Live data from Hacker News

How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

techinasia.com

31–40 of 68 posts

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#31

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).

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.

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#32
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we know wanikani is spending on advertising.

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…

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

This. Two thousand times.

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#33
post #27
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money to pay people to do those things. Maybe we can say "without advertising or promotions"?

I think marketing spend is the right term. They pay for marketing salaries, but had no marketing spend.

It's a distinction without a difference. They invested effort - time and money - into marketing activities. Whether or not those efforts were outsourced is immaterial.

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#34

> 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.

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.)

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#35
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".

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#36
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.

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#37

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.

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

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#38

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 delib…

Also PR. It's not just this article, either -- the founder gives talks and interviews pretty regularly, it appears.

Indeed. I suspect the PR played the larger role, actually. Before anyone seeded a word-of-mouth chain about Duolingo, they likely read an article about it.

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#39

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 i…

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

Being freemium is almost certainly the way Duolingo will eventually go, too. Though they do seem to be resisting it and raising investment to push it further off, their business is currently unsustainable & if not freemium, it is currently unclear how they will make it sustainable.

Re: How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

#40

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 need…

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.
Post reply on HN