of product: lessons from duolingo
inside: the big green language-teaching owl, india pale ale and kanan gill's comedy special
Welcome to Of All Trades! As a self-proclaimed jack of all trades, I’m thrilled to take you through my rabbit hole of my obsession with Duolingo and how they built product. If you didn’t know already, I’m a product manager at a fin-tech startup and I’m slightly in awe of the trade. Also, I’m more than slightly in awe with France, especially the language. Put two and two together and this week’s post is on its way to you. So, LFG!
Duolingo is a foreign language learning app born out of a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science professor’s dream to make education more accessible to the masses. He argues that language-proficiency seems to be the biggest bridging gap between income levels of otherwise circumstantially identical individuals—specifically, English. If you’re a waiter who speaks English as opposed to not, the opportunities to earn more would be drastically higher. Hence, he and his cofounder (a PhD student of his) landed on building something to teach languages as opposed to maths or computer science.
Some serious biz
Fast forward 10 years, the application stands as the market leader with almost 12 times the users as its closest competitor–a whopping 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) across the globe. As of October 2024, its market capitalisation—the total market value of the shares that have been issued and are owned by the investors—stands at $12.63 billion. Market capitalization is a common way to measure a company’s worth and with this number, the big green owl is the proud mascot of the 1414th most valuable company in the world.
It makes a revenue of more than $600 million annually, but you’d be surprised to know that 80% of this revenue comes from a small fraction of the user base–the paying subscribers who account for only about 8%. If you use the app to learn any one of the numerous languages they teach (including fictional ones like High Valerian), you’d know that this is entirely in line with Duolingo’s mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.
How Duo came to haunt you!
During its growth phase in the first couple of years, Duolingo managed to bag about 3 million users thanks to its gamification model. Replete with a map, XP or experience points, progress bars and limited lives that diminish as you commit mistakes, Duolingo has set up the stage wonderfully. Don’t take this lightly, the human brain loves to play, coz you guessed it—all the world’s a stage! Most important of all, we get formally introduced to the company’s mascot, Duo–the green owl who is notorious for guilt-tripping learners so much that one could be alone, heartbroken and drunk on the sidewalk at 11:50 PM and it still won’t leave you alone!
Videos of Gen-Z finishing their daily practice at clubs are all the rage now and being a user myself (with a 100-day streak, ahem), I can confidently allude to it. I’ve finished my lessons being sick, happy, tired, cynical, consumed in my racing thoughts et cetera, in autos, motion-sickness-inducing cabs, in restaurants and in the midst of parties.
It’s safe to say that I’m now looking for an app that’s as persistent in blatantly making me stick to my past-self’s goals for every aspect of my life where small, consistent efforts day in and day out matter more than a few herculean bouts every now and then. Please leave your suggestions, thank you!
While Duo seems to be doing an immaculate job with seeking you out of your pathetic, lesson-skipping hole already, AI is helping Duo to pester you better. With over 10,000 A/B tests that the app runs, we all are but guinea pigs without the awareness. Different sets of users are made to experience the app with minor tweaks (A or B). They feed this extensive data collected from the learning habits of its majority, non-paying user group to AI/Machine Learning language models, uncovering insights to make the learning experience better for everyone.
The notification “These reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.” turned out to be the most guilt-tripping, with data to show that the app user retention (which measures the percentage of people coming back to the app again) spiked by 3%. Guilt-tripping 3 million users into changing their behaviours is not a small feat. Kudos, Duo!
With the new revenue-churning plans which involve introducing Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4, the company may be finally heading in the direction of their investors’ advice (read: pressure) to make more of the les fonds. Hopefully, Duolingo still remains accessible for everyone for a long time to come and Duo keeps showing up in our anxious nightmares. We love tough love here!
Personally…
If you ask me, I don’t mind being a guinea pig for this sort of experiment, because at the end of the day, I’m getting better at learning French and I can charmingly say I have two suitcases. I am going to the movies with my 3 cats and my sister (all untrue): J’ai deux valises. Je vais au cinéma avec mes trois chats et ma soeur.
Fin
Other Cool Stuff I Learned
India Pale Ale is not Indian! Did you know that its origins trace back to the 18th century? Originally brewed for British expatriates in India, its hoppy flavor and higher alcohol content helped preserve it during long sea voyages. It’s a fascinating example of how necessity drives innovation in product development.
Kanan Gill’s show Is This It is a perfect, comedic rendition of the feeling perfectly captured by the pin below. I was surprised by the interconnectedness of the jokes and the ability of this man to allude to things in subtle perfection, reminding us that this is all there is and it’s absolutely worth watching—all two hours of it!
A note: if you’re a returning reader—first of all, thank you so much for sticking with me—you might have observed that this post is different than the usual ones I have written in the past. I’m doing a rebranding of sorts to explore my multiple interests and the context for the same is shared in the note below:
What are your experiences with Duolingo or your own language-learning tools? Have you learnt anything cool recently that you can’t stop thinking about? I’m a sucker for such thoughts. Hit reply and let’s continue the conversation!
Anywho, I hope you liked this new format.
See ya soon, you da best,
Abhinaya