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How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing

techinasia.com

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

#41

Post by 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-...

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

#42

Post by 2pointsomone »

maroonblazer wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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

#43

Post by tudorw »

maroonblazer wrote: post #9

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…

Thanks for that, nicely summed, I get many clients who think marketing is promotions, they've already missed the boat and it's a tough job to pull them back far enough to re-assess their market.

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

#44

Post by dschiptsov »

afarrell wrote: post #37
dschiptsov wrote: post #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.

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

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.

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

#45

Post by INTPenis »

beambot wrote: post #13
maroonblazer wrote: post #9

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…

Not to mention a high-profile TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_...

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

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

#46

Post by philfrasty »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #4

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…

The only other (software) company I can think of in the language space with a recognized brand is Rosetta-Stone and it has traditionally been very expensive. Currently retails for a little less than 400€ (450$) for one language course on Amazon.

So I think the user-value from a price-perspective is gigantic if you want to get into a language (not sure how deep Duolingo dives into the language though).

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

#48

Post by blubb-fish »

maroonblazer wrote: post #9

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…

You are nit-picking.

Marketing refers in this context to not or semi-directed advertising like ...

... ads. You know those stinky blinky patches of moving colors next to a text you would like to read. Never seen them do that.

Duolingo only relied on organic and peer-to-peer advertisement - very healthy - I like this a lot - kudos to them!

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

#49

Post by raverbashing »

schakraberty wrote: post #31
newman314 wrote: post #24

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.

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

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

#50

Post by ucaetano »

blubb-fish wrote: post #48
maroonblazer wrote: post #9

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…

You are nit-picking. Marketing refers in this context to not or semi-directed advertising like ... ... ads. You know those stinky blinky patches of moving colors next to a text you would like to read. Never seen them do that. Duolingo only relied on organic and peer-to-peer advertisement - very healthy - I like this a lot - kudos to them!

No, he's not. Duolingo didn't spend on advertising, but spent a lot in marketing.

And if the article is mixing the two, the article is just plain wrong.

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