Marketing and Growth was the topic for this 4th Session of the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival 2024. We were delighted to bring the insider story of How Duolingo grew from 3M to 200M users, speaking to the inspiring Gina Gotthilf, former VP of Marketing and Growth at the language learning app.
Speakers:
Gina Gotthilf Co-Founder & GP @ Latitud (former VP @ Duolingo)
David Guérin Principal @ Brighteye
You will find key takeaways and a full write-up of the session below, and the recording can be watched here:
Key Takeaways:
Experimentation drives growth: A/B testing is crucial for optimising user experiences and identifying what works best for your product
Failure is valuable: In the growth phase, failure is seen as a learning opportunity. If a change negatively affects metrics, it's still useful for understanding customer behaviour
Organic growth matters: Focus on product quality, SEO, App Store Optimisation (ASO), and PR to grow your user base without spending on advertising
Data over opinions: User feedback can be misleading—rely on concrete data to guide decisions
Customer experience is key: Always anticipate user needs and design
The full write-up:
Growth is arguably THE most important aspect of any startup. After all, is that not the entire point of starting your own company? In this very special session, Brighteye had the pleasure of welcoming Gina Gotthilf, former VP of Marketing & Growth at Duolingo during the company’s expansion from 3M to 300M users.
With such impressive qualifications, she was able to provide us with some fantastic insights into what growing a business’ customer base requires. Here are some of the points which we found most interesting:
Gina’s story
During the session, Gina walked us through her unique career path. We learned about her experience at Tumblr, where she was put in charge of expanding the company’s user base into the LATAM region. After encountering success in this role, she was recruited by Duolingo to be their VP of Marketing & Growth, a role she filled for 5 years. Here, she was responsible for the app’s expansion worldwide, leading various original initiatives to popularise the app. Having encountered roaring success in this capacity, she began working on Mike Bloomberg’s campaign as a Marketing Lead, before founding Latitud where she invests in early-stage tech companies.
Experimentation is Key
In Gina’s view, a large part of the success she experienced at Duolingo can be attributed to her willingness and ability to experiment when trying to get word out about the app. To this end, the team made extensive use of A/B testing, in which two versions of a product are created (say a landing page with the signup button at the top, and one at the bottom), they are randomly allocated across customers, and key performance metrics are measured to compare their relative performance. Using this method, the Marketing & Growth team tested their way to success, comparing different iterations of the same features until they achieved their desired results. One such example was with sign-up completion reminders – thanks to their testing, the Duolingo team realised that the best time to send reminders to users who hadn’t finished signing up was 23.5 hours after they had originally started. Rigorous and systematic testing in this way was an essential driver in Duolingo’s expansion.
In a similar vein, Gina noted how the company’s attitude towards failure allowed for new ideas to be suggested and implemented regularly, which ultimately helped optimise every step of the user experience. Failure was defined differently within the Growth team: if a change negatively impacted some relevant metric, the team had learned something valuable about customer attitudes towards different features, which could be used to optimise that same metric. However, if product changes don’t make a difference, nothing has been learned and the team goes back to the drawing board. With this culture in place, the pace of innovation was fast and Duolingo was able to grow quickly and consistently.
Organic Growth, Doing Much with…Nothing
Another fascinating point of discussion was Gina’s success in expanding Duolingo’s user base without any spending on advertising until her fourth year on the job. Here is how she achieved this, in her own words:
Duolingo is a fantastic product to begin with – none of her efforts would have encountered as much success if she hadn’t been advertising a product which worked well and which had broad appeal.
Focusing efforts on important (and free) digital areas such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and App Store Optimisation (ASO).
Using PR as a tool to get Duolingo well-known. Getting minor deals with governments or attending conferences gave Duolingo enough credibility for journalists and news outlets to be willing to run stories about them – by building up this track record of conference attendance and important partnerships, Gina created an excuse for Duolingo to be mentioned in as many contexts as possible, all with the intent of making the company seem bigger than it really was.
Keeping a strong focus on hard data: Gina provided examples of some very harsh negative feedback provided by users on some changes which, overall, proved popular and effective with customers. The key takeaway here is that user feedback, while sometimes important, can ultimately be far more misleading than concrete data.
Always keeping the customer experience in mind. For instance, the “Can’t Speak Now” feature was created to prevent users from leaving lessons with the intention of continuing later, and then forgetting or getting too busy. Thinking ahead in this manner optimised the frequency with which users practiced.
The Duolingo Method in a Post-Pandemic World
During the Q&A section of the session, there was a significant conversation relating to the difference in economic climate between the time when Duolingo broke through and today. When Duolingo first came to be, it was one of the first apps of its kind, meaning that it faced significantly less competition. Today, however, it can seem increasingly difficult for new startups to distinguish themselves from their competitors as the space is now seemingly oversaturated. Given this fact, it is fair to ask whether Gina’s roadmap for growth at Duolingo is even applicable to today’s founders and their companies. On this point, Gina observed that while being the first to offer a product may present some advantages, it also meant that their product had no historical precedent of success to entice potential investors. In actual fact, most investors are willing to spend far more today than they were during Duolingo’s rise (see Brighteye’s 2024 European Edtech Funding Report for more on this) – as such, there is no strong reason to believe that a startup today couldn’t mirror Duolingo’s path to success.
And that concludes our session – we are very grateful to Gina for having taken the time to talk to us, and we wish her the best in her future projects!
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