
How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing - vmalu
https://www.techinasia.com/how-duolingo-got-110-million-users
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maroonblazer
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
Not to mention a high-profile TED talk:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration?language=en)

~~~
INTPenis
Yes, word of mouth comes cheap when you're a recognized professor and
inventor.

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resoluteteeth
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
Memrise ticks (1) (2) (3) and (4), although I believe it is now a fremium
model.

~~~
anaccountimade
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
Well, we know wanikani is spending on advertising.

~~~
GuiA
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.

~~~
wallflower
> Keep in mind in that learning a language, limiting yourself to a single
> source is silly.

This. Two thousand times.

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sheepleherd
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
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.

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davemel37
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?)

~~~
Trundle
I think soared's answer mostly explains it but also I think the
demographic/general theme of this particular site has something to do with it.
Tales of growth hacking and doing much with little are more interesting and
relevant to people interested in starting their own businesses or having
success with their own projects than tales of big marketing spends are.

I'm highly unlikely to find myself in a position any time soon where I've got
a $500m marketing budget. So someone turning that in to $1b+ is of less
interest to me than the guy who went from 0 to whatever cheaply.

~~~
davemel37
If your $500m budget is only returning $1b you are probably losing money and
are wasting a ton of your budget.

For what it's worth, Duolingo raised $83.3M , so it's not like they
bootstrapped to that growth.

The growth hacking you are referring to has a large cost too. You need
disciplined and very creative engineers, copywriters, analysts, a culture of
testing, social psychologists, marketing experts, directors, etc... I bet
Duolingo's marketing costs are well into the millions a year in Human Capital.

The stories of guys going from 0 to whatever cheaply are not the same stories
as a company with 83 million in funding.

~~~
Trundle
I mean, I didn't actually get anything out of this particular article at all
or upvote it, but there was at least potential of hearing how they got to the
point where they could get that funding and afford those experts, so I clicked
it. It had a chance. Can't say the same if I saw "How Coca Cola increased ROI
on their $2 billion advertising spend by 3%!"

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mful
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...

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graeme
I think this headline must have meant "without spending on advertising".

Marketing is a _far_ broader category than advertising.

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aikah
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
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?

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newman314
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
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
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

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jpatokal
> 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
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.)

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kriro
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-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/10/duolingo-
raises-45-million-series-d-round-led-by-google-ventures-now-valued-at-470m/)

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jsonne
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.

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yodsanklai
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.

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schakraberty
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.

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fthd
> "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.

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dschiptsov
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
Beware of judging costliness by frequency though. I see advertisements for
DigitalOcean and Linode fairly frequently, but their offerings are certainly
not crap.

~~~
dschiptsov
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.

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ommunist
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"?

