Gina Gotthilf: Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users; How to Master PR and Comms | E1028

1. 0:00 – 6:00

   Gina Gotthilf’s Journey from Brazil to Silicon Valley

   1. GGGina Gotthilf0:00

      Hi, Harry. I led growth at Duolingo from three to 200 million users before working for the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign, da-da-da-da, and, you know, co-authored a neuroscience study. Like, I don't know if that's what I would do, but, like, these are three moments and three signifiers that Harry would say, "I don't know who Gina is and what she did, but I... she just had three things that make me think this is important and I should pay attention."

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:21

      (instrumental music) Gina, I am so excited for this. I've heard so many great things from your partner, Brian, for a long time, so thank you so much for joining me today.

   3. GGGina Gotthilf0:29

      Ah, it's my pleasure, Harry, but you're... You always say you're excited for your guests, so...

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:33

      You know, you know what? I do, but I actually heard that this intro, in particular, was more interesting than any other. Brian actually kind of left a dangling carrot. He said that you had some very early, more turbulent years to your career, but he didn't actually go into them. Can you help me understand, uh, what were these more turbulent early career years?

   5. GGGina Gotthilf0:53

      Yes, Harry. Yeah. No, that's totally true. I, I like talking about this because I think people think they need to know exactly what they're gonna do from the get-go. And I'm a great example of someone who, like, fumbled about a lot in my early 20s, and it's still okay. Um, I majored in philosophy, which is arguably one of the most useless majors you can have. I say that in a self-deprecating way. Of course you learn how to think, et cetera, et cetera, but it's not very useful. I didn't know how to use Excel when I graduated, and all I wanted was to live in New York because my dad had lived in New York and I grew up with, like, New York pictures all over Brazil, and I just wanted that experience, but I applied to 100 jobs and didn't get any of them. And then finally, I got an internship, and I was the only intern who had already graduated, so I was like the loser older intern, um, at the company, and things didn't go quite swimmingly. Um, so for starters, my, my boss, uh, ha- was a heroin addict at the time, um, (laughs) so she... But we became great friends and I knew there was something off, and one day I confronted her so she finally admitted it to me, and then we ended up going to Narcotics Anonymous together and they asked me to take over for her responsibilities while she was out, um, and so that was one way in which I, I, I grew because I had to do the job of my boss, um, very quickly. Mm-hmm. And then m- my, my new boss there was, uh, had just been promoted from head of HR to head of social media, as is very normal, so this, this person didn't quite know what was going on. It was just really tough. I cried in the bathroom a lot. Um, and then I had a couple of other experiences that just didn't quite work out and I kept losing my right to be in the United States because I'm Brazilian and I needed a visa, and I just decided, "You know what? Having a career is not for me. Uh, I think that this whole, like, climbing a ladder thing is really stupid. I studied philosophy, I want, like, meaning in life, and I'm just not gonna do this anymore." So I left New York when I was 24, um, slash, like, had to leave New York when I was 24, (laughs) um, and I went back home to Brazil and thought like, "Okay, well, I'm going to sign up for WOOF," the World Organization of Organic Farms, where you go and you live in farms all over the world and you get to sleep and eat there and in exchange they, like, uh, i- in exchange you, you work for them. And so I was like, "I'm gonna work with animals and out on the land and this is now my life," and I bought around the world ticket with the money that I had and bought all of this stuff, and things really changed when Tumblr hired me. So it was like, n- now when I talk about my career, I'm like, "Yes, yes, I helped Tumblr grow and then I w- helped Duolingo grow and I worked for the Mi- Bloomberg presidential campaign and now I started a company that's backed by Andreessen Horowitz," and it sounds really impressive but most people sort of cut out these, like, B-sides to their history, um, and I, I kind of have fun highlighting them. Um-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings3:38

      Uh, pause. P- pause, Gina, Gina.

   7. GGGina Gotthilf3:40

      Yes?

   8. HSHarry Stebbings3:40

      You, you said you go and, you know, work and live on farms and then Tumblr hired you. I don't imagine that's the normal sourcing strategy for Tumblr at the time. How did that happen? (laughs)

   9. GGGina Gotthilf3:52

      Yes. So that, you know, I, I really believe that a lot (laughs) o- the big decisions are made because people don't know any better or they don't have other choices. Uh, one thing that I did that was really good throughout my whole career is that I love meeting people. And some people call that networking, but I really, truly love meeting people and when I was in New York and I had kind of these crappy jobs at digital marketing agencies and I had to leave, I decided I wanted to leave all the... meet all the people who h- I had spoke to on the phone or emailed that I thought sounded interesting, and I reached out to them and said, like, "I'm leaving the country. I would love to have the opportunity to have a coffee with you." And one of the people I met was Mark Cote-nee, and Mark Cote-nee had just been hired at Tumblr as their head of media. He was at Newsweek before, amazing man, we're still friends, um, and he talked to me and said, "I think that Tumblr wants to grow in Brazil soon." And I said, "Well, good luck to Tumblr. I am no longer doing this. I'm not, I'm not doing the career thing anymore, but, you know, I hope you guys have a great time," and I went back to Brazil. And they reached out to me six months later saying, "Hey, remember, you know, we were... We're now at the point where we want to grow in Brazil and we remember you," um, and I had worked with, with Mark on a campaign at one of the digital marketing agencies so he knew a bit about how I worked, and he was like, "And we would love your help." And I remember saying, "That is so great, but no." Like, I just, I turned it down. I was like, "I'm not... I just don't wanna do this anymore. I'm tired of, of falling on my face and I just want a really simple life where I don't try this anymore." And he was like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna convince you because if you're gonna go eat, pray, love..." I think this was pre-eat, pray, love, so he might have just said, like, "Travel," um, "then you're gonna need some money, right? So how about we hire you for one month and you help us figure out, like, what it is that we're gonna do in Brazil. Like, maybe you help us hire the right person or you just help us, like, you know, figure out the first steps." And I was like, "Okay, that sounds, that sounds good." They hired me for a month and I helped them organize press interviews and, you know, do a big community meetup and then source talent for this role that they were hiring for that was country manager, and at the end of that they were like, "We don't like anybody. Can you do it?" And it was a really tough moment for me because I didn't want to. (laughs)

   10. HSHarry Stebbings5:57

       I thought that it w- you know, I was gonna fall on my face again, but it felt

2. 6:00 – 8:04

   Lessons from Time at Tumblr

   1. HSHarry Stebbings6:00

      like a really pivotal moment in my career, and they were very desperate, so they were like, "We... You can make your own title."

   2. GGGina Gotthilf6:05

      ... like, you can make your job description, you will have no manager. You're just gonna be in Brazil by yourself and you can figure it out. And I was like, "Okay, that sounds fun."

   3. HSHarry Stebbings6:12

      Mm-hmm. Can I ask, Tumblr's a very iconic early internet name. When you think about how that time shaped your mindset today and any big lessons, are there any that you would really think to straight away from that time at Tumblr?

   4. GGGina Gotthilf6:26

      Oh, well, yes, Harry. One of the things I learned at Tumblr that I think a lot of people in early-stage startups that succeed learn is that no one knows what they're doing at most points in time, in life and in business. And so, look, Tumblr was an amazing product, David Karp is brilliant, the team was awesome, but a lot of the stuff we were doing, we were fumbling about trying to figure it out. Um, and, you know, one anecdote I have to tell about that is just the memory of standing at a cash register in Sao Paulo trying to take all the money I had in my account in Brazil to pay our contractors, because Tumblr couldn't figure out how to wire money from the US to Brazil. And then I ended up borrowing money from family members and I borrowed money from a- a well-known startup founder today as well in order to pay those contractors, because we were doing this big launch event and the money just hadn't shown up. And if the money didn't make it, we wouldn't have the launch event that I'd been working on for so long. And, uh, you know, I wasn't paid at Tumblr for six months because they couldn't figure that out, and I was like... I was living at my parents'... like, in my childhood bedroom at the time when I was 25 and, like, working out of, like, my childhood bed, literally. So it was okay, I could eat and sleep, but I- I realized, you know, everyone's figuring every step of the way out and if they can do it, then- then maybe one day so can I.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings7:41

      Your parents are going, "Why are you working for this company that's not paying you?"

   6. GGGina Gotthilf7:45

      (laughs)

   7. HSHarry Stebbings7:47

      For six months? That is-

   8. GGGina Gotthilf7:48

      Yes, they were. They were very shocked by a lot ab- ou- a lot of it. You know, just the fact that, like, when you work for a startup, your boss comes down to Brazil and your friends, and you go out to a bar. They're like, "This is inappropriate. You shouldn't be doing that."

   9. HSHarry Stebbings7:58

      That is, that is hilarious. What a great story as well, from a month through the journey you had. I love that.

3. 8:04 – 19:20

   What Worked and Didn’t Work at Duolingo

   1. HSHarry Stebbings8:04

      Um, okay, so we have that Tumblr journey and then we have Duolingo. I think people always learn actually from, like, actually tangible things that worked or didn't work. When you think about growth experiments, can you take me to one? This feels like a job interview, a terrible way to phrase this, but fuck it. Um, take me to one which worked and one which didn't, and how you changed as a, as a leader and a thinker because of those two experiences.

   2. GGGina Gotthilf8:27

      Yes. Well, one thing I'll say is that when I started out at- at Duolingo, just for context, I was not a head of growth. They hired me as, like, this person to do Brazil and then Argentina, Mexico, and it was working, so they kept asking me, like, "Can you grow, uh, us in Europe?" And I was 25, uh, at this time I was 27, so I was like, "Yeah, of course." And I- I had- had no idea what I was doing. And so growth at the time wasn't quite an ex- like, a product-led growth, experiment-based, like, A/B testing thing for me. I was just, like, figuring out how to make Duolingo become as well-known as possible all over the world with PR and partnerships and whatever worked, which had worked for Tumblr before. When they put me in charge of growth, um, I remember this conversation very clearly because, uh, Luis and Severin, co-founders of Duolingo, came to me and said, "We need..." You know, "Our- our investors are telling us that we need someone to be head of growth," because Luis was head of growth until then. Like, he was the one who was just, like, he had all the me- metrics in his head. And we thought of hiring someone externally, but, you know, you're- you're helping us grow so much, maybe you should be the head of growth. And I was like, "Yeah, of course I'll do it." And then I went back to my desk and googled what is growth. Like, what is growth, and then startup, you know, like to tr- And I found Andrew Chen's blog, and I started reading Andrew Chen's blog. And, like, that's when I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I can do this." But it was just me and one engineer, that's all they gave me, and one back-end engineer. And so you can't do much when it's just you and one back-end engineer, so we started thinking, like, what can we do that doesn't require any designs? Um, my first lesson was we decided to test notifications, and, um, Luis and Severin were both like, "No. We- you should not test with notifications because we have already tested them with notifications a lot, and we have optimized them. Go do something else." And we were like, "Mm, but almost everyone who uses Duolingo gets notifications, so we're still gonna see if we can do something about it." And I'm a really good writer. That's one thing I can do. So I was like, "I can write copy, like, from, like, the perspective of the owl and from the perspective of the user and the perspective of, like, the Duolingo, like, leader." Uh, "So let's do this, uh, you know, multiple times." And it- and it actually was extremely high ROI. Even though they had already optimized a lot, uh, we were able to derive great results. And so the lesson that I would highlight there is... There are two. One, it's always... When you're prioritizing growth experiments, it's always about ROI. And I for me is investment of time and R is potential returns. And so investment of time means how, you know, how much time are you gonna take to do this? And for us, I could write copy in, like, 30 minutes. I could write, like, 20 iterations, and Sven, the engineer at the time, could, you know, do two lines of code that do a notification very quickly as well. So the investment was very low and the potential return was very high because the number of users who were seeing that was so high already at the time. So e- even if we could marginally improve that, then we could see great returns. Um, and the second thing is that when you find an inflection point in something that you notice has an effect on the growth of your startup, it's worth doubling down on that versus just trying to figure out what else. Um, and that works not just for things that worked, but also for things that worked really negatively. So if you do an experiment and, like, it really harms you, that means that you found an inflection point, and you might as well keep testing.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings11:31

      Wh- what does that mean? So if it doesn't work, you found an inflection point, keep testing, double down? Eh, help me understand that. Why would you want to dig deeper into the pain of something that doesn't work? (laughs)

   4. GGGina Gotthilf11:40

      Well, it's not pain if you're learning is how I view it. Um, and a- an experiment fails if you were not able to reach any results. If you're not able to get to statistical significance, or if you did and you actually saw no meaningful results, that's a huge failure. You learned very little, and now you have to go and start again. But if you run an experiment with statistical significance and it harmed your product, that means that you found a moment that really matters to users. And if you found a moment that really matters to users, you can manipulate it in multiple ways for positive and for negative.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings12:09

      Okay.So if that's one with notifications that worked, and actually we saw, like, actually incredibly high investment, uh, sorry, incredibly low investment for great returns, if we think about the flip side, was there one that maybe didn't work or took longer to work?

   6. GGGina Gotthilf12:23

      Yes. Uh, there is, there is one particular experiment that we did and that really didn't work, and I'm almost cheating because it ended up being our most successful experiment of all time in the growth team. Um, so what happened was the team really wanted to, to implement badges on Duolingo. One thing that we did as a team that ended up being really effective was that we would have different members of the team go and play, like, intentionally play different games that were very popular at the time, and then identify what they thought were growth levers on those games, and then talk about how we could implement those onto Duolingo in our growth meeting. We would do that about once a month, and this is exciting and, and cool because most people building an education app would think like, "Ooh, what's working for education apps? Maybe I'll go copy that." But we always thought, "What's working for retention?" And games get retention, right? And education apps do not get retention, right? And why? And so we always looked at games for our frameworks, and everyone was convinced that badges was gonna be huge because all of the top games have badges. Like, even from the days of Foursquare. So you do something, you gain a badge, and then you do something else and you gain another badge, and now you're collecting badges, and they're exciting, and then you can show off how many badges you have, and that somehow really gets people to stick around long. So everyone was convinced and the team kept trying to convince me, the head of the team, to do it, and I kept saying, "Nope, it's, it's low ROI 'cause it's too much investment. We're not gonna do it." Finally, they convinced me, "Jeanna, this is really silly. Like, uh, we know this is gonna work." So I was like, "Okay, let's do it. Let's finally do it." But you know what? Let's find a minimum viable product, like an MVP version of this test. So instead of doing the whole test, we're gonna figure out like... And that's often what you do. Like, let's figure out what li- is the minimum version of this, of this experiment that we think will give us the results that we need in order to determine whether this is a good or, or a non-lever. Um, and so we decided to create one badge, and it was really early on in the experiment. You look like you wanna ask something.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings14:18

      Oh, no, no. Rock and roll, please.

   8. GGGina Gotthilf14:19

      Okay. Um, it was real early on, so a lot of the experiments we did were early on in the app ex- experience. And by early on, I mean, you know, from very close to the moment when the person signs up or tries Duo- Duolingo out for the first time, because that's when you have the most number of users. And so we decided to give people a badge for signing up. It was like, you sign up and then you would get like this, like, really gamified girl with balloons that would say, like, "You got your first badge." And we were like, if we can see results from that, then we know that people would... are reacting positively to badges, and then we can start implementing other badges. The reason why we did that is because creating badges isn't just an experiment, because you need multiple badges in order for a badge to even mean anything, and you need a place to show off your badges, so now you need to think about the logistics of how you're going to implement that badge, at what point they get triggered, where do they get displayed inside a very simple app where we're trying not to have a hamburger menu with, like, multiple tabs. So it was quite complex, but we decided this was the way to know. And what happened was no one reacted to the girl with the balloons. Like, it did, it did nothing. And so we concluded, this is silly, it's actually not a good use of our time, let's table it. And we didn't work on badges again for about another year when we had an a-ha moment as a team, and I can't quite explain to you when that happened, um, that actually what we had tried was a minimum viable product, like an MVP of the experiment, but it wasn't viable. That's how I would put it. Basically, it was so minimal that it didn't actually elicit the emotions, it didn't actually do the thing that badges would if implemented in its full extent. Because something... First of all, you get a badge for something that you did and that you're proud of. No one's proud of signing up. That's such a lame...

   9. HSHarry Stebbings15:57

      So, I mean, that, that was, that was my exact thought, which is like, I totally get it that like you need the album of badges for it to be meaningful and you need more. But I think actually when I hear that, it's just like, you know as a user, signing up is not, not anything to be proud of.

   10. GGGina Gotthilf16:14

       No.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings16:14

       And so it's not actually the fact that you need the album, it's the fact that the action doesn't correlate to value.

   12. GGGina Gotthilf16:20

       Yes. That's, that's one main thing. And I think that when you're so into it and in your team and you're looking at the moments that really make a difference in a user's journey, it's easy to sort of lose track of what actually matters and what doesn't matter from a user perspective. And what we weren't doing at the time was dogfooding our own experiments, which is really silly. So we would, we would, like, launch an experiment, and then we would look at the results. We never thought that we should just, like, sit at a table and actually try out the thing that we had just built to see how that makes us feel and whether it works or doesn't work. So that's something we started doing in the growth team at that point, which I know sounds silly because Duolingo knows what they're doing, but, like, at every step of the way, we were figuring out how to make things better. And so when, a year later, we decided to finally, you know, do that again and actually do it right, we, we invested a lot more time at that ti-... At that point, we had much less, like, low-hanging fruit to tackle, and so we were like, "Okay, let's invest time in this." We actually spent, I think, about a month because, like, designing the different badges, figuring out where they all go, et cetera. And then, of course, it ended up being the most effective thing that we did and collecti- collection of experiments where we were, we were, we could impact not just growth numbers, but every single metric across the company, like monetization, et cetera.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings17:27

       You mentioned pausing it there. How long do you give an experiment or a project before you pause it? 'Cause you need enough data, but you don't want to keep it going for too long. What's that right balance?

   14. GGGina Gotthilf17:40

       So there is a, there is a science for this. It's called statistical significance, and you can find calculators online. But basically what that means is, you, you know, if you, if you flip a coin... Or let's, let's... You know, here's an example. Harry, what's your favorite color?

   15. HSHarry Stebbings17:55

       Uh, blue.

   16. GGGina Gotthilf17:56

       Wow, mine too. So probably 100% of the human race prefers blue as a color, right? No, definitely not. Why? Because we're too small of a sample size. So that doesn't actually give us information, it's just random. Statistical significance tells you whether something that you tested and the result that you got is likely to repeat itself over time over and over and over and over and over, and there's math to figure out whether that's, you know, that's the case or not. And it depends on, um, two things. One, the size of the change.... um, of (clears throat) like the size of the impact of the experiment that you're trying to make. So for example, like if you do a notification that's slightly better than the other one that improves click-through rates by 2%, that's very different from, like, if you, um, do something that's so major that actually, like, 80% of people are now clicking on this one, you know, versus the control. 80% and 2% are, are very different, and so you need less people when you have a bigger change, when you see, like, bigger result, and you need more people in order to prove that something so tiny, eh, is actually repeatable. And so there's a way to test for that. It's really hard really early on in early-stage startups, which is where I'm focusing my time now, because you don't have enough people for statistical significance, so you would need to have a lot of money to invest in ads, for example, to get people to, like, to try your thing. And so that's really hard to do.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings19:14

       I, I totally agree with you and get you there. I, I do have to ask, uh, uh, one, and picking up, you said about retention there

4. 19:20 – 22:20

   Effective North Star Metrics

   1. HSHarry Stebbings19:20

      being the focus. I had Alex Schultz, the CM of, master on the show, and he said basically, "Retention's king. Everything else doesn't really matter." How do you think about effective North Star metric setting? Because I think most people actually just set the wrong North Star and then optimize for the wrong thing. How do you think about that and how did retention play into that?

   2. GGGina Gotthilf19:40

      I agree. Retention is everything. To me, retention is almost like product-market fit. If you have retention, it means it's- that people actually like the thing that you made and it's actually useful for them, and that determines whether something's going to succeed or is not going to succeed. So that's, like, a very s- basic way of looking at it. You can, you can, you know, create, like, "You know what, Harry, I just made this box and I think it's an incredible box. And if I invest a lot of money in marketing this box, and if I'm a marketing genius, it's going to sell a lot and then the minute I stop investing, it will not sell a lot because it's actually not that great, it- and it's just like every other box out there." But if you make something that's amazing, you know, then every dollar you pour, every minute you pour into making people aware that that exists and that that's a possibility to solve that- their problem, then that money and that time goes far for, uh, goes a lot further because it actually is useful to people.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings20:34

      Wh- what was your North Star metric at Duolingo when you think back to it? Is it the number of sessions per week? Is it the number of levels completed? What was s- how did you define success as a user?

   4. GGGina Gotthilf20:48

      The North Star metric for Duolingo, at all times, was daily active users. That's it, DAU. And so of course, we had some metrics that helped us understand whether, you know, like, how we were impacting daily active users, but we cared about daily active users from the beginning, even before we were doing growth experiments with my team and we were just looking at PR. So I was told, like, PR only matters if we're able to increase the number of daily active users. And if you talk to an- a PR agency, they would say, "That's impossible. I don't wanna do that." But it is possible, because if you're able to get this product in front of a lot of people who are your target users, then they will actually use what, you know, what you're, you're, you're showing them. Um, whereas a lot of people focus on metrics closer to acquisition, and growth gets correlated with acquisition a lot of the time, but it doesn't matter how many people you get. If it's not- if your retention isn't there, then it doesn't quite matter. So spending a lot of time on retention upfront, if you can, really helps make sure that every time, every, every second and every dollar you spend on acquisition goes a lot further.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings21:55

      I mean, you mentioned that kind of the retention. I mean, we discussed that. Acquisition getting through the doors, PR as well is one kind of fun one aspect of doing so. Now, we agreed before we- when we s- were chatting that it's actually kind of heavily under-utilized and underrated, I think, by founders. I almo- actually, I think it's often denigrated, if we're being totally honest. It's like, oh, fluffy PR marketing whatever stuff, um, and is handed to, like, the intern,

5. 22:20 – 31:59

   The Tactics of Public Relations

   1. HSHarry Stebbings22:20

      I find, and it's really just not the right way to do it. So my question to you is, how should founders think about PR at the most tactical level?

   2. GGGina Gotthilf22:30

      PR is so not sexy. It's considered really old school. It's like, "Ugh, no, I wanna do product-led growth. I'm gonna be doing A/B tests." I ended up doing PR before I knew what PR was. I just thought, "You know what? If I get th- these big newspapers to write about Tumblr, then I think that, like, we're gonna get a lot of users." And then I was like, "How do I get these big papers to write about Tumblr? Maybe I should just find who the journalists are and then I should figure out, like, what interests them." And that, I guess, was PR. Um, and it honestly was the most important lever that helped Tumblr grow in Latin America and that helped Duolingo grow in the first two years, I would say, which is crazy. Of cou- and of course we were talking about retention. I only had the luxury of doing PR because those were retentive products. Those were products that already had a baseline of retention such that, you know, we knew that it had product-market fit and people actually wanted to use it. So from a very tactical perspective, here's how I think about PR looking back, and it's- and I have a playbook, but at the time, just to really highlight my ignorance, I didn't have a playbook, I was just really trying things out and they worked. So here's what you need to do. First, you need to have a story to tell, and if you don't have a story to tell, it doesn't mean that it's not there, it just mean- it might mean that you just don't know what the story is. And often when you are the person who built the thing, you're not the person who can actually tell the story about why it's important, and so you explore that. You know, if you're really solving a problem, which is what a startup is supposed to do, or a product's supposed to do, and, and you're solving a problem for a lot of people, again, that's what a startup is supposed to do, you probably have a great story there about why this matters to people. And then you might have stories of individuals who have actually had their problem solved with what you built, and that's also a really interesting story. The second thing is, you go and you find-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings24:15

      Can I be really boring and just really tactical?

   4. GGGina Gotthilf24:17

      Sorry. Yeah.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings24:17

      Do we write that story down on a Google Doc? Do we, uh, how do we codify it? P- f- who, who n- often is involved?I just wanna get as tactical as possible because it will-

   6. GGGina Gotthilf24:28

      Yes.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings24:28

      ... save me doing this work and then I can just send them this episode instead.

   8. GGGina Gotthilf24:32

      Yes. Of course, Harry. So, what I would recommend is you just tell the s- like, tell the story of, of what y- what you think is meaningful about your app or what you're building over and over and over and over. And you watch very carefully for how people react to things. And then you learn what actually matters to people and what doesn't matter to people. And so, if you have a start- a startup or a product, you know, and I go, "Harry, let me tell you about my, the thing I'm building." And I, like, tell you, and at first you're gonna pretend that you're interested because you're, like, really nice and I'm your friend or whatever. And I'll say a lot of things during the course of, like, while I'm telling you about my product, and you're going to ask a question about something in particular, or you're gonna react to something in particular. That's when you know you have a hook about something that matters to people. And you can actually write that down if that's gonna make it easier to you. And I would actually write all of those moments down and understand how that sort of backtracks into a story.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings25:21

      Totally agree and get you there. Okay, and so you have that hook and then we write it down on a Google Doc? Like, how, like, how long is that?

   10. GGGina Gotthilf25:27

       Yeah. I didn't... With Duolingo we never wrote it down in a Google Doc. It just, it was like shared knowledge. I, I worked very closely with Luis von Ahn, the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo in the early days, and so I just heard him tell the story over and over, and I memorized it. And then we would just, like, play off of each other and build on it with time.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings25:43

       Okay, so we have that story. Why did PR care? Everyone has a story today.

   12. GGGina Gotthilf25:49

       Okay.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings25:49

       Everyone thinks their story is unique. W- How do we take it one step further?

   14. GGGina Gotthilf25:53

       So, the first thing I would say is not just write your story, but you need to condense that story down into a one-liner. And that's, of course, like, what you would do for a startup in general. But one line really matters because when you're messaging someone for the first time, they really don't care who you are, they don't care about what you're writing about, so their attention needs to be piqued immediately. So, what I advise founders to do is basically come up with every name or number that might be impressive about their startup or their, or their background and condense it into one line. So, for example, you know, I'll, I'll just go with mine, right? Like, so Gina Gothelf has, um, uh... If I, if I introduce myself to someone I'll say, "Hi, Harry. I led growth at Duolingo from three to 200 million users before working for the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign," da-da-da-da, "and, you know, co-authored a neuroscience study." Like, I don't know if that's what I would do, but, like, these are three moments and three signifiers that Harry would say, "I don't know who Gina is and what she did, but I... She just had three things that make me think this is important and I should pay attention." So, you need to find those signifiers. And if you don't have them yet, it's okay, you can find proxies. Like, for example, "I went to this university," or, "So-and-so has used my product," or, "I have money from this angel investor." So, you need to find the things that are go- are gonna matter to a journalist. What we did with Duolingo and with Tumblr, but especially with Duolingo, over and over again, was just that. So, for example, um, I would have Luis von Ahn fly to a country and then I would make sure to schedule a talk by Luis von Ahn, not just in one place that had, like, a, a, a major name, like, for example, a top university, but two. And so it would be normally, like, a top university in that country and then a top tech conference, and I would try to make it so that it all happened within one week or 10 days max. Then I would reach out to journalists on Ins- uh, uh, sorry, on Twitter or on LinkedIn and I would have this one-liner, and then I would say, "Luis has been invited by..." and then I would use the two things that they would go, "Wow, this matters." Like, imagine, Harry, you've never heard of Harry Stebbings but he was just invited by Harvard and TechCrunch to speak at blah, blah, blah, and, you know, he has no time, so I'd create a scarcity. He has no time right now, you know, like, he's super important even though no one's heard of this. Um, if you would like, you know, 10 minutes to, to speak with him, I could potentially make that happen. And so, you generate scarcity and you generate those levers and points of significance even when you don't have them by s- thinking what matters to people. So, for example, in Columbia we did that with the Columbian government. Like, we used Duolingo t- we, we... I worked with the Columb- the Colombian government, the MinTech, which is the Ministry of Technology there, to get Duolingo into public schools. You would think, wow, Gina, that's amazing. You got Duolingo to public schools. You've got the whole population. No, it actually worked really badly. Actually, the MinTech in Columbia was, was probably the better one of the governments. I don't want to say anything bad about them. But other governments, in general, are very slow and they are unable to make these things happen at the rate that a startup requires for it to be considered a success. Which means that they weren't able to get Duoling- Duolingo into schools, or even if they did people weren't using Duolingo, teachers were afraid of using Duolingo, and then the rate of people using Duolingo in classes were super low. None, none of that mattered because we could use that for PR, because now I could reach out to journalists and say, "Duolingo is officially being used with, alongside the Ministry of Technology or the Ministry of Education of your country in public schools." And I have proof because... And as part of my little contract I said they had to have a little landing page where they put the Duolingo logo on it. So, then I could, like, hyperlink so the journalists could go and see, wow, it's true, the Duolingo logo is on the government website. And suddenly now the journalist thinks Duolingo's really important and really matters. The government is putting their name behind it. So, even though this partnership isn't really going anywhere and it's not quite working, I have now signaled to the journalist that they should know about something and they don't, and they need-

   15. HSHarry Stebbings29:37

       Mm-hmm.

   16. GGGina Gotthilf29:37

       ... to catch up.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings29:38

       What did the journalists respond? Did... were they all just like, "Yes, you're amazing," and, "How wonderful"? Like, how did that go?

   18. GGGina Gotthilf29:47

       Look, I did a lot of PR in my, in my career, at Tumblr and especially at Duolingo because every opportunity we got then we would just milk it. And so we'll... and we would come up with a feature and then we would come up with a feature in order to get the press, and we'd, like, make press out of something that wasn't that interesting, so I did a lot of it. And you have to be really resilient because a lot... you get a lot of nos, even when you're able to tell a great story. But you don't... It... But if... Here's one big difference about being the person at your startup who does PR yourself versus hiring a PR agency, and why I'm a big advocate for doing it yourself if you can. When you are at a startup you have nothing to lose by spraying and praying. You have very little to lose, to be honest. Which means, like, I really want to get featured on whatever newspaper or whatever site or whatever blog or whatever influencer's account.Um, you can then go and find out all of the people who are writing about it or who are, you know, journalists at this organization, and you can pitch 10 of them. And that is a huge faux pas in PR. You're not supposed to pitch 10 people at the same organization. It actually can backfire tremendously, and if, if you are an agency, you are burning all of your bridges and people won't listen to you anymore. But if you are the founder of a startup and your life depends on the startup working out, you don't care that much and you can always play the, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I've never done PR" card, which is fine 'cause that's not supposed to be your main job. So, of course, you know, you- you- you- I would recommend messaging many people within the same organization with a couple of caveats. First, if you message multiple people in an organization and one of- and one of them says yes, I would immediately react and say, "Hey, just so you know, I also wrote to so-and-so." Like, you know, like, I can let them know that, like, you're- you're taking this or whatever. So you, you, like, make sure that you give them information that they wouldn't have to find out at the water cooler and feel really awkward about at their organization. Um, so that's one. Two, I would not recommend that you now make a list of all of the New York Times journalists and try to pitch all of them. Because from a tactical perspective, here's another thing that I've learned, and it also works for startups pitching VCs honestly, which is make a list of all of the PR sources that you might wanna be featured on, and start with the least important ones when you're pitching. Because as you pitch, you need to learn what's working and what's not working. As we said earlier, if I, if I pitch something

6. 31:59 – 46:47

   Ultimate Guide to the Press Release

   1. GGGina Gotthilf31:59

      and I keep getting nos, you have to modify that pitch. It's not working.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings32:02

      Do you send them the press release? I'm going through this now with, with something. D- do you send them the press release? Do you say, "Hey, Gina, would love to hop on a call," and then before the call, or after the call, you send it? Do you, do you have to do it to get their attention? How do you think about using docs or a press release to get attention?

   3. GGGina Gotthilf32:21

      I would say there's no, there's no recipe and people do it differently. And especially, you know, uh, agencies do it differently. The way that worked- that has worked out for me in the past is generating FOMO. And so, I don't send all of the information up front, which is annoying to journalists. I'm sorry for the journalists who are listening to this. I'm sure it's annoying, but it piques their interest, and human beings react to things that pique their interest, um, and he wants the person to react. And so you... I would write to these journalists and I would, you know, because on, on LinkedIn you only get a really s- small message that you can send, and on Twitter there's like 140 characters. So, I got really good at just sending that short message. But the short message has to be interesting enough that the person would reply with one word, like, "Would you like to hear more?" Sure. I got a lot of that, you know. Now, this is my, the way I read into this, like psychology of it. If the person has responded to you once, now they have a relationship with you, even if it's a very marginal relationship, but before, they had zero relationship to you. So, it's very easy to ignore an email that you've never responded to before, but if you've responded to someone once, you're much more compelled to respond a second time. So, now you already have a foot in the door and you're in a much better place, and they will at least tell you no, whereas it's much easier to just ignore otherwise. So, I would keep it super short, and like a cliffhanger, and then if the person responded with interest, then I would give them a lot more information. Because, of course, I don't want to make a journalist's life tough.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings33:40

      Do you put the release date in that? Do you give exclusives and how do you manage that?

   5. GGGina Gotthilf33:45

      Mm. Okay. So, it depends on your strategy. Now we're going really, really tactical on the PR side.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings33:50

      I love, I love this. This is one of my favorite topics and no one knows how to do it, so I'm thrilled about this.

   7. GGGina Gotthilf33:55

      Okay. I love PR too. I think it's, it's awesome. It really depends on what strategy you choose, and there are two main strategies in PR. One is you decide to do an exclusive, which means that you're only gonna allow one publication to, you know, to share the news that you want to share. That's advantageous when you wanna go with a major organization, especially when you don't have a relationship with them, like a really big news source. Because for example, if TechCrunch publishes something or the New- the New York Times publishes something, or The Economist, that can already be enough for you. You don't even need anyone else, because everyone else will want to take- pick up that story anyway, and so then you get the distribution that way. But there are downsides to that as well, because then you just have that one, and then maybe other main, uh, news sources that you care about will then say, "This isn't news, so we're not gonna cover it anymore." And so, it's about, it's about depth versus breadth and what, and- and which one you decide to go with at the time. Depends on what your strategy is, who you're trying to reach, and also what your leverages are in terms of your connections and how often you've done this before. Most startups, I would say, choose the exclusive, because then you develop a relationship with that one journalist and then, you know, it feels more doable. We would spray and pray most of the time, just like breadth, which is not what you're supposed to do. When I hired my first PR person actually at Duolingo, they, like, reprimanded me very heavily but I said, "I don't care 'cause it's worked, and I will continue to do it because it worked, so I don't care what the, what the theory is," which is, uh, instead of giving someone ex- an exclusive, um, trying to get it published in as many places as possible, um, at once. If you decide to go with that approach, you would do an embargo. So, there's an ex- exclusive versus, like, the embargo. Embargo means that you tell journalists they can only publish something at a specific time at- on a specific date. And if you're able to do that, then you can get all of the news sources to publish something at the same time, and that's magical because you create a surround sound effect. Whereas if someone reads this story and they see a notification about it later, they think that it's much bigger than it is because of their bias. And so you just create this, like, image that, like, whatever is happening is huge. And so, that is really, like, the pot of gold if you can go for it, and, uh, it's worked really well for both Tumblr and for Duolingo, and honestly for Latitude, my company now, as well.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings36:01

      This is so relevant 'cause I'm literally doing this as we speak with some companies, but it's like, how early before a release do you go? Is it two weeks, a week, two days? How long do journalists need to not feel like it's too long but not too short?

   9. GGGina Gotthilf36:15

      You want to give the journalist enough time to work on the story, because most journalists have a lot of work and they're overwhelmed, and they also have their own schedules. And so, if you, if you, if you're too close to the date you really risk the journalist just not- not covering it even if they were interested, which is a really big miss. So, I've had to move artificial dates before because a journalist was like, "Great, but I don't have time for this." And then I go, "Okay, well, what if- what if it was a week later?" You know, like, and, like trying to make that work.... um, of course you don't want to do it too early that it's, like, irrelevant. So, I think that starting to email jour- so here's the thing. I would say sending the release or sending the information with journalists two weeks before probably works, but you need to think... And now Harry's writing on his arm, so I think I said something relevant. (laughs)

   10. HSHarry Stebbings36:59

       (laughs) For any- for anyone listening on audio, they're like, "What the fuck?"

   11. GGGina Gotthilf37:02

       Listen! Yes.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings37:03

       For me it's great. Go, rock and roll.

   13. GGGina Gotthilf37:05

       Um, yeah, so what I would say is, you start earlier because you need to develop a rela- again, like you need to re- develop a relationship with that journalist even if it is just getting the journalist to respond to you once, or, like, accepting your invite on LinkedIn, or, like, seeing your tweets to them. You need to give that stuff lead time, so you wanna start earlier. Um, and then, but then in terms of actually sending them the information that they need, I would try to give them more than one- one week of time, maybe two.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings37:30

       And the- and the thing I would also say is, like, bluntly, when you look at journalists' tweets, often they don't get many likes, and I don't mean that horrible- horribly or disparagingly. But sometimes it's, like, 8 to 10 to 12 to 15. I always say, hey create a list when you start your company of the journalists that are relevant to you, and honestly just go to it once every other day, like a couple of their tweets which will be relevant to you. You know people who like your tweets consistently. I- I notice-

   15. GGGina Gotthilf37:54

       Totally.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings37:55

       Like, 100%. And so like, you instantly have that recognition. And I- I wrote down-

   17. GGGina Gotthilf38:01

       So-

   18. HSHarry Stebbings38:02

       ... two things on my arm. One is paywall. There are publications which have paywalls, but their names are great. How do you think about that?

   19. GGGina Gotthilf38:13

       For me, growth, and PR, and humanity. A lot of the time it just comes up- comes down to understanding how you make people feel, and if you're able to make people feel anything, then they remember you. And if they remember you, then you're much more likely to get what you want. And I don't mean that in like a completely Machiavellian way, I just mean it in like a basic human psychology way. So, if you like someone's tweet regularly, they'll remember who you are and they'll think, like, this person cares, and hopefully you care, and normally if I like someone's tweet it's because I actually care, either about what they said or about them that I want them to feel good about... And, or I want to, you know, for example if I see someone I know and they tweet about something, like Eric Torenberg, uh, tweet- he tweeted about something re- recently and then he put it on LinkedIn as well, I liked and commented on both because I know that that's gonna impact his chances of, like, growing, and I care, so I'm gonna do that, right? And so if you, if you develop a relationship with people, whether it be like, them remembering something you said that was personal, or making them laugh, or, you know, whatever, then- then you're able to and- and that really works for growth hooks as well as thinking about how that made people feel. Now, going to your question, which was?

   20. HSHarry Stebbings39:19

       Paywalls.

   21. GGGina Gotthilf39:20

       Paywalls, yes.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings39:21

       Mm-hmm.

   23. GGGina Gotthilf39:21

       So, there, uh, what I would say is if you're going for a duolingual strategy, and- and the reason, and so the... What comprises a duolingual strategy? We were a, um, we were a B- we are... Well, okay. Duolingo is a B2C product, and it can be relevant to most of the population. Like, there are very few people in the world who would not benefit from learning a second language. It could be kids, teenagers, young adults, or even grandparents trying to connect with like their granddaughter's new husband or whatever. Um, and so we were really going wide, and we wanted to go wide, and that's why this free entry approach worked, and that's also why we did not give exclusives especially to publications that had a paywall, because that would really limit our breadth, and we were going for breadth. However, there are, uh, other cases where those publications matter a lot more than the breadth. For example, like, in B2B cases, or in cases where you're working with fintech, or legal tech, or- or industries where you really need to build trust with the right people, then having some of those publications, like The Wall Street Journal for example, write about you, is really meaningful. It's a signifier that goes beyond the reach. It just now, you can link to it whenever you email anyone or when you write a, like... And s- and people think this is an important thing, this matters, this has a lot of, you know, data behind it, because The Wall Street Journal wouldn't cover something if it didn't. Even if people can't read the story, they'll read the headline, which honestly is what most people do anyway, and so that already means a lot.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings40:50

       You know, I think the biggest thing that people don't do is they don't ask, "What's the core objective, and who are we going for?" Like, if you are going for new investors ahead of a funding round, actually maybe TechCrunch might be the right publication to go after. If you're going for new customers, well shit, maybe, I don't know, um, uh, The Wall Street Journal or Shipping Weekly, or I don't know, whatever random vertical you're going for, but TechCrunch is not gonna get you more customers if you're in shipping or heavy logistics. Like, who's the ob- what's the objective and who are we going for? And let that trickle down into your publication list, I think.

   25. GGGina Gotthilf41:24

       That's absolu- no, that's absolutely true, um, and one thing to take into consideration is that if you're able to get something on TechCrunch, even if it wasn't your, you know, core consumer possibility, then very quickly tell other publications that are more... That feel more insecure than TechCrunch, like edi- like editors and journalists, and link to... TechCrunch just covered it; they're much more likely to cover it as well, so you- you might be able to have your cake and eat it too. But one thing that I see a lot is exactly that, it's not understanding the motivation behind what you're doing and- and behind what the... The people who are reading that publication. So, I'll- I see a lot of startups say, "Oh, we got a funding round and we did this big announcement and we didn't get that many new users from it." Well yeah, because people who are reading about funding rounds and who are reading about, like, the monetization of a startup are not necessarily the people whose problems you're solving with that- with that startup. And so that's the people you want to reach, which might be, like, you know, uh, ELLE magazine, because like, you know, women are gonna be interested in learning a language too, uh, and you know, so you don't think about that.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings42:21

       How much control do you want over the content? Journalists can be challenging, bluntly, in terms of what they produce. I've had journalists write snippets of like what I've said and turned it into the main piece-

   27. GGGina Gotthilf42:31

       Mm-hmm.

   28. HSHarry Stebbings42:31

       ... and it's been not what I wanted.

   29. GGGina Gotthilf42:34

       Mm-hmm.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings42:34

       How much control do you give, how do you think about ensuring the piece that you get is the piece that you wanted?
7. 46:47 – 53:24

   How to Measure Success with PR

   1. GGGina Gotthilf46:47

      move on.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings46:48

      So I have two questions for you. One is, okay, I... You're on my team and you're doing this amazing work and I'm super happy. Do you not... I need to measure some form of success from your work. You know, we've got links to TechCrunch and to Forbes and to whatever publication. How do we measure success of PR and actually align it back to the core business?

   3. GGGina Gotthilf47:10

      It's really hard, and that's- and that's not a cop-out answer. And you have to, especially if you're early stage. So for Duolingo it was DAUs, like if we were actually able to get new users that became active users, that was our success metric. Because then we knew that we were reaching the right audience, and that, you know, the story that was told was the story that we needed to tell in order to get people to download and try Duolingo, and that, you know, they were likely users of Duolingo. So that's what really mattered. But it depends, right? So if you're trying to raise funding then it's like, if you're able to raise funding, or if you got people who are referencing the stories, um, on a regular basis. Like, "I heard about you through this," or, "I heard about you through that," like that's... You could measure that if you had, like, a landing page for something, like, "How did you hear about us?" Like, that could be helpful. But some of that is gonna be intangible because you grow your brand equity over time, and that can have a huge impact on your business. But when you're a startup you don't have the luxury to just be like, "Oh, I'm just building this brand equity and we'll see where it goes."

   4. HSHarry Stebbings48:04

      I totally agree with you. In terms of, like, oh, people saw it, when you are published in TechCrunch or anywhere like we discussed, what do you do then? Like, what did you get, you know, the Duolingo founders, you know, the founders of Tumblr to do... You're like, "Hey, we're in this. Tweet it, LinkedIn it, Instagram it." Like, how do you help with that distribution?

   5. GGGina Gotthilf48:23

      That's- that's such a great point because it's so important. It's like, first is just how you get that thing, that's like the signifier, like, "Look, we're important," and then how do you, like, spread that mes- that message as- as much as possible? So, um, with Duolingo would probably be leveraging, like, our social media channels and make sure that we have, like, you know, really great copy. And I- I really love... You know, one... (laughs) I don't think I'm allowed to say this, but one of your questions on your- on the thing was like, does... do people still care about brand and, like, brand love?And I hear- I think that this is so relevant because everything, if- if you're trying to build a brand, which you should be, because, you know, again, it's about how you make people feel, not about whether the thing g- that you're making is useful only. Um, if you're writing social media copy to get people to do something, like for example, to share your- the story that was published on TechCrunch, if you just say, "Hey, please share this," you can with your friends, but with people who don't care, they won't. So first, those relationships matter. But then second, if you're able to write copy in a way that makes people care ab- and then in the case of Duolingo, in the case of Tumblr, in the case of Latitude, which is what I'm building now, it's always about the mission, like do you wanna get behind this mission? Then you would share this, and that's easier to get buy-in than just, like, the ask, like, to get someone to share something. And sorry, I had a third point and then it just escapes me.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings49:34

      I think- I think another thing is removing friction from the share. Most people don't share something-

   7. GGGina Gotthilf49:38

      Yes.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings49:38

      ... because it's quite painful to share-

   9. GGGina Gotthilf49:39

      Yes.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings49:39

       So it's, "What's your at handle? What's the link that you want me to share?"

   11. GGGina Gotthilf49:43

       Totally. Totally. So absolutely, I think you're absolutely right, and then that this is what my third point was going to be. With Latitude, this is something we've done as well, but then there's a third component, which is our community, so then leveraging whatever you got through social media and then through your community. And the way that you do that is exactly as you would with anything else. Like if you're trying to get a journalist to publish something, you make it as easy as possible for them. If you're trying to get a user to use your product, you make it as easy as possible for them. If you're trying to get someone to share a message, you make it as easy as possible for them. And so what that means is you write exactly, like first of all, you're gonna write a really nice message asking them to share, and then you're gonna write exactly the message that you want them to share-

   12. HSHarry Stebbings50:19

       And that is personalized. That is personalized.

   13. GGGina Gotthilf50:22

       That is personalized. Yes, that is personalized. Um, and you need to be really smart about how you write that message because you need to remember that this person is posting that on their personal profile, so they are sending a message to the world about what it- who they are based on what they're sharing, and so you need to think about the words that you use and the image that you use in as much as it affects them there. So with- with Latitude, one of our biggest growth levers was, um, when we started admitting startup founders, so we worked with early stage startup founders in Latin America, when we started admitting them, we created this token that said like, you know, "I am- I was selected to be in Latitude," and then I wrote the copy, and I feel- I, like, I almost feel bad when I tell our Latituders that this was our tactic. It feels manipulative. But I wrote the copy in a way that makes them feel- seem amazing to their audience, like, "Wow, you are so impressive," and also really humble, so it's like a really perfect humble brag that makes us look even better. Because people... Then we had, like, all these amazing startup founders because we had our friends join originally, saying, "I got into Latitude." And suddenly people are reading their thing saying, "What's Latitude? And if this person got into Latitude and they're proud of it, then it must be really great." And now they're checking out what Latitude is and then they're signing up. And so making that easy with the personalized, like, image of them, like, "I- I just got into Latitude," helped us a ton.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings51:38

       Do you know, I think, like, YC have done this the best. Every Twitter handle has YCW21, YCW... It is the value or sign of accreditation. I totally... Also, make it super short. I get some that are super long. I get, "Hi," random, and then m- they're too long, terrible. Also, like, for me, I don't know about you, I put, "Hi, Gina, hope you're well and enjoying the sun in Miami." Personalized, you're like, "Oh, wow, Harry remembered I live in Miami," and then I paste. And then, by the way, I always do a P.S., and then I put, um, "Hope to, you know, play football with your husband next time." And you're like, "Oh, wow, top a-" Like, he's really... I've actually not. It's taken about 30 seconds to do the top and tail, but you're like, "Wow, that- that Harry is such a nice guy."

   15. GGGina Gotthilf52:26

       100%. And like when I was doing, um, press for Duolingo and we were doing these global launches, I was personally writing over a hundred emails at a time, like, to get, like... I, and it had to be within a window of time because this launch was coming up, um, and so that's exactly what I would do. I'd have the- the copy with like the links all, like, perfect there, et cetera. And then the other thing, I think you don't have to do this anymore but it depends on your email client, like, select all, remove formatting, and, like, redo formatting. I would do that one by one because, like, otherwise you send an email and you could see that there was, like, copy pasted stuff, and then you've already lost credibility.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings52:58

       That looks terrible. The minute I see that I'm like, "Done, out." No, I'm with you. Uh, also never do this. I- I get probably 50, uh, like, press releases a week with, like, embargoed news, just cold. I'm like...

   17. GGGina Gotthilf53:12

       Like, the subject line, embargoed news?

   18. HSHarry Stebbings53:14

       Well, like, it- it would... They'll send me the press release and like, an embargo, and I'm like, "I never agreed to your embargo. I've never spoken to you before," and this is-

8. 53:24 – 58:09

   Should Founders Work with PR Firms?

   1. GGGina Gotthilf53:24

      Uh-huh.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings53:24

      ... PR firms that do it.

   3. GGGina Gotthilf53:25

      Yeah.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings53:25

      They just, like, spam it out. My question to you then is, I get 50 PR firms a week in my inbox at least, they are generally crap and I actually just 99% dislike PR firms. I'm going out there and saying this one. Should founders work with PR firms or have it internal?

   5. GGGina Gotthilf53:44

      I'm with you. I 99% hate PR firms. I don't hate, I understand the model and I've actually met some great PR firm founders. I- I don't- I don't hate them. They're like- they're something that's- serves a need. If you can do it yourself, do it yourself. But I've also worked with founders who just don't have the time, bandwidth, or- or knowledge, or relationships. Um, then I would say hire someone who does, who can do th- those things for you. Um, it's- it's only-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings54:10

      And also by running, even if you get a cheap PR firm, they'll still be at- at best three, four grand a month, at best.

   7. GGGina Gotthilf54:16

      Yes.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings54:16

      You can hire a 23, 24-year-old who's hungry as hell chasing journalists on Twitter DM 24 hours a day-

   9. GGGina Gotthilf54:24

      Yes.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings54:24

       ... for the same amount.

   11. GGGina Gotthilf54:25

       Yes. And that's- that's a lot of what I was doing. Yeah, the advantages, like, you know, the PR firms, they already have the relationships, and maybe if you don't... Like, if you don't know, because you obviously have a knack for this, like I had a knack for this, like Louise Van Ahont had a knack for this. Sometimes you don't. You're an engineer, and some of the best founders I know are engineers. Engineers just aren't... Are going to have a lot more trouble understanding how to make that happen. So maybe then at that point it's- it's worthwhile, I would say, hiring a firm, but then hiring someone who can learn from the firm as quickly as possible.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings54:53

       I love that. Is there any other massive mistakes you make with found- you see founders make with PR that we should touch on before we do a quick-fire?

   13. GGGina Gotthilf55:01

       I think the biggest mistake is not understanding that what matters to you doesn't matter to the other person. Again, this goes back to everything we've been talking about, like in growth, PR, relationships, like that's some- just so core to human nature, you know? You write something that, like, matters to you. So if I am a founder and I- I'll write something that, like, is almost, like, so obvious to me because I've been entrenched in it for so long that I understand the problem so deeply and I'm already, like, talking about the solution, and I think that it's really impressive that I hired Harry Stemmins or whatever and I put it in there. And like, people don't know, uh, uh, it does- none of this sa- none of this matters to the person who I'm writing to. So you need to understand, like, how to communicate things in a way that really matters to people and that is not obvious, even though it should be. And you need to understand who you're speaking to specifically. So if you're writing to someone from, like, a science background or a tech background, it's very different than if you're writing for someone from, like, a beauty or fashion background and you need to understand what's the angle that's going to pique their personal interest. And if you take the time and you, like, actually make a list of the top publications you care about, and you understand what that journalist might care about, they're much more likely to respond.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings56:04

       Final one, I promise, before quick-fire. Should PR be an ongoing effort or something that you actually do in static stages? Fundraising announcement, expansion into Brazil, new product. Is it continuous or quite static?

   15. GGGina Gotthilf56:20

       You want it to be a steady drumbeat if you can, because you want to stay stop- top of mind at th- uh, you know, to consumers and, and then you can grow your equity that way. It's a lot harder to do, but it's super important. And then the m- you know, the more relevant you become, the more relevant you are and that sort of feeds on itself.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings56:34

       I've loved this chat. I lo- these seriously, shows like this are, like, my favorites 'cause it's like actually your natural passions just go where the conversation goes, and this is one of my favorites. Um, and so I was just thrilled. I totally went for that one. Uh, listen, we're gonna do a quick-fire, so I-

   17. GGGina Gotthilf56:50

       We didn't even talk about growth, China. Like there are so many things. Um-

   18. HSHarry Stebbings56:54

       I know, but to be fair, this is actually something that every single founder that I meet actually deals with. Um, so I'm actually b- pleased 'cause it's more applicable than in the other topics. Uh, as-

   19. GGGina Gotthilf57:03

       Mm-hmm. Can I say one last thing in case you-

   20. HSHarry Stebbings57:05

       Yeah.

   21. GGGina Gotthilf57:05

       ... are able to find somewhere to edit it in? I think when people think about PR, they think about journalists and they think about, like, big media. But to me, PR is reaching anyone who has a big audience and getting them to share that with their big audience. And that sh- that shifts how you think about, about media and, and PR and, and news becau- especially with the world today where people are becoming their own media brands and we're, you know, we're changing that. If you're able to identify how to reach that one person who can reach a lot people, a lot of people for you for free, that is PR. And so that means, like, influencers, micro-influencers, or anyone with an audience, like a school professor could be your influencer.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings57:42

       I, I, I-

   23. GGGina Gotthilf57:42

       A doctor.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings57:43

       I totally agree with you and I actually also think they, that fundamentally shifts everything though. Now when you think about, you know, like, you know, this podcast gets 1.3 million plays per show. That's probably quite a lot more than most publications do, uh, in terms of readership. And then you actually get a lot more attention and you can tell tone and nuance. And so I, I 100% agree. And micro-influencers, I mean, we're really... Yeah, we could do, like, a series of this. Maybe it's not a bad idea.

9. 58:09 – 1:04:20

   Quick-Fire Round

   1. HSHarry Stebbings58:09

   2. GGGina Gotthilf58:09

      Yes.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings58:09

      But, like, micro-influencers, totally with you in terms of the targeting. Um, I'm gonna say a short statement, you're gonna give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

   4. GGGina Gotthilf58:17

      Yes.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings58:18

      What tactics in growth have not changed over the last five years?

   6. GGGina Gotthilf58:24

      PR. (laughs) That's (laughs) the end, no, that's, that's too easy based on what we just talked about. Honestly, I, and this is maybe a cop-out, I don't think it's about the tactic. It's about the framework of thinking. It's understanding what makes people tick and what's the highest lever thing you can impact. That is still the same.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings58:40

      What tactics have died a death?

   8. GGGina Gotthilf58:42

      I think there's, there's one died a deaths from day one but people don't realize it, is paid marketing and especially, like, paid ads on Facebook. Um, unless you're really smart about how you're doing it and you know exactly, like, you know, how you're going to scale this over time, it's a very palliative tactic because as you scale it becomes harder, there are less lower, l- low hanging fruit, it's super expensive, and it's hard to depend on because once you're depending on getting users that way then you can't stop and you sort of become addicted to it and then you're kind of stuck. But, you know, I know that there are a lot of companies that do that. It's just in my personal growth trajectory, that has never been part of growth. I've only done organic growth.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings59:16

      I totally with you. You're, you're at the whim of someone else completely, then they have changes to algorithms and you're completely fucked. It's, you know-

   10. GGGina Gotthilf59:23

       Exactly. And so and, and again, you're not focusing on retention which is, like, really making something that really matters to people. It makes sense in the beginning when you're getting people in the door, in the door so they can test, understand, like, what messages work and don't, and then also getting to a statistical- statistical significance. But the second thing, um, I was gonna say is, again, it's more conceptual. I think that every growth tactic sor- quote unquote dies when it becomes saturated. So at first a growth tactic is, is really interesting because you've discovered something that other people haven't discovered and then you're able to max out. So, like, a really simple example is, like, you know those D2C brands that discover that you can put ads in the subway. It's so dumb but, like, th- that was a growth tactic. They were like, "Oh my God, people are riding the subway and now we're putting ads in the subway." This happened like 10 years ago with like Warby Parker, you know, and like Casper. Now, it's no longer a growth tactic because everyone's using the ads in the subway. And that's the same thing with notifications. People love to, like, talk about how notifications, uh, there's too many notifications. Mm, no, it continues to be a, a growth tactic but, like, it's not, like, as innovative as it was before, but it will continue to be because with AI we don't even know what's gonna happen and, like, things are changing all the time, and so you just need to continue iterating. Just finding areas that are less explored allow- m- allows you to reach results for cheaper. That's it.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:38

       I find creativity is probably the, like, biggest lacking resource today, if we're totally honest though. Like, people who really think, like... I always say to my team, "If MrBeast were running a venture fund, what would he do?" Like, I, uh, j- just push your mind to that. He'd probably go around London and give $10,000 to every single person he sees and then film them for a week.... like, I'm sure there will be some interesting shit that happens.

   12. GGGina Gotthilf1:01:01

       Yes. The thing is-

   13. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:02

       Like-

   14. GGGina Gotthilf1:01:02

       And, and I don't know if this is part of the podcast or not, I think that, like, we're so obsessed with frameworks and learning from each other and, like, developing things into a science, and that's amazing, and I ... It's almost, it's almost one of my weaknesses that I just don't have that. Like, I am a philosophy major with no master's degree who never actually studied marketing, who has only my experience in growth and but like, I, because I didn't know how to do PR, because I didn't know how to do growth, I was just like coming up with things that made sense to me and that has worked really well.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:29

       Okay, tell me, what's the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams?

   16. GGGina Gotthilf1:01:34

       Definitely hiring before product market fit. People are so excited by A/B testing that they wanna jump right in and I feel guilty about that because I do a talk for early stage founders about how Duolingo A/B tested and how we grew from three to 200 million users, and then everyone wants to jump into A/B testing. But what you don't realize is that it's really hard to do that if you are not able to reach statistical significance and then founders start getting into the trap of directionally statistical significance which is no longer math or science. And so then that doesn't make any sense. So when you're ... So I think that's number one. The number two, I would say especially for early stage is — and it's something I will disagree with some, some other guests you've had on your podcast — is hiring a leader too soon, because when you hire a leader, they might be a little bit too removed to actually want to roll up their sleeves and try the crazy stuff that, like, might not make a lot of sense but could work because you're trying to get, like, creative. Um, so, uh, ah, you know, as an example, Duolingo actually hired someone amazing who had great experience in marketing who then hired me, and they ended up keeping me and promoting me to head of growth because this person was a great ... They, they were great at coming up with ideas and then asking other people to do those ideas. I was this crazy 26-year-old who was just like throwing myself at whatever and trying different things and, and thinking, "You know what? I can make us grow in Japan and I can message people on LinkedIn and they're gonna respond because I don't even know the limits, uh, that I have." And so you need to find that great balance between someone who is super scrappy and willing to do whatever it takes but also has some baggage so that they can have, you know, a, a starting point that isn't completely random when they're trying new things.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:09

       How do you do postmortems?

   18. GGGina Gotthilf1:03:12

       Postmortems are super important because people like to just shove mistakes or things that didn't go well, like, under a rug and then move on, um, or, or blame each other, and it's really important to get to the root cause of things so that you can prevent them or learn from them. And again, like I said in the beginning, if you're learning from something, it's not a mistake, then it was an opportunity for learning and you're growing and that's great. So very tactically speaking, schedule a postmortem that's not very, you know, uh, that, uh, in terms of time, it can't be too far away from whatever it is that you're postmorteming because people need to have a good memory for it. There are tools online that really help you do that so people should know that they're coming into a postmortem, and then there are tools online, I need, and I need to look up the t- the tool I just used last week 'cause I forgot. It was really good. Um, just a thing that allows you to create boards and people can then, like, collaborate, like, what went well, what didn't go well, what are things that we need to improve, and have, like, very clear things that n- t- people can brainstorm and answer in real time with an anonymous, um, and, and make sure that everything is, um, is surfaced without people blaming each other or pointing names, just taking responsibility and, and focusing

10. 1:04:20 – 1:07:45

    Why Now Is The Best Time to Invest in LATAM

    1. GGGina Gotthilf1:04:20

       on the learning.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:20

       We're gonna do three more, okay? Th- uh, first one of the three, why is now the best time to invest in LATAM?

    3. GGGina Gotthilf1:04:28

       Now is the best time to invest in LATAM for a number of, because of a number of reasons are, are, that are coalescing at this moment. First, there's just the sheer opportunity because development in tech in LATAM is, quote-unquote, behind that of markets like Silicon Valley. There's just less huge solutions that come from LATAM and the reason why that matters is because Latin America is huge. It's like, it's actually occupies the largest latitude on the map which is why my country, my company is called Latitude, but we don't behave like it, and we're actually very alike. We like to focus on how we're all very different but we're actually very alike. We like very similar music, we like similar food and our governments are just as corrupt and you're just as likely to get robbed or kidnapped in most of our countries. (laughs) Um, and so there's just, it's important to focus on the similarities. That's something I learned while, while growing, uh, globally at Duolingo. So you have a very, very large number of people with huge problems that have not been solved and that can be solved at t- uh, at scale through tech, and then you have people in developed markets who absolutely don't know what it's like to, uh, to grow up in those markets and don't understand those pain points and don't understand what are the, the barriers that they're gonna face while we're there because they just don't know how complicated it can be. But and then you have amazing people in Latin America who do understand that the problem is we didn't have money and we didn't have the talents to do that before, and now these things have changed. Why? One, because we have people who have gone to quote-unquote Silicon Valley, whether it be in the cloud or not, so just like broad Silicon Valley, China, India, markets where they've gotten to work at tech companies that have scaled to billions, um, you know, billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of users, and are now coming back to LATAM to build. You have people who have now worked at companies like New Bank, um, which IPO'd with a valuation of like 30-something billion dollars, um, and have learned what that's like and how that works and are now going on to build their own companies, whether it be as founders or as builders. So you have much more talent than you've ever had, um, and then you have money. Uh, first, firstly because investors in the US and abroad are looking to Latin America because they understand that it's a huge opportunity. There are more VC firms and more family offices that are starting to look at tech now because it's almost inevitable, so you have more money. Our money is really devalued, so anything coming from abroad is worth a lot and can make a huge splash. Um, and so we're at this amazing moment that I believe to be a, a really serious inflection point where we're building solutions for hundreds of millions of people, a lot of infrastructure stuff that's super non-sexy but basic like B2B SaaS, things that helps-... SMBs, like small and medium businesses understand how to do things without using pen and paper, um, and giving people access to health, to education, to banking. Like, that's- it's not like I want a better data. It's like, "I would like to have a bank account. (laughs) I would like to be able to see a doctor." Those are very basic things that are very core human pain points that affect a lot of people. And so this is the time to build. And- and then there's another thing on top of that, which is just the connectivity. Like, we are so online now. Everyone has access to- to the internet in one way, shape, or form, and the technology, it's ubiquitous. So you can really reach people from all different sectors of the population.

Episode duration: 1:09:33