go ahead and download the app to start your learning today. |
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| | BRAIN FOODĀ š§ Ā | Todayās learning: Greg Isenberg crafts a social app using AI in under two hours. Jam-packed with real-time coding, using tools like Cursor AI, Replit, and Claude, which totally demystifies the building process. It's cool to see Greg turning complex concepts into real world things. Worth a watch if youāve been wanting to build something but werenāt sure you had the skills for it. |  | Letās build a social app with AI in 100 min (v0, Cursor AI, Replit, Claude AI) |
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| | | TWEETS OF THE WEEKĀ š£Ā |  | Liz Wessel @lizwessel |  |
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Enterprise pricing. Most founders don't have a game plan beyond throwing up a "Contact Sales" button on the site. When I started my co at 23 y/o, I remember making all the pricing mistakes in the playbook. 10+ years later and having now worked w hundreds of founders as anā¦ x.com/i/web/status/1ā¦ | | | 7:32 PM ā¢ Sep 23, 2024 | | | | | | 895 Likes 62 Retweets | 20 Replies |
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|  | Jordan Singer @jsngr | |
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free idea: dynamically generate interface given database schema |  Jacob Matson @matsonj
Related: every app is just an interface for a database x.com/vboykis/statusā¦ |
| | | 1:55 AM ā¢ Sep 24, 2024 | | | | | | 510 Likes 12 Retweets | 27 Replies |
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|  | Startup Archive @StartupArchive_ | |
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Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design a product for a million people āHow do you make something for a million people? I donāt know where to start. But if you pick one person, study them, and take their journey, you can actually build something really personal. You canā¦ x.com/i/web/status/1ā¦ | |  | | | 11:50 AM ā¢ Sep 21, 2024 | | | | | | 829 Likes 127 Retweets | 23 Replies |
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| | | | | | | P.S. Want to work together? | | | Thatās it from me. See you next week, Doc š«”Ā
P.P.S. Letās connect on LinkedIn and Twitter. |
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