How Duolingo got 110M users without spending on marketing
techinasia.com
techinasia.com
- 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 deliberately positioned their product so as to attract as large a share of the addressable audience as possible .
- They increased awareness and trial of their product via word-of-mouth, an age-old marketing communications tactic.
This is marketing.
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!
And if the article is mixing the two, the article is just plain wrong.
The keywords there are "action", and "promoting". The first 4 items you list are not marketing. They are preparing for the market. The only thing there that is actually marketing is "They increased awareness and trial of their product via word-of-mouth" and that only barely counts because most of it is OTHER people marketing it for you, without your consent, control, or even input. So, it's not Duolingo marketing themselves. It's Duolingo's users marketing it for them. That's usually referred to as Evangelism and Guy Kawasaki has made his career out of explaining and promoting that idea http://guykawasaki.com/
"Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services."
I.e. advertising and promotions are just one part of marketing.
Maybe we can say "without advertising or promotions"?
Those dimensions of starting a business that we now take for granted - from identifying a market to branding and visual design of the packaging and other consumer-facing materials - come to us by way of the discipline of marketing management.
Perhaps it should read "... people learning English who may require some form of certification ..." because not all of those 400 million Chinese are looking to work or study abroad.
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 it surprising that it has tons of users?
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).
The website is very user-friendly, and the app has been designed specifically for mobile screens, so a lot less typing, and a lot more swiping.
It feels like a paid app, and I can't think of anything that comes close in value. If I were the CEO of RS I'd lose a lot of sleep over duolingo...
Yeah, I really feel like technology is bringing us into a whole new era for language learning. At least it has for me.
みんなさん、どうもありがとう！
I might be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was just an excited user. Partly because for the reasons I just listed, and partly because his path to learning Japanese sounds... counter productive to say the least (learning 756 kanji over 4 years before you tackle grammar is... silly).
Regardless, wanikani (and other Japanese products made by this small company) is excellent. I recommend it, and am not affiliated with it.
Keep in mind in that learning a language, limiting yourself to a single source is silly. Try different textbooks, online courses, apps, YouTube videos, etc. Some of them will convey grammar in a way that clicks more with you, others pronunciation, others vocabulary, etc.
This. Two thousand times.
The article means to say "promotion" or "advertising" or "PR" or any of a myriad of "marcomm" activities that have a budget, but if you design a product to meet customer needs and bring it to market, you are marketing your product. If you think marketing has a negative connotation, you're doing it wrong, same as if your product is poorly designed or dangerous or simply ineffectual.
Approach your marketing program from the point of view of "meeting customer needs".
I view a business as an investment vehicle and marketing is how you turn over that investment. I would be much more impressed with a business that can consistently arbitrage advertising into profits at scale.
In reality anything that touches a prospect, customer or user is marketing!
A better question is... how much further would duolingo be if they invested in advertising and focused more on marketing? Would they have billions of users instead of 110M ?
Further, how many of those 110M are like me that downloaded the app, used it once or twice and than never opened it again? How many users like me would use it much more if they did invest in communicating its value to me at ideal times. (i.e. when it sees I am visiting Cabo, or Cancun, two trips I took with the app on my phone and never touched it?)
I'm highly unlikely to find myself in a position any time soon where I've got a $500m marketing budget. So someone turning that in to $1b+ is of less interest to me than the guy who went from 0 to whatever cheaply.
For what it's worth, Duolingo raised $83.3M , so it's not like they bootstrapped to that growth.
The growth hacking you are referring to has a large cost too. You need disciplined and very creative engineers, copywriters, analysts, a culture of testing, social psychologists, marketing experts, directors, etc... I bet Duolingo's marketing costs are well into the millions a year in Human Capital.
The stories of guys going from 0 to whatever cheaply are not the same stories as a company with 83 million in funding.
Its probably playing on some peoples notions that marketing is evil, and therefore money shouldn't be spent on it. Obviously not true, but there is a general dislike for marketing.
This is really just a fluff piece about Duolingo and the founder...
Marketing is a far broader category than advertising.
Is this really a thing? Sounds exploitable, and I thought the randomness of slot machines is quite carefully vetted.
The difficulty of certifying a machine / game / etc is so high that the industry mostly uses a few basic games which are proven (both from a legal and operational perspective) and then reskins them endlessly to keep players coming back. Vampires were in for the last few years, apparently, thanks to Twilight. (Anecdata based on walking through a few casinos while in town for Microconf. It's vampires, TV shows appealing to older Americans, and a lot of very very obviously US-company-attempts-to-do-China games.)
TechCrunch article on their series D: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/10/duolingo-raises-45-million-...
Yet their crunchbase profile shows they have a head of marketing. That's basically like saying I didn't spend a dime on engineering because I built the app myself.
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.