Learning from Duolingo marketing

Hi frens,

As a new user of Duolingo for less than half year, it truly successfully keeps me learning every day. Ant the marketing (and app icon changing) is fun:

I know Duolingo for a long time, and it gains much more media attention since last year:

The result? The stock DUOL 0.00%↑ reached all-time high, and “Duolingo Finishes 2024 with 51% DAUs growth, more than 40 Million DAUs, and Record Revenue in the Fourth Quarter”.

The marketing looks unbelievably simple, but it works much better than any other brands, not to mention web3 world. So what’s the difference?

We’ve seen lots of web3 products focusing too much on marketing and “tokenomics” for cold start, only to lose initial short-term active users due to a lack of a long-term product vision. What about Duolingo’s cold start? The founder said, “No marketing. It was all word of mouth. That’s how we grew for the first several years.“

It may seem like an extreme case and survivorship bias, it does reflect that marketing wouldn’t work well if the product isn’t ready for long-term iteration and operation.

Your friend,

Denken