7 ms·

How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

158 points by vmalu 11y ago

schakraberty 11y ago
Having a marketing department to get the word out is very different from running expensive marketing campaigns through digital marketing platforms. The sense of the heading is clear enough - that building a good product and telling a cool story about it does more for your marketing than many paid campaigns.
fthd 11y ago
> "without spending a dollar on marketing" Yet their crunchbase profile shows they have a head of marketing. That's basically like saying I didn't spend a dime on engineering because I built the app myself.
aikah 11y ago
They got most of the Livemocha audience as the former turned to total sh--t. Livemocha used to be a great platform for learning. Then it was bought by Rosetta Code which sells expensive and obsolete language learning material.
- ionforce 11y ago
  What exactly was Livemocha? I heard a lot about it but by the time I did, they had already changed their site. What was their original approach that was so well received?
resoluteteeth 11y ago
The gamification aspects of Duolingo are a nice touch, but even if it didn't have this it would probably still be popular. I don't think there has to be some sort of "one weird trick" here. It's not perfect, but Duolingo 1) is free, 2) has no ads, 3) has both a website and apps, 4) is interactive with audio and voice recognition. There really isn't any competition to this. Lots of people want to learn languages; is it surprising that it has tons of users?
- zantzinger 11y ago
  Memrise ticks (1) (2) (3) and (4), although I believe it is now a fremium model.
  - anaccountimade 11y ago
    Have you seen Wanikani? It's the best! Before I used Wanikani, I was struggling to learn Nihongo, also known as Japanese to you non-anime experts. I was able to get my katakana and hiragana down, and I was also a pro at romanji, but I just couldn't get myself to study the kanjis! By the way kanjis are like the Japanese alphabet if you were wondering. Anyways, I spent 2 years working really hard on my Japanese listening ability by listening to native material, but try as I did, I couldn't get anywhere, but then I used Wanikani, and WOW did it boost me up to a whole nother level! I'm starting my 4th year now learning the language, and I'm still working on Wanikani. Some people do it faster, but I'm happy with my pace. Anyways, I now know 756 kanjis thanks to Wanikani! It's definitely joyous to see all the progress I've made! Once I get through the rest the kanjis, then I'm going to learn the grammar, which should be easy due to all of the vocabulary and kanjis that I'll know. I do know basics, but I still have a lot of work left for my grammar. Yeah, I really feel like technology is bringing us into a whole new era for language learning. At least it has for me. みんなさん、どうもありがとう！
    - daveguy 11y ago
      Well, we know wanikani is spending on advertising.
      - GuiA 11y ago
        I use wanikani, and I'd be surprised if this was a fake/paid for post. The team that builds it is really small (just one guy develops the product, he has 2-3 employees for community management etc), and their user base is really in love with the product. I might be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was just an excited user. Partly because for the reasons I just listed, and partly because his path to learning Japanese sounds... counter productive to say the least (learning 756 kanji over 4 years before you tackle grammar is... silly). Regardless, wanikani (and other Japanese products made by this small company) is excellent. I recommend it, and am not affiliated with it. Keep in mind in that learning a language, limiting yourself to a single source is silly. Try different textbooks, online courses, apps, YouTube videos, etc. Some of them will convey grammar in a way that clicks more with you, others pronunciation, others vocabulary, etc.
graeme 11y ago
I think this headline must have meant "without spending on advertising". Marketing is a far broader category than advertising.
mful 11y ago
The title here is misleading -- the article barely talks about Duolingo's marketing strategy, touching briefly on word-of-mouth and gamification... This is really just a fluff piece about Duolingo and the founder...
davemel37 11y ago
Where does this idea of glorifying not spending on marketing come from? I think it involves a fundamental misalignment of the point of building a business. I view a business as an investment vehicle and marketing is how you turn over that investment. I would be much more impressed with a business that can consistently arbitrage advertising into profits at scale. In reality anything that touches a prospect, customer or user is marketing! A better question is... how much further would duolingo be if they invested in advertising and focused more on marketing? Would they have billions of users instead of 110M ? Further, how many of those 110M are like me that downloaded the app, used it once or twice and than never opened it again? How many users like me would use it much more if they did invest in communicating its value to me at ideal times. (i.e. when it sees I am visiting Cabo, or Cancun, two trips I took with the app on my phone and never touched it?)
- dhbradshaw 11y ago
  I think that saying that something does well without marketing is making an implicit argument that it's doing well for some other reason. A basic model might be success = (value + delta) * ( marketing + epsilon). If you give success a large number and say that marketing was zero then the model leads you to guess that there is substantial value in the product itself.
- encoderer 11y ago
  To your first point, I do think leanness is a virtue. Especially in a young company where product market fit isn't yet targeted it can be easy to burn investor money without roi.
  - davemel37 11y ago
    If you view marketing as an expense, you have a valid point. I view marketing as an investment and in that context, if you need to be lean, investing intelligently in marketing is one of the most important things you can do to increase cashflow.
- jsonne 11y ago
  What it comes down to is this. Spend money on marketing, or don't, but always focus on ROI.
maroonblazer 11y ago
The title of the article belies its content. Several examples of marketing are cited: - They identified a market: people who want to learn a language as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible. - They analyzed and understood the needs and desires of the target market. Presumably they further segmented the market. - They created an offering that met the needs of the segment(s) they were going after. - They deliberately positioned their product so as to attract as large a share of the addressable audience as possible . - They increased awareness and trial of their product via word-of-mouth, an age-old marketing communications tactic. This is marketing.
- beambot 11y ago
  Not to mention a high-profile TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_...
  - INTPenis 11y ago
    Yes, word of mouth comes cheap when you're a recognized professor and inventor.
- jhanschoo 11y ago
  s/marketing/advertising/ would be useful.
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  And they created a product that is useful and fun to use.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- 2pointsomone 11y ago
  I think you are being overly critical here unnecessarily (really don't know why such wit is needed). The point the title is trying to make is they didn't spend on traditional ad channels. Most startups who start with zero users on day one can't use these very organic marketing means to reach that number.
jsonne 11y ago
They have marketing people working for them, so they're obviously spending money on "marketing". Advertising, which I think the article is alluding to, may or may not be worth it. ROI in your ad dollars is really where the trick is with paid acquisition.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
spend money on chinese botnet instead? what does 110M users cost now? $5?
newman314 11y ago
I really wanted to use Duolingo but it appears that Japanese for English course is still not available (I would settle for just be able to speak and not read/write Japanese).
- schakraberty 11y ago
  Duolingo primarily uses a text interface, so knowing the script is a key part of their methods. Japanese and Chinese scripts are among the hardest. So we'll probably see those added on late. Hebrew is a recent addition, and Hindi is on the anvil.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    Yes, I guess they would probably show you what you have to type amongst choices and not make you type Japanese in your mobile phone
- nonuby 11y ago
  Would be awesome to see Thai available too..
jpatokal 11y ago
> It uses the same tactic as a casino, where a slot machine increases your chances of winning on the first couple of tries to give your brain a dopamine rush to go for more. Is this really a thing? Sounds exploitable, and I thought the randomness of slot machines is quite carefully vetted.
- patio11 11y ago
  That's illegal as hell in Nevada, and I would assume in most jurisdictions in the US that permit casino gambling. The machines are very, very carefully engineered to give exactly the odds reported to the regulator. If you don't, that's a corporate death sentence; if Nevada refuses to certify your machines you can't sell them anywhere. The difficulty of certifying a machine / game / etc is so high that the industry mostly uses a few basic games which are proven (both from a legal and operational perspective) and then reskins them endlessly to keep players coming back. Vampires were in for the last few years, apparently, thanks to Twilight. (Anecdata based on walking through a few casinos while in town for Microconf. It's vampires, TV shows appealing to older Americans, and a lot of very very obviously US-company-attempts-to-do-China games.)
sheepleherd 11y ago
Don't want to go all academic on you all, but what they taught us in school is: "marketing" entails every aspect of interaction with customers, so if customers hear about your product, that's marketing. If you have a product... that's marketing. The article means to say "promotion" or "advertising" or "PR" or any of a myriad of "marcomm" activities that have a budget, but if you design a product to meet customer needs and bring it to market, you are marketing your product. If you think marketing has a negative connotation, you're doing it wrong, same as if your product is poorly designed or dangerous or simply ineffectual. Approach your marketing program from the point of view of "meeting customer needs".
- jfoster 11y ago
  There's also the opportunity cost of foregoing revenue in order to make a product free. I don't doubt that they'll eventually be profitable, but they are definitely paying for their userbase, just indirectly.
dschiptsov 11y ago
By offering a valuable, no-cheating service, so users would talk about it. It is actually a heuristic - as long as you see a costly marketing, the product is either crap or fraud. SAP is the best example. If you see an established product, such as Facebook, advertising itself, think of it in a users-data-mining stage, instead of offering a valuable service which gives growth without deceiving maladverticing.
- afarrell 11y ago
  Beware of judging costliness by frequency though. I see advertisements for DigitalOcean and Linode fairly frequently, but their offerings are certainly not crap.
  - dschiptsov 11y ago
    These "small guys" are re-selling metered resources of leased hardware, and has a lot of competition, so they need ads. Their ads are usually factual, not deceiving or cryptic-misleading, like that AWS nonsense-marketing-speak.
kriro 11y ago
Since I was curious it seems like they were valued at about 470 million in June 2015 (where it seems they had roughly 100 million users). I don't know how they plan to monetize (certified tests are mentioned and it seems they dropped their idea to crowd source translations) but it seems like they focus hard on staying free to grab even more users. Probably a decent case study for "defending VC" against bootstrapping. TechCrunch article on their series D: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/10/duolingo-raises-45-million-series-d-round-led-by-google-ventures-now-valued-at-470m/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/10/duolingo-raises-45-million-...
askbypollankit 11y ago
Marketing doesn't only means Google Ad words, Facebook post boost. It also includes TED talk, word of mouth, understanding consumer needs.... So they obviously did marketing and if they did it at no cost, then please tell how?
ommunist 11y ago
The title is misleading. The very article is a clever piece of marketing. And it certainly cost something to someone to get it online. Perhaps the correct title is "without spending on advertising"?
yodsanklai 11y ago
I've been using Duolingo everyday for 2 months now (to learn Spanish). Some thoughts: It's entertaining. You don't need much motivation to "play" everyday. Whenever I want to procrastinate, I feel it's a better option than reading the news and so on... However, it's too simple (which is why it is addictive). By itself, it's not enough to learn a foreign language. It's a good complement, and a great way to get started though.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

158 points by vmalu 11y ago

Having a marketing department to get the word out is very different from running expensive marketing campaigns through digital marketing platforms. The sense of the heading is clear enough - that building a good product and telling a cool story about it does more for your marketing than many paid campaigns.

fthd 11y ago

> "without spending a dollar on marketing" Yet their crunchbase profile shows they have a head of marketing. That's basically like saying I didn't spend a dime on engineering because I built the app myself.

aikah 11y ago

They got most of the Livemocha audience as the former turned to total sh--t. Livemocha used to be a great platform for learning. Then it was bought by Rosetta Code which sells expensive and obsolete language learning material.

ionforce 11y ago
What exactly was Livemocha? I heard a lot about it but by the time I did, they had already changed their site. What was their original approach that was so well received?

resoluteteeth 11y ago

The gamification aspects of Duolingo are a nice touch, but even if it didn't have this it would probably still be popular. I don't think there has to be some sort of "one weird trick" here. It's not perfect, but Duolingo 1) is free, 2) has no ads, 3) has both a website and apps, 4) is interactive with audio and voice recognition. There really isn't any competition to this. Lots of people want to learn languages; is it surprising that it has tons of users?

zantzinger 11y ago
Memrise ticks (1) (2) (3) and (4), although I believe it is now a fremium model.
- anaccountimade 11y ago
  Have you seen Wanikani? It's the best! Before I used Wanikani, I was struggling to learn Nihongo, also known as Japanese to you non-anime experts. I was able to get my katakana and hiragana down, and I was also a pro at romanji, but I just couldn't get myself to study the kanjis! By the way kanjis are like the Japanese alphabet if you were wondering. Anyways, I spent 2 years working really hard on my Japanese listening ability by listening to native material, but try as I did, I couldn't get anywhere, but then I used Wanikani, and WOW did it boost me up to a whole nother level! I'm starting my 4th year now learning the language, and I'm still working on Wanikani. Some people do it faster, but I'm happy with my pace. Anyways, I now know 756 kanjis thanks to Wanikani! It's definitely joyous to see all the progress I've made! Once I get through the rest the kanjis, then I'm going to learn the grammar, which should be easy due to all of the vocabulary and kanjis that I'll know. I do know basics, but I still have a lot of work left for my grammar. Yeah, I really feel like technology is bringing us into a whole new era for language learning. At least it has for me. みんなさん、どうもありがとう！
  - daveguy 11y ago
    Well, we know wanikani is spending on advertising.
    - GuiA 11y ago
      I use wanikani, and I'd be surprised if this was a fake/paid for post. The team that builds it is really small (just one guy develops the product, he has 2-3 employees for community management etc), and their user base is really in love with the product. I might be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was just an excited user. Partly because for the reasons I just listed, and partly because his path to learning Japanese sounds... counter productive to say the least (learning 756 kanji over 4 years before you tackle grammar is... silly). Regardless, wanikani (and other Japanese products made by this small company) is excellent. I recommend it, and am not affiliated with it. Keep in mind in that learning a language, limiting yourself to a single source is silly. Try different textbooks, online courses, apps, YouTube videos, etc. Some of them will convey grammar in a way that clicks more with you, others pronunciation, others vocabulary, etc.

graeme 11y ago

I think this headline must have meant "without spending on advertising". Marketing is a far broader category than advertising.

mful 11y ago

The title here is misleading -- the article barely talks about Duolingo's marketing strategy, touching briefly on word-of-mouth and gamification... This is really just a fluff piece about Duolingo and the founder...

davemel37 11y ago

Where does this idea of glorifying not spending on marketing come from? I think it involves a fundamental misalignment of the point of building a business. I view a business as an investment vehicle and marketing is how you turn over that investment. I would be much more impressed with a business that can consistently arbitrage advertising into profits at scale. In reality anything that touches a prospect, customer or user is marketing! A better question is... how much further would duolingo be if they invested in advertising and focused more on marketing? Would they have billions of users instead of 110M ? Further, how many of those 110M are like me that downloaded the app, used it once or twice and than never opened it again? How many users like me would use it much more if they did invest in communicating its value to me at ideal times. (i.e. when it sees I am visiting Cabo, or Cancun, two trips I took with the app on my phone and never touched it?)

dhbradshaw 11y ago
I think that saying that something does well without marketing is making an implicit argument that it's doing well for some other reason. A basic model might be success = (value + delta) * ( marketing + epsilon). If you give success a large number and say that marketing was zero then the model leads you to guess that there is substantial value in the product itself.
encoderer 11y ago
To your first point, I do think leanness is a virtue. Especially in a young company where product market fit isn't yet targeted it can be easy to burn investor money without roi.
- davemel37 11y ago
  If you view marketing as an expense, you have a valid point. I view marketing as an investment and in that context, if you need to be lean, investing intelligently in marketing is one of the most important things you can do to increase cashflow.
jsonne 11y ago
What it comes down to is this. Spend money on marketing, or don't, but always focus on ROI.

maroonblazer 11y ago

The title of the article belies its content. Several examples of marketing are cited: - They identified a market: people who want to learn a language as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible. - They analyzed and understood the needs and desires of the target market. Presumably they further segmented the market. - They created an offering that met the needs of the segment(s) they were going after. - They deliberately positioned their product so as to attract as large a share of the addressable audience as possible . - They increased awareness and trial of their product via word-of-mouth, an age-old marketing communications tactic. This is marketing.

beambot 11y ago
Not to mention a high-profile TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_...
- INTPenis 11y ago
  Yes, word of mouth comes cheap when you're a recognized professor and inventor.
jhanschoo 11y ago
s/marketing/advertising/ would be useful.
maxxxxx 11y ago
And they created a product that is useful and fun to use.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
2pointsomone 11y ago
I think you are being overly critical here unnecessarily (really don't know why such wit is needed). The point the title is trying to make is they didn't spend on traditional ad channels. Most startups who start with zero users on day one can't use these very organic marketing means to reach that number.

jsonne 11y ago

They have marketing people working for them, so they're obviously spending money on "marketing". Advertising, which I think the article is alluding to, may or may not be worth it. ROI in your ad dollars is really where the trick is with paid acquisition.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

spend money on chinese botnet instead? what does 110M users cost now? $5?

newman314 11y ago

I really wanted to use Duolingo but it appears that Japanese for English course is still not available (I would settle for just be able to speak and not read/write Japanese).

schakraberty 11y ago
Duolingo primarily uses a text interface, so knowing the script is a key part of their methods. Japanese and Chinese scripts are among the hardest. So we'll probably see those added on late. Hebrew is a recent addition, and Hindi is on the anvil.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Yes, I guess they would probably show you what you have to type amongst choices and not make you type Japanese in your mobile phone
nonuby 11y ago
Would be awesome to see Thai available too..

jpatokal 11y ago

> It uses the same tactic as a casino, where a slot machine increases your chances of winning on the first couple of tries to give your brain a dopamine rush to go for more. Is this really a thing? Sounds exploitable, and I thought the randomness of slot machines is quite carefully vetted.

patio11 11y ago
That's illegal as hell in Nevada, and I would assume in most jurisdictions in the US that permit casino gambling. The machines are very, very carefully engineered to give exactly the odds reported to the regulator. If you don't, that's a corporate death sentence; if Nevada refuses to certify your machines you can't sell them anywhere. The difficulty of certifying a machine / game / etc is so high that the industry mostly uses a few basic games which are proven (both from a legal and operational perspective) and then reskins them endlessly to keep players coming back. Vampires were in for the last few years, apparently, thanks to Twilight. (Anecdata based on walking through a few casinos while in town for Microconf. It's vampires, TV shows appealing to older Americans, and a lot of very very obviously US-company-attempts-to-do-China games.)

sheepleherd 11y ago

Don't want to go all academic on you all, but what they taught us in school is: "marketing" entails every aspect of interaction with customers, so if customers hear about your product, that's marketing. If you have a product... that's marketing. The article means to say "promotion" or "advertising" or "PR" or any of a myriad of "marcomm" activities that have a budget, but if you design a product to meet customer needs and bring it to market, you are marketing your product. If you think marketing has a negative connotation, you're doing it wrong, same as if your product is poorly designed or dangerous or simply ineffectual. Approach your marketing program from the point of view of "meeting customer needs".

jfoster 11y ago
There's also the opportunity cost of foregoing revenue in order to make a product free. I don't doubt that they'll eventually be profitable, but they are definitely paying for their userbase, just indirectly.

dschiptsov 11y ago

By offering a valuable, no-cheating service, so users would talk about it. It is actually a heuristic - as long as you see a costly marketing, the product is either crap or fraud. SAP is the best example. If you see an established product, such as Facebook, advertising itself, think of it in a users-data-mining stage, instead of offering a valuable service which gives growth without deceiving maladverticing.

afarrell 11y ago
Beware of judging costliness by frequency though. I see advertisements for DigitalOcean and Linode fairly frequently, but their offerings are certainly not crap.
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  These "small guys" are re-selling metered resources of leased hardware, and has a lot of competition, so they need ads. Their ads are usually factual, not deceiving or cryptic-misleading, like that AWS nonsense-marketing-speak.

kriro 11y ago

Since I was curious it seems like they were valued at about 470 million in June 2015 (where it seems they had roughly 100 million users). I don't know how they plan to monetize (certified tests are mentioned and it seems they dropped their idea to crowd source translations) but it seems like they focus hard on staying free to grab even more users. Probably a decent case study for "defending VC" against bootstrapping. TechCrunch article on their series D: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/10/duolingo-raises-45-million-series-d-round-led-by-google-ventures-now-valued-at-470m/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/10/duolingo-raises-45-million-...

askbypollankit 11y ago

Marketing doesn't only means Google Ad words, Facebook post boost. It also includes TED talk, word of mouth, understanding consumer needs.... So they obviously did marketing and if they did it at no cost, then please tell how?

ommunist 11y ago

The title is misleading. The very article is a clever piece of marketing. And it certainly cost something to someone to get it online. Perhaps the correct title is "without spending on advertising"?

yodsanklai 11y ago

I've been using Duolingo everyday for 2 months now (to learn Spanish). Some thoughts: It's entertaining. You don't need much motivation to "play" everyday. Whenever I want to procrastinate, I feel it's a better option than reading the news and so on... However, it's too simple (which is why it is addictive). By itself, it's not enough to learn a foreign language. It's a good complement, and a great way to get started though.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]