How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
1–10 of 68 posts
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#2> "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.
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#3They 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.
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#4The 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?
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#5The 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 i…
Memrise ticks (1) (2) (3) and (4), although I believe it is now a fremium model.
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#6I think this headline must have meant "without spending on advertising".
Marketing is a far broader category than advertising.
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#7The 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...
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#8Where 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?)
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#9The 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.
Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
#10Where 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 o…
What it comes down to is this. Spend money on marketing, or don't, but always focus on ROI.