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Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
I moved on to Babbel.
I also found busuu and linq to be okay as well.
Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
I'm sure they'll be profitable in a decade...
Also don't forget this is an IPO: ideally you want to overstate your value.
Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
I switched to being a paying subscriber once and the experience was more or less the same as being a free user with the aid of an ad-blocker. Enough said.
I found it much more useful and less playful
Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of people. The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks. I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful enough to look beyond Duolingo.
Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
Just keep burning through investor cash until you're acquired by a bigger corporation. Then a year later they announce that they're killing your company because, surprise, it couldn't turn a profit.
Somewhere a rich stock owner makes a huge profit. Everyone's happy.
Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
BTW the quality of the language programs differs vastly. Spanish, which I'm studying, is very fleshed out. Tried Arabic and it was anemic and even broken in parts.
He is a legend in crowdsourcing 2 startups. The best part about crowdsourced startups are they inherently create MOAT.