Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf

1. 0:00 – 4:34

   Gina’s background

   1. GGGina Gotthilf0:00

      Communication is constantly underrated, and communication isn't about being able to convey a message, it's about being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it and understands it and, like, remembers it. And that's really hard to do. One of the things I've helped employ at Duolingo that I think is still there today, it's definitely not just me, it was an amazing team, is a unique voice. And what that means is, like, not just another language learning app where we give you instructions and you follow directions. There is always a quirk, like it's unexpected. The way we talk to you is a little bit funny, doesn't take ourselves too seriously, and it makes the person receiving this message feel something. Again, it's about how you make people feel and that you feel like either you giggle or you're like, "Wait, what? They just did what?" You know? And, and using that to your, to your benefit.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:45

      (instrumental music) Today my guest is Gina Godhil. Gina's most known for leading growth and marketing at Duolingo, helping take them from three million to over 200 million users, primarily through organic and non-paid growth channels, which we explore in depth. She also worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign, where she oversaw a historic digital ad budget, and she shares learnings from that experience. She also led growth and community for Tumblr in Latin America. Currently, she is the co-founder and COO of Latitude, which is a company dedicated to helping build the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America. In our wide-ranging conversation, Gina shares a ton of new insights and tactics on how Duolingo grew early on, how they grow today, and most interestingly, what they did to become one of the very rare successful consumer subscription businesses. We also talk about how every life and career has an A side and a B side, also why PR and brand are way underappreciated by most startups. She shares a bunch of stories of failed experiments and also some of her biggest wins. Also why Latin America is so interesting right now as a hub for startups and for innovation. Also, there's a bit of philosophy sprinkled in and a bunch of real talk. This was such a fun conversation. Gina is delightful. I am excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Gina Godhil, after a short word from our sponsors. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds. And it's all built on Jira, where your engineering teams are already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Hex. If you're a data person, you probably have to jump between different tools to run queries, build visualizations, write Python, and send around a lot of screenshots and CSV files. Hex brings everything together. Its powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no code, in any combination, and work together with live multiplayer and version control. And now, Hex's AI tools can generate queries and code, create visualizations, and even kickstart a whole analysis for you, all from natural language prompts. It's like having an analytics copilot built right into where you're already doing your work. Then when you're ready to share, you can use Hex's drag and drop app builder to configure beautiful reports or dashboards that anyone can use. Join the hundreds of data teams like Notion, AllTrails, Loom, Mixpanel, and Algolia using Hex every day to make their work more impactful. Sign up today at hex.tech/lenny to get a 60-day free trial of the Hex team plan. That's hex.tech/lenny.

2. 4:34 – 7:22

   The Vamos Latam Summit

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:34

      Gina, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

   2. GGGina Gotthilf4:39

      Lenny, I'm so excited to be here. It's been awesome to see how you've built this and just how far it's gone. Thank you for inviting me.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:47

      I really appreciate that. I'm more excited to have you on the podcast. And I know you just came off hosting a massive event somewhere in Latin America, and I think you had 5,000-something people. You had Ben Horowitz keynoting. And I wanted to start with, uh, the talk you gave. I think you described it as people having this A side and B side to their life, kind of like a record has an A side and a B side. So could you just share this, what was this conference, and then, two, uh, kind of just briefly share this concept as much as you can?

   4. GGGina Gotthilf5:15

      For sure. And thank, thanks for that, Lenny. Look, I think for us, for those of us who, here in the US, I became an American last year, I love the US, I've been here for 19 years, it's hard to imagine just how much is going on south of the border. There's actually, you know, 660 million people living across Latin America, and it's, uh, an economy of $6 trillion. Um, and Brazil is a huge market just in terms of sheer size, over 200 million people, and also in terms of where the ecosystem is. I am Brazilian, so I am Latin American, even though sometimes Brazilians are not sure if they are Latin American because we speak Portuguese. And so the, the future of the region really matters to me, and helping people get the opportunities that I've had in terms of access to information and resources that could help them build scalable, very successful startups...... can really change the economy across the board. I believe in that much more than I believe in government and, like, whether we're gonna vote this guy or that guy next. And so that's sort of, you know, the impetus for the company. The conference was a conference put together by my company. I'm a co-founder with three, Bryan, Yuri, and I. We put this conference together to bring together the top entrepreneurs, operators, and investors across Latin America, but also people who are interested in investing in the region, of which they are more and more here in the US and abroad. More than 5,000 people came. We had over 70 speakers. It was across two days. We had amazing people like, you know, Ben Horowitz who never gave, like, a talk or, like, did a fireside specifically for and about Latin America and the opportunity. But we also had incredible founders who you, you know, in terms of, like, US operators may not be as, as familiar with, but if you've ever heard of Rappi it's a really important delivery company in Latin America. So the founder of Rappi flew down from Miami for that. And then we had, you know, VCs from, like, a lot of the top names that you've heard here in the region as well. And then a lot of unicorns. We've had a lot of unicorns in the region. So they were all there and the idea was to share learnings along the way, um, successes and failures so that people can skip by not making the same mistakes as others. And I was asked to, to open both days.

3. 7:22 – 9:34

   Gina’s “A and B sides” framework

   1. GGGina Gotthilf7:22

      Uh, and then the first day, the, the opening talk that I ended up giving was this concept that I really like which is the A side and the B side, uh, of a story. Which is that if you are old like me, and maybe you, Lenny, I think we're a similar age, you remember what a CD or, like, or what a, what a, what a mixtape was like, and we had the A and the B side. We are very encouraged in our lives, especially professionally, to talk about our A sides all the time, because that's what impresses people, that, that's what opens doors, that's what allows us to keep growing and it's so important. So it means that a lot of what you hear on podcasts and on, on stage ends up being the Instagrammable version of someone or a company or a country's trajectory. It's just the highlights. You know, and when I talk about my A side, it's very impressive. You know, I did things like we'll talk about. I met President Obama. I worked on the Mike Bloomberg presi- Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign. I helped Duolingo scale from three to 200 million users. I worked with Tumblr helping them scale in Latin America. Andreessen Horowitz invested in my company, et cetera. But between all of those highlights, there were so many B moments, um, that get sort of, like, shoved under the rug because it's just easier for me and it's more impressive for others. But I really like to highlight those, because I think that most of us have a lot of B moments every day, every week, every month, and every period of our lives, and it's easy to think that things aren't just not gonna work out for us because we're in one of those B moments if we don't recognize them as moments. And the story I ended up telling was how, you know, much like I have this, these A and B sides and I don't talk about my B side so much, Latin America also has A and B sides because it's really easy to focus on, like, "It's dangerous." Like, "We're behind." Um, you know, "The governments are a mess. There's, like, financial, uh, insecurity." But there's a lot of A side in there, and a lot of the A side is the opportunity we have in terms of tech, because in terms of G- percentage of GDP that tech occupies compared to other markets, it's very promising. We're at, like, one-third of India, one-tenth of China, one-thirtieth of the United States, meaning that, like, tech companies can grow a lot so that they occupy that space in the GDP, in terms of the GDP, which is believable. So that was the concept of the talk and the reason for this conference.

4. 9:34 – 16:27

   Her B side

   1. GGGina Gotthilf9:34

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky9:34

      I love this concept. We're gonna talk, as you expected, about a lot of your A side stuff.

   3. GGGina Gotthilf9:39

      (laughs) .

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky9:39

      Is there any example of a B side story of your life that would be interesting to share?

   5. GGGina Gotthilf9:44

      Look, I think those are the most interesting because they're, they're, they're funny or ridiculous, you know? But I'll just say that I had a lot of B sides, and I still do. For example, I, you know, I had no- I had no idea what I wanted to do. I actually wanted to be an- I thought I wanted to be an actress. I either wanted to be that person in-

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky10:01

      Wow.

   7. GGGina Gotthilf10:01

      ... SeaWorld who goes like this with a dolphin, this was before SeaWorld was canceled-

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky10:06

      (laughs) .

   9. GGGina Gotthilf10:06

      ... or I wanted to be an actress. But then my parents convinced me that it was, I was probably n- not gonna succeed because the odds weren't in my favor. I applied to schools. I didn't get into any Ivy League. I didn't get into any of the top schools I wanted to go to. When I got to college, I actually ended up dropping out because I got so depressed. Like, incredibly depressed, couldn't get out of bed depressed. Ironically, I dropped out of Reed College, which is the same college that Steve Jobs dropped out of. So, you know, I was just destined for greatness. I knew it at that moment (laughs) .

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky10:35

       It all makes sense looking backwards, as you said.

   11. GGGina Gotthilf10:37

       Totally. I was dropping out being like, "Yes, this is exactly the path." No, I was, I was miserable. I thought there was no path forward. And when I, and I finally went back and graduated, the co- the college counselor looked at my curriculum and said, "What have you even done with your life? There's nothing to show for." And it was shocking-

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky10:52

       Right.

   13. GGGina Gotthilf10:53

       ... because I was always, like, the overachiever who wanted to do the maximum curriculum and, like, ace all of my classes and do whatever, you know. Like, I, I did three diplomas in high school, the international, the American, the Brazilian. My one learning there that has stuck with me, and I think can, can work for other people too, is that it's not just about doing things that actually matter and, like, l- and, and learning. It's about being able to tell a story and it's about understanding what other people perceive as valuable. I'm not talking about net value, but I'm talking about if you want to grow in the world, it's understanding that psychology of how humans react to what you're showing them. So that was one lesson. But then I went on to, you know, I, I went, I applied to 100 companies. I didn't hear back from most of them. I finally got an internship at kind of, like, a tier B/C digital marketing agency in New York City because I wanted to live in New York so badly. Um, and they forgot to apply for my visa on time, so I lost my visa and had to go back to Brazil. And then I ended up leaving that organization to go work for another one, and, like, I won't even go into the details of the, the shadiness of that company that I worked for. But then they ended up laying me off, so I lost my visa again, had to go back home. Found another opportunity, got fired that time. So there was just a lot of rockiness in my start that I don't think you would imagine when you see someone up on stage, like, leading a conference for 5,000 people, um, that I think is important. And even when I started working for Tumblr, I was like, "This is it." Like...I made it. This is a really interesting company. This is gonna work out. That was super rocky because it was an early stage startup. So for example, you know, they couldn't figure out how to wire money to Brazil, so I was not paid for six months and at one point, me and like my colleagues were trying to get money out of the teller to pay contractors because we had no money to pay them. And like, we borrowed money from people and, and finally they also laid me off because they decided to sell to Yahoo. And then I had to figure out, like, what am I gonna do? No one's gonna hire me. I've been fired and laid off so many times. So this is all before I started, like, an agency to help US-based tech companies and startups grow in Latin America, because I figured I was in, like, this really great place to make that happen. And it eventually worked for well-known companies such as Duolingo. At the time they weren't well known. They were a tiny little startup. They didn't have an Android app. And that's how I started working with Duolingo, because their head of marketing connected with someone they had worked with at Flickr and said, "I noticed Tumblr grew a lot in Brazil last year. Can you recommend like a company or an agency to help?" And they said, "This girl." And I was 26. And so they con- that's how they connected me with Duolingo and I started helping them grow in Brazil as a consultant. They were like, "This is great. Can you help us grow in Chile? Argentina?" And I was like, "Yes." They were like, "How about Mexico?" And I was like, "Yes." You know, I, I... Did I know anything about these places, Lenny? Did I know people there? No. But like, you can figure it out. And then they ended up asking me to come on full-time, do that across the world, Japan, China, Korea, Turkey, Spain, France, et cetera. And then to own growth, which ended up meaning communications, social media, government partnerships, anything to grow. And then a lot of... And then eventually became an A-B testing growth engine with engineers and PMs and designers, of which I knew nothing about. And you know, even after that, like, I, I left Duolingo five years later, didn't know what to do with my life. You'd think, "Oh wow, you have it figured out. Now you left Duolingo, you have the world in front of you." And I'm like, "Maybe I can finally go work for nonprofits." Which is what I actually wanted to do in the first place. Tried a hand at that, like had a couple of experiences before going to work for the Mike Bloomberg campaign. Working for the Mike Bloomberg ca- campaign is impressive, but you know what? Mike Bloomberg didn't win. He's not the president. So that was not a successful campaign, you know?

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky14:36

       Mm-hmm.

   15. GGGina Gotthilf14:37

       If you really look at it. Um, and, and, and yeah, Latitude seems like it's a really promising path, but it, there's A days and B days. Um, so i- it's just a lot of that and just staying resilient and s- and believing in yourself and getting back on the horse when you fall on your face.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky14:53

       Amazing. That's such an important message. I think one of the threads from what you're describing, something that I think about a lot is, people kind of underestimate how long their career is. There's just so much time to do stuff and for things to start to work. This is gonna sound really fancy, but I think Marcus Aurelius has this quote about how our life is actually very long. We just use it really badly and we just waste-

   17. GGGina Gotthilf15:13

       Wow.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky15:13

       ... a lot of our time.

   19. GGGina Gotthilf15:14

       I think you're so right, Lenny. And I love that because people are going around being like, "Life is short, life is short." But that's so true. We waste so much time. But also I think we don't, we don't recognize how much opportunity we have in front of us. And as a 26-year-old, I definitely thought my career was over. You know, I was like, "I blew it." And like looking back, it's funny, you know?

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky15:34

       Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. Like, I spent nine years at my first job at a random company in San Diego in a startup. And I was like, "What am I doing here so long?" (laughs)

   21. GGGina Gotthilf15:43

       (laughs)

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky15:43

       And then, and it turned out that was really useful for the thing I did next. And then eventually, wow, things started to really take off. So I think that's a really good lesson for people is just, it's a long time. Like, this is my fourth career. I was... Like, I've switched careers many times. I was a engineer, then I was a founder, then I was a product manager, and now I'm whatever this is (laughs) , whatever you call this thing. Um, so...

   23. GGGina Gotthilf16:01

       Okay, cool.

   24. LRLenny Rachitsky16:02

       Yeah.

   25. GGGina Gotthilf16:03

       Yeah. I guess me too.

   26. LRLenny Rachitsky16:04

       Awesome.

   27. GGGina Gotthilf16:04

       I was, I was an operator, I was a consultant. Well, I was an employee, I was a consultant, then I was an operator, which is a fancy way to say employee at a startup.

   28. LRLenny Rachitsky16:12

       (laughs) Yeah.

   29. GGGina Gotthilf16:13

       And then now I'm a founder and a VC and an ange- angel and whatever this is.

   30. LRLenny Rachitsky16:20

       (laughs) Awesome. Awesome. So I think, I think that's a really important takeaway is just there's a lot of time to do stuff and don't stress if things aren't moving as fast as you want.

5. 16:27 – 20:40

   Lessons from working on Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky16:27

      I wanna try to bounce around between A side and B side in this conversation. That'd be a cool framework. And so we're gonna definitely talk about Duolingo and a little bit more about Latin America. I wanted to touch on this Mike, Mike Bloomberg story. So what I understand from your experience there is you deployed a historic amount of money into paid ads as a part of that campaign. I'm just curious what you learned from running paid ads at that scale, uh, for a campaign or just broadly.

   2. GGGina Gotthilf16:53

      So I, you know, we deployed a historic amount of money in the campaign.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky16:58

      Mm-hmm. It wasn't just you.

   4. GGGina Gotthilf16:58

      It wasn't me, Gina, personally.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky17:00

      Spending the money. Yeah.

   6. GGGina Gotthilf17:00

      I think that's important to share. So, so Mike, the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign was spending roughly a million dollars a day, which is crazy. Um, and you can do a lot with a million dollars a day.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky17:11

      It's good to be Google.

   8. GGGina Gotthilf17:12

      It's good to be Google. But yes, it's good to be Facebook.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky17:16

      Right.

   10. GGGina Gotthilf17:16

       I, I'll share, you know, what I think is most useful here a- and also what my experience ended up being, which is, you know, they, they brought together a lot of great talent from across the US in term- especially in terms of tech. This is a organization called Hawkfish that they started working with, the Mike Bloomberg pres- basically he created it. I don't know. It was like embedded in there. There were a lot of us who had large egos and, and had been like sharks in our previous organizations who had to figure out how to come together and work and in a very short amount of time. That was a very interesting experience because it's hard to do that. It's not just important to be great and smart, but it's also important to understand how to most effective- effectively deploy your resources and talent across an organization. And that sort of takes a little bit of time to, to happen. And for a presidential campaign, that's, you know, I, I find that very hard to do from that one experience. That said, it also meant that when you're looking at the paid ads and the fact that we were deploying this massive amount of money, there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it came to figuring out exactly what we were gonna do with those ads and like how we were gonna target them and what are the campaigns we're gonna run and what's the copy and what's the design?And after, you know, maybe a few days there, I realized that my, my, my best bet in terms of actually adding value was not to be another cook in the kitchen trying to figure that out, but to move into the next step of the journey which nobody was paying attention to, which is once you click on an ad, you land somewhere and then whatever happens there is super important, because if people then take the action you want them to take on that landing page or don't is definitive. But everyone spends all of their effort and money on the ads. And I think that this is true of almost everything. We forget to think about the step by step in growth and what that experience looks like. And even just the second or third screen af- in an experience are as, if not more, important than the first one because that's where your, quote unquote, "leaky buckets" can happen. So if you're able to 2X the effectiveness of a landing page, you are able to, like, actually in a compounded way increase the effectiveness of that first ad. So, I spent a lot of time kind of going rogue and figuring out how to make landing pages because, like, the designers and the copywriters were all allocated to the, the actual ad. So I was just there being like, "I'm gonna do copywriting and design and figure out, you know, how we can, how we can increase these conversion rates." And the cool thing about that level of dollar deployment is that you're able to reach statistical significance very quickly, whereas, like, in a company like Duolingo where you already have a lot of users and you can reach statistical significance on an A-B test within two weeks, at the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign on a landing page we could see that three times a day, you know?

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky20:02

       Wow.

   12. GGGina Gotthilf20:02

       So like, four times a day.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky20:04

       Wow.

   14. GGGina Gotthilf20:04

       So I would be able...

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky20:05

       Okay.

   16. GGGina Gotthilf20:05

       ... to like, do something and be like, "Oh wow, this test has a 3% conversion rate." And then like, get approval for like a new version and deploy it and then be like, "Okay, we're at 6% now." And then actually improve 3 to 8... I, there was one where like I brought one page from 3 to 12% conversion rate with statistical significance. So that's, I think the, the biggest benefit of having those other amounts. I think the, the drawback, and that's the same for startups that have a lot of money to spend, is you start going a little wild in terms of like, "Oh, like the monies are, the world's our oyster, we can do whatever we want." And you lose sight a little bit about effectiveness, which is where growth is so magical.

6. 20:40 – 24:34

   How Gina was able to 3x the conversion rate on a campaign site in one day

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky20:40

      What was that change on the landing page you did that increased conversion so much? Do you remember?

   2. GGGina Gotthilf20:44

      None of this is gonna blow anyone's minds I think because it's very best practices, but it's easy to overlook when you're so focused on so many different steps of a process. The first one is making it mobile-optimized. So people really, like, people who are working are working on their computers, on desktop computers even today. We forget that most people are looking at pages on our phones, and that has been the case for a while and I think it's just increasing. So you need to make sure that that experience of looking at something on your phone, whatever your phone is, is great. And what that means is, like, from a landing page perspective, super simple. Like first it has to like, you know, the, the core copy, the message, and button need to be above the fold. Or if you're not gonna keep the button above the fold, which I still recommend, but if you're, if you're not gonna do that for whatever reason, then you need to have a very clear indicator that like, it's e- that there's something to scroll towards on your page. The second thing a- applies to both desktop and mobile is people skim, and copywriters don't like to believe that, much like journalists don't like to believe that people just read headlines. It's just how it is. People are busy and lazy, uh, myself included. So, you can write all of this beautiful messaging that you've thought through, but if people are not gonna read it, it doesn't matter. So you have to approach a landing page with that perspective in as much as possible. And so for me, what makes something particularly skimmable is f- first, you know, restricting copy a lot, and even p- even copy that seems short is probably not short enough. Second, so people normally like to have like a title, some sort of like subtitle, and then like an image and a button. Those are kind of like core pieces of like some sort of landings page experience. Having the title and the button speak to each other is really cool because if people only read the title and the button, they got it. Like, it can't be like, "Wouldn't you like... The next president of the United States to blah blah blah..." And then like, a whole explanation of what... And then the button is like, um, I don't know, "Apply." Whatever, right? Like, it's like, apply for what? Now I have to go read the thing and I didn't get it. So, just keeping those two things super speaking to each other. And then of course, making sure that that landing page speaks to the ad experience, and that's something that I think people do pay some attention to. Finally, there's a qu- there's an element of emotion to it, which I didn't get super deep in, but just very basic, right? Like, my job was to create a landing page that made people... So it was actually funnily enough before COVID hit the US, and then, and then COVID hit the US. Half the people in that campaign got COVID on our like, sad...

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky23:06

      Oh, right.

   4. GGGina Gotthilf23:06

      ... like, goodbye Mike Bloomberg party, and I had already bounced and I left New York 'cause I was scared. I was like, "This city's gonna be a petri dish." And I spent months trying to convince the whole United States as much as I could that COVID was gonna hit the United States and there were gonna be a lot of deaths unless we had a different president. And so I of course convinced myself very effectively that like, we were in grave danger. And so to do that, like we had images in the background of different sorts like Mike Bloomberg and like, whatever, like, but what is fear- you know, fear really inspires people and, and that's just a, a truth about human psychology, especially when it comes to like a presidential campaign. So, having dark colors like black, like having Trump in sort of like a black, um, scenario kind of looking down and looking a little menacing is more powerful than having Trump looking ridiculous, for example, in the context of y- we need to take action otherwise there will be deaths because of this, right? So it depends on the content, but don't underplay the im- the importance of understanding how people are gonna feel when they see something and whether that's gonna lead them to take action. Keeping it super, super simple, because also the other thing I see is like, a lot of images, you know? It's like, no, the image can't distract from your core message. It just has to be a background thing that aids in the digestion of that message.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky24:23

      I feel like all these, uh, startups are gonna start adding Trump, menacing Trump to their landing pages.

   6. GGGina Gotthilf24:29

      (laughs)

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky24:29

      ... because it works for you guys.

   8. GGGina Gotthilf24:31

      Well, they're gonna alienate 50% of the American population.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky24:33

      True.

7. 24:34 – 36:39

   4 areas Duolingo leaned into to have success in the difficult world of B2C subscriptions

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:34

      There's a few other things I wanted to dig into. One is obviously Duolingo, so let's just spend some time here. So, what's really interesting, I've written... With my newsletter, I've written over 200 posts. The number one most popular post of all time, did not expect this, was about the story of Duolingo and the way that the team reignited growth after it started to plateau. This was by Jorge Mazal?

   2. GGGina Gotthilf24:56

      Mazal.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky24:56

      Or Mazola? Mazal, okay, cool.

   4. GGGina Gotthilf24:58

      Jorge Mazal, yes.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:00

      Okay, there's the, the right pronunciation. And so clearly there's a lot of interest in Du- the Duolingo story. And you were there before Jorge, you were there really early. I think you were there from three million users to 200 million. That's kind of the-

   6. GGGina Gotthilf25:15

      That's right.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky25:15

      ... what I hear you describing as-

   8. GGGina Gotthilf25:16

      That's my claim to fame.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky25:17

      Okay, cool.

   10. GGGina Gotthilf25:18

       Yes.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky25:18

       (laughs) Okay, great. That's a, that's a large, large growth trajectory. So, one thing I wanted to ask broadly is, it feels like B2C subscription apps, like, never work. They never last. There's so few success stories of consumer subscription apps. There's, like, Duolingo, like, Calm maybe, but it's, I don't know, it feels like it's slowing down. Headspace, Grammarly sort of. They, like, there's, there's, like, always, they're like okay. And there's a few that are okay, but most die. I guess I'm mostly curious, what is it that you think Duolingo did right to make it basically and continue to thrive even these days?

   12. GGGina Gotthilf25:56

       Very few people really believed that we were gonna make it, uh, not surprisingly, right? Even though we had, like, this amazing team, et cetera, now it looks ob- almost obvious, it's like, yeah, B2C language learning just, like, seems so niche. And plus education, there's no money in education, like, you know, i- it's been stuck for so long, so. You know, and what I, I kept hearing, "You guys, did you hear about Rosetta Stone? Like, this solution already exists." Um, so I, I think that there are a couple things that really made Duolingo a success, which are very hard to replicate. Number one, an obsession for the mission. That sounds cliché. I think a lot of founders and, and startup people like to talk about the mission, and I get it and I think it's, it's real, but I really mean it because this obsession for solving a problem for hundreds of millions of people, and the problem wasn't just a vitamin. It was a problem in the sense that if you don't know English in today's world, your opportunities to get out of your socioeconomic zone are very diminished. More specifically, you can double or triple your income potential by learning English in a developing market, like Latin America. And there are lots of those around the world. That belief that education should be free and that people should have access to that opportunity, not just in developing countries, but of course also in the US, really drove the organization in a way that drove how we built our marketing, how we spoke to our users, how we designed the experience, how we put barriers in front of taking decisions that would actually impact that mission. It helped our users rally around the business. It helped us hire the best people, even if we were based in Pittsburgh and couldn't necessarily pay the Google dollars. So, it's, it's really hard to measure the importance of just really being ab- obsessed about that mission. But I speak to a lot of education founders, ed- you know, ed tech founders, and I'm very biased probably because of this experience. I, I will say that I had a, one of those, what's it called? The experiment where they ha- like, they looked at all of the shots that some plane got when it came back from war and then started fixing the plane. There's a name for this, right? And then they realized that they shouldn't be f-

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky28:04

       I forget the name, but it's the pictures... Yeah, the pictures

   14. GGGina Gotthilf28:06

       ... fix those spots because if they got back they survived, they were, like, missing the plane that, like, fell, right? So, I, I got to ride on a plane that survived, so I have a... Oh, it's called, um, survivor bias maybe?

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky28:17

       That sounds (laughs) that sounds right. Yeah.

   16. GGGina Gotthilf28:19

       Yeah. I have survivor bias, but that-

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky28:21

       Survivorship bias.

   18. GGGina Gotthilf28:21

       ... I really believe in this. Survivorship bias. So if I, if I speak to a founder and I can tell that they're spe- they're building an ed tech because they believe that they will be able to make money from it, there's nothing wrong with making money. Nothing. I want to make money. You know, I'm, I think it's a capitalist world that we live in a- and it's fine. But just that drive and, is what brings people to you and it's what leads you to make long-term thinking decisions that really end up mattering, and it's what allowed us, in many ways, to grow organically versus with paid ads, ads, which I think is crucial for an early stage tech startup. It's not the only thing, but I think it's one of them that's super important.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky28:58

       Just to follow that thread, that's something that I actually found. I read a post about this looking into of the ones that made it, what did they do consistently across them all? And one is just stay very lean and scrappy for a long time. Because, to your point, it's so hard to build a big business and you can't afford, like you said, the best people, you can't pay them as much as everyone else, so essentially it's just, like, a long time of just being very lean and scrappy. Th- that was the most consistent pattern across all these B2C subscription apps.

   20. GGGina Gotthilf29:26

       Agree. And that's number two. When I was hired by Duolingo as a consultant and as, um, an employee, my mandate was, "Make Duolingo grow. Here is no budget." I had no budget. And people are shocked. Like, they're like, "Oh, but when did you start, when did you turn on the ads?" We're like, "We just didn't." Because I'm, I know, like, this is between you and me, Lenny, I actually am quite bad at paid ads. It's just not, like, a muscle that I ever developed. I'm only-

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky29:49

       All right, we won't tell anyone.

   22. GGGina Gotthilf29:49

       ... good... Huh?

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky29:51

       We won't tell anyone.

   24. GGGina Gotthilf29:53

       Okay. Please, uh, please keep this a secret. I'm only, I've only been good, I think I could develop that muscle if I need, you know, if one day I need it. But I'm particularly good at thinking about organic growth because I've had to, because that's what Tumblr and Duolingo required of me. And the, and the logic behind it was listen, we, with Duolingo, you know, we, we started monetizing the platform very late and it was a luxury because we had so much venture capital money to sustain us for a while. But we had some bets that we we- that we made in the early days that we thought were gonna help really sustain the company, like translations that didn't end up panning out. And then we, you know, the Duolingo English test that we started developing really early with Burr Settles, um, s- an amazing guy who basically was, uh, you know-... developing this test, we realized that was going to be super long term. We didn't start really char- like, charging for subscriptions or having ads un- till, I don't know exactly, but something like year three. So we didn't have an LTV, which meant that having a CAC made no sense. So that's number one, like having, like you need that CAC to LTV ratio that everyone, you know, talks about. That's an important thing. But it's more than that, first. But I think there is a CAC to LTV ratio thing. The second thing is that even if you have a low CAC, I was just talking to an entre- entrepreneur this morning, he was like, "Oh, we were able to hit a 10-cent CAC." And I'm like, "Yeah, but that grows." Like, as you start, like, targeting more people, the low-hanging fruit kind of dry out, and you end up having to pay more money. And then once you have those users coming in because of those paid ads, you can't cut it off because you still need that growth because you're trying to prove to your investors that you're growing, or you need those users in order to continue A/B testing or whatever, like, and then you become completely dependent, and it's really hard to turn it off. So it's almost like an addiction that as much as you're able to, like, limit in the beginning, the better. And the third thing is that I really believe that... I don't believe, I think we all know by at this point that the most important thing for the growth of anything tech, uh, or maybe in general is retention. Of course you need acquisition, but retention is important. And I simplify it a little bit because I don't think retention is like... I don't think it in te- of it in terms of like, "Wow, y- I must retain this user." It's like, "Is this thing valuable or not?" Like, that's what retention is to me, like either it's actually providing real value or it's not. If it's providing real value, people stick around. It's as simple as that. And if you don't force yourself to pay attention to retention and finding the users to whom this is the most useful really early on, you risk convincing yourself of metrics and kind of like glossing over some of this other important stuff, which means that even if you succeed at acquisition, you're just not gonna succeed long term, because those users fall through, and you won't really understand why, because you were building retention based on acquired users that weren't the ones who were necessarily gonna... Uh, you know, uh, a- and, and I don't mean to say that I don't believe in paid at all. I think paid has its value. I think e- especially when it comes to testing, sometimes you don't have as many users as you need to run statistically significant tests. But with paid users, you could, or you could just use paid ads to understand, like, messaging and images and even value prop on a landing page. Like, that's super valuable. Or you find an amazing niche, and you know exactly who your target users are, and you figure out a way that makes sense. But then again, I would say, I would argue that if you found your perfect user and, and where they are, you should go figure out a way to get them organically, 'cause if you can really provide them value, they would come, and they would stay.

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky33:16

       So far, I've heard be really focused around a mission, be very clear about what you're trying to achieve. Two, is just very low spend. Try not... But essentially don't expect to grow this into a venture scale business. Focus on a sustainable, profitable business for as long as you can and, like, constrain your spend basically. And then third is this focus on retention, which I think is a, a really important point just like... And this is true for any app you're building, but I think especially true for consumer business where people are just like, "Nah, this is cool. Oh yeah, what's next? Okay, let's check out Snapchat."

   26. GGGina Gotthilf33:47

       Totally. And, and I, you know, I was gonna have a different three, but I think it's related. So maybe we can add it as 3B or 4.

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky33:54

       3B, let's do it.

   28. GGGina Gotthilf33:55

       An obsession for the product. Again, sounds obvious but isn't. When you look back to products that existed, you know, before the internet, before the, the, the app store. You built this thing, you made it, and then you tried to convince people to buy it. That was like kind of it, right? So like, "Look, I make a, I made a chair. This is a beautiful chair." And then you spend all this money trying to, like, get it out into the world and people buy the chair. And you, like, s- hire all these salespeople, and you hire an amazing marketing agency, and they try to sell the chair. It's no longer at all that because products are constantly in motion and evolving. And like, unless you're able to own that data and understand what it can tell you, you're never gonna win. So I, I hear... A lot of people come to me and say, "Gina, Gina, we built Duolingo for this." And I'm like, "Okay, cool." And then they show it to me, and it looks exactly like Duolingo. And I'm like, "Okay, cool." And then I'm like, "How did you get to this design?" They're like, "Oh, yeah. We used Duolingo or something." I'm like, "Great." So like, but then as I started talking to them, I understand they didn't actually... They don't have the engineers and PMs there looking at Mixpanel or whatever it is that they're using every day, understanding how every single change is leading to other changes that enables them to ask the questions and come up with the hypotheses that allow them to get to the next step. So it's almost like they just, like, copy pasted some... It's, you know how I think e- of that? It's like those students who are able to copy their, like, the, the best student's, um, answer on the math test and then they get frustrated that they didn't get an A because the work wasn't there but they copied the answer. But if you don't know how to do the work, you get another math question and you're not gonna get it right. And so that I think still misses an a- in I would venture to say most early stage tech startups out there. It's certainly the case in Latin America where people think they can outsource, like, the code or outsource the growth. And they're not just, like, looking like hawks at, like, the, the quality of the data and statistical significance and, like, running hypotheses and, like, questioning them, and that rigor is a culture at Duolingo that was there from day one before me and continues to be there today.

   29. LRLenny Rachitsky35:58

       Amazing. So I think if a listener is trying to build a subscription consumer app, I would suggest just rewind and listen to that again. I think there's so much gold there. And in my experience, I get a lot of decks 'cause I do a bunch of angel investing. I just, I kind of just discount consumer subscription apps because they never work except when they do once in a while. And so my advice is if you're building something in this space, just, like, listen to exactly what you just said. There's a lot of important stuff and, like, actually internalize it. Like, stay really lean. Stay really focused. Obsess with retention. Obsess with making sure the product is solving the problem you're going after, so...

   30. GGGina Gotthilf36:32

       I'm so glad that you agree, Lenny. I, you know, I really admire you, so it makes me very happy.
8. 36:39 – 42:05

   B-side lessons from Duolingo

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky36:39

      (laughs) I wanted to switch to the B-side, and I'm curious, what's like a mess up or a big mistake maybe that you made or your team made that was like, "Oh, wow, that was a big waste of time."

   2. GGGina Gotthilf36:50

      Yeah, look, a lot of things didn't work out. More than 50% of our, of our A/B tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense. I will say though that like in the spirit of A and B-sides, I, and I think in general we are really good at forgetting the B stuff. Like I, I talk so much about all the stuff that worked, that it's hard to remember like all of those moments that didn't actually work. And the, and the moment, and the thing that I, I tend to talk about, which is like this mistake that we made as the growth team is almost like one of those, like when you get asked in an interview, like, "What's your, what's like your biggest weakness?" And you're like, "I'm a perfectionist." You know? It's like one of those things that actually makes you sound good, because it's the story about how my team really wanted to implement badges. We spent a lot of time playing all the games that were popular at the time, trying to understand how those gamification growth hacks that we could find in, in those apps would potentially overlay onto Duolingo and how, you know, we would do that. And badges was just pervasive in all of the top games, and so it seemed like a, a no-brainer. But since we ranked all of our experiments in terms of ROI and return being like how many users we think we're gonna get from this, the AU's and inve- time investments, it was never, it never made sense to focus on this because we thought that the time sink would be too high. So I actually ended up not letting the team run this experiment for like six months so that we focused on lower-hanging fruit. So that's like a mistake on my end. Then we decided to, we decided to run this experiment in the most lean way possible. We're like, "You know what? Like there's MVPs, there's like minimum viable experiments. We don't have to run a whole badges thing. We can just, like, do something more simple and actually see if that, like, leads to growth in an interesting way and then we'll know." And we ran this very simple experiment that was like, you sign up and then you get a badge and it was like this girl with a balloon. I don't know. She was like happy or whatever. And of course, of course, in retrospect, it led to no results because no one is proud of signing up. It's not an exciting moment and you don't even have badges to collect. You can't show it to other people. Like, none of the things that make badges compelling were there. But we were like, "Okay, well, we tested it, it didn't work." And then we moved on. So we moved on for like another, I don't know, eight months and we didn't look back. And then when we did look back, first of all, at that point, we, we'd discovered that we hadn't been dogfooding, okay? Which also was embarrassing looking back. We hadn't been dogfooding in the growth team. We'd just come up with hypotheses. We'd like... We were super careful about prioritizing them and making sure that we were doing the best possible, like, write-ups and all these things, but, like, the dogfooding piece had just... I didn't come from a p- a product background. I was a marketer, and I hadn't even... I didn't really understand the term dogfooding. But when I, when we thought ab- we t- had a conversation, we were like, "You know what? If we had just tested that, we would've all known that this was a super lame badge." And I was like, "Why are we not testing our experiments?" And so, like, that became part of our, of our practice. It's still relevant. I, I just had a conversation yesterday with engineers at Latitude. I, I, I haven't explained what we built yet, where we're building it. Maybe we'll get there. But I was talking yesterday to eng- engineers at Latitude and they're awesome. Like, in terms of our product team, we have like the number eight employee at Nubank. You might've heard of Nubank, but it's this, like, massive banking, like, fintech in Latin America. And, and we have people from, like, other fintechs and then we have this guy who was a lead PM at Twilio. And I was explaining to them why we should be dogfooding and they were all like, "Oh yeah, we should dogfood." It's just like easy to forget stuff like that. So, so that was a mistake that, you know, we could have probably gotten to the growth that we got to with badges much earlier, earlier on. And not only did we get to growth with badges, but it became like this amazing treasure trove of opportunity because once you have badges and people want them, you can now ask people to do anything. Like, go find friends, go buy things, like, you know? Whatever it is. And so, like, we, we had, uh, we impacted almost all metrics across the company positively, espe- incl- incl- including some we hadn't expected. But it's, like, easy to talk about a mistake that ended up being a win. So, that's why I s- I compared it to the interview thing in the beginning. But, you know, we, we tried making Duolingo a social app really early on and failed. Um, it was called Duo- Duels. Duo Duels. Like, you could duel. You know?

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky40:54

      Very clever.

   4. GGGina Gotthilf40:56

      Yeah, I know. We were, we were clever. But people didn't use it and we didn't figure out why. We, we tried making a Duolingo for schools platform and, like, we couldn't get it to pick up. I went and launched Duolingo in China and it got download- downloaded by a million people in the first day and then the app got blocked and I, we, you know, because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do and then everyone rated the app like a one star because it didn't work. And so then we had a really, like, like a lot of trouble actually recovering from that. We launched Duolingo in India and didn't realize, because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did, that most people set their phones, phone UI in India to English, because typing in Hindi is hard and of course there's a lot of languages throughout India. And we were making it so that when you downloaded Duolingo, whatever L- UI you opened your app, your, your phone was set to, we offered not that language for you to learn. That was your base language. So we were telling people, "Learn French, Spanish, German from English." And they were all trying to learn English, so they didn't find what they were looking for and they left. Um, there were so many mistakes, you know? And luckily, I think we were able to, to bounce back from most of them in terms of how Duolingo's doing today.

9. 42:05 – 44:54

   The importance of trusting your gut

   1. GGGina Gotthilf42:05

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky42:05

      Man, there's so much there. That was awesome. I like your, like, "Oh, I don't remember any of my failures," and then, like, "Oh, here's all these awesome stories." (laughs) That was great. Just one thread there that comes up again and again in this podcast is the dogfooding piece, especially.

   3. GGGina Gotthilf42:17

      Mm.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky42:17

      I think people don't trust their gut and personal instinct enough. I think a lot of times PMs are just like, "I need to do user research to understand what we should be doing," versus just use the thing, see what feels wrong and keeps you from being excited and really trust that. I find that more and more. Like, uh, I don't know, when I read a thing and when I'm writing, I'm just like, "Oh, I don't like that. I should change that. I don't need to, like, run this by three people." So, I think that's a really good lesson there, just...... don't underestimate the power of you just using it and relying on instincts and feelings you have when you're trying to use it.

   5. GGGina Gotthilf42:50

      Totally, and that's so hard to do, especially when you're young. And I think, uh, you know, I will add that especially when you're female as well or may- you know, maybe other minorities, it's just really hard to trust your instinct because you're constantly telling yourself, like, "What? What do I really... Do I really know anything?" Or, like, "Am I just being lucky?" But you ha- you have to, and I think that f- forcing yourself to pretend that you know answers and just finding out what this, like, pretend person who would know all the answers would think, like, is really helpful because it helps you develop your point of view, your voice, and to trust yourself even when you're working on something that you don't fully understand. Uh, you know, as an... You know, we're, we're building a banking platform at, at Latitude. I was looking at it, and I was like, they, they were having trouble understanding why people were having problems with wires, and I told them all about how I'm an idiot when it comes to wires, and I make these mistakes A, B, C because, like, I don't match, like, the line. It's like whatever. There's, like, all this information you're supposed to input, and sometimes the information you get is not in the same order. And they're like, "Wow." Uh, you know, and I'm like, "This is just me as, like, a user making dumb mistakes." But that is our forte when you're able to understand that when you don't get something, probably other people don't get it too at scale.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky43:56

      Absolutely. It's like the, uh... If you're, if you're thinking about asking a question in class, many people are thinking of that same question, and they will appreciate you asking that. The other thing that stood out there, so the Hindi, uh, mistake you made, I actually made the same mistake with my podcast recently. I was noticing that the second-biggest market of listeners is in India, so I'm like, "How do I lean into that and help people in India find this podcast even better?" So I added subtitles in Hindi to a number of the episodes and tweeted it being, "Oh, look at me go. I'm gonna make this so great for people in India." And everyone's like, "We don't need this. We prefer English. People in tech in India, we know English."

   7. GGGina Gotthilf44:33

      It's true.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky44:33

      This is even harder. They're like, "I can read a lot faster in English, so please don't do this." So that was a really good learning for me in India.

   9. GGGina Gotthilf44:38

      And there's so many languages in India. Like-

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky44:40

       That too.

   11. GGGina Gotthilf44:42

       Really.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky44:42

       Yeah.

   13. GGGina Gotthilf44:42

       It's, it's, it's crazy how many, like, how people don't speak the same languages across the whole country, but also it means that people in India are very... are fluent, are fluent in so many different languages.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky44:52

       We live, we learn.

10. 44:54 – 48:01

    Organic growth tactics and the importance of branding

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky44:54

       I wanna go back to the A side and just a couple more questions about Duolingo. You said that most of the growth was organic, and you basically had to grow it organically. Is there anything that you can share that worked really well? Because everybody wants to grow organically through word of mouth. Is there anything tactical you did that really helped Duolingo that other startups can, can do and try?

    2. GGGina Gotthilf45:12

       Absolutely. So first of all, I would actually say that A/B testing and product-led growth is organic growth because you're not spending money on it. Um, and so first thing that you can do, uh, no matter what stage your startup is, is make sure that you are not overlooking the importance of people in your product team who really know how to evaluate data and how to use that and learn. And if you're too early stage, you're not looking at 5% growth; you're looking at 20, 30% growth opportunities, but I think that's number one. Number two, actually this is something I might have said as, like, something that Duolingo did really well, but I think it, it goes hand in hand with mission. But, you know, throwing the mission thing aside, brand and PR. So, uh, the importance of building a lovable brand that really resonates with people and makes people feel something and, and want to stand behind an idea that's bigger them- than themselves is not easy to do but possible and core to being able to, to increase word of mouth. So, at the bottom of this is the mission, which is we, you know, Duolingo, the mission was always to, for... originally to bring free language education to the world, then, you know, to build the best education to make it accessible to everyone. I don't know how they're wording it today, but that's something most people can get behind. Doesn't matter if you think Bloomberg or Trump should be president, like, do you think everyone should have access to great education? Like, most people would say yes. And so, that's much more powerful than, "Do you want to download an app and learn a new language?" You know? So, if you're able to have that, uh, and, and things, uh, that you really believe in about what you're building that's changing lives or impacting the world, even if it is just helping business people do their jobs better in a way that's gonna improve their lives and their ability to make a li- a, like, uh, a living, or a com- it's gonna improve company's ability, whatever it is, like, the bigger, the bigger idea behind it and focusing on, on creating something that people like, w- whichever your audience is. It might be a more serious audience in something like Duolingo. But for Duolingo, it meant, like, we have this owl, the colors, and then the way that the owl talks and the notifications and the emails that you get and, and the product experience. All of that ties back into how people feel about your brand, which makes it so that people are more likely to talk about it, which makes it so that you are much more likely to get a reporter to write a story about you if you have something that's meaningful outside of like, "Hey," like, "TechCrunch, did you know that my app grew by 20% last month?" They're like, "I don't care." You know? But if you're able to tell a story about people whose lives you completely transformed or, or something like that, that's much more interesting and has played an important role in, uh, honestly my work at Tumblr, at Duolingo, not the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign but definitely Latitude as well.

11. 48:01 – 52:01

    What makes for remarkable branding

    1. GGGina Gotthilf48:01

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky48:01

       Okay. That's amazing. I was gonna ask, what does that actually mean and how do you build a lovable brand? And so what I've heard so far is there's this, like, personality and voice that was really fun that y'all lead into to make it, like, not just a generic translation app. It's like, oh, this is really fun and interesting. And then this other piece is these stories of transformation.

    3. GGGina Gotthilf48:21

       Yeah. There's more. There's more. So, uh, uh, th- I think a brand that stands for something that, but truly stands for something, that's where the mission piece comes in.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky48:30

       How do you, uh, communicate that to... Like, how do people even know that the brand stands for that?

    5. GGGina Gotthilf48:34

       So that has to be integral part of your communication. Like, in the early days, like, we tested a lot of stuff on social media. We made, again, mistakes. Like, at one point, we were, we were posting photos of our team on Facebook being like, "Check out the behind the scenes." Guess what? No one cares. But, like, but making the mission... We, we had, like, a calendar. This is very tactical, but, like, a social media calendar where, like, one post a week is about effectiveness, because we knew that, like, proving that Duolingo was an effective way to learn a language and actually having data behind that...... move the needle. So making sure that was part of our communication in terms of our social media calendar, in terms of like PR pitches that we were making, in terms of, you know, whatever we were able to like communicate out into the world. And then make sure one post a week was something about the mission and what we were actually trying to accomplish. But it also got embedded into a lot of things, like for example, when we were testing, uh, screens to get people to convert into paid users on Duolingo, we found that including something like by paying for Duolingo you're making language learning accessible to millions of people, that actually imp- improved the metric. People cared enough to make the payment, you know? So it really can, can be anywhere. In addition to that, I, I love copywriting and I believe that communication is constantly underrated. And communication isn't about being able to convey a message, it's about com- being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it and understands it and like remembers it, and that's really hard to do. And one of the things, uh, I've helped employ at Duolingo that I think is still there today, it's definitely not just me, it was an amazing team, but I've helped employ that I've used at, uh, Latitude and o- and other places is a unique voice. And what that means is exactly what you said, Lenny, like not just another language learning app where we give you instructions and you follow directions. There is always a quirk, like it's unexpected. The way we talk to you is a little bit funny, it doesn't take ourselves too seriously, and it makes the person receiving this message feel something. You know, it's about how you make people feel and it, you feel like either you giggle or you're like, "Wait, what? They just did what?" You know? Um, and like, a- a- and using that to your, to your benefit. We, we use that a lot, uh, in, in, uh, at Latitude today and s- as well in terms of especially our newsletter. Just self-deprecating humor, that's what's helped us grow so quickly in Latin America in such a short amount of time. People identify with it. They see themselves as part of that, again, much like the mission versus like you are a company and I'm a consumer.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky50:58

       (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Mercury, who I also happen to use for my business checking account. I've tried a lot of business banks and there's nothing even close to the experience you get with Mercury. I moved cash over from another bank and it literally took less than half an hour to set up the account and wire money over at no cost. They kind of make you want to use the site more often, which I've never felt with another banking site. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey, a modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. And Mercury isn't just a place to hold and send money. It's software built to help you scale with safety and stability whether you're a team of two or a team of 1,000. Mercury also goes beyond banking to provide you with access to the foremost investors, operators, and tools. Visit mercury.com to join over 100,000 startups on Mercury, the powerful and intuitive way for ambitious companies to bank. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC.

12. 52:01 – 52:45

    Duolingo’s process for keeping copy on-brand

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky52:01

       Is there an example of that kind of, like a message you remember for, either from Duolingo or from even Latitude of something that worked that was really funny or different?

    2. GGGina Gotthilf52:09

       Look, I think for Duolingo, we constantly looked at every copy we wrote and asked, "Could this have been written by, by other companies?" Like what...

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky52:17

       Mm.

    4. GGGina Gotthilf52:17

       "Could this have been any other company or, or does it, or is it Duolingo? Like, what makes this Duolingo?" And it was tough because the more people you hire who come from other backgrounds, they don't, they're not used to that style and they might even think it's unprofessional or whatever, but you're like, "Nope, this is the Duolingo way." So it helps figuring out like, okay, exactly what is that voice? What does it sound like? What are some voices? What are some words that it tends to use? Why yes? Why not? What's too much? What's too little? In terms of specific examples, this is something that I didn't write myself, but I wrote a lot of notifications for Duolingo

13. 52:45 – 55:19

    How Duo’s passive-aggressive messages led to a movement

    1. GGGina Gotthilf52:45

       for, um, the passive-aggressive message that I'm sure people have received, which started and then became a meme and then, and then Duolingo used as well, but like the whole like, "This doesn't seem to be working. We'll stop sending them for now," message, which like you got after five days of inactivity. In addition to that message, es- around the same time, we decided to send an email to people in New Year's, because that's when people make a resolution to do things, and we wanted them to make learning a language a resolution for the year. So we created an email and it had like Sad Duo, you know, because there was... I, I, I don't know if the screen is still there. I haven't used Duolingo in a while, but there was always a screen of Duo really sad when you fail something and like, and that, that screen had been-

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky53:25

       Duo is the owl.

    3. GGGina Gotthilf53:25

       The owl. Duo's the owl, sorry. The green owl will cry and, and we A/B tested the size of the puzzle, the size of the puddle, and the number of tears that came out of his eyes-

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky53:35

       Mm-hmm.

    5. GGGina Gotthilf53:35

       ... in terms of effectiveness. So we used Sad Duo in like, you know, you know, in one of those emails and then it started, you know, someone picked it up on Twitter and the messa- like, the passive-aggressive message and, and this, like, Sad Duo, it, it, they started making their own versions which was like, "Study now or Duo will, will eat a poisoned loaf of bread," or like, "The next email will be a funeral evite." Things like that, right? And so that's an example I think to me which can now be seen very much throughout Duolingo's brand where we could have just said, "Oh, no. This is a PR disaster. We need to go back to being this friendly, like, nice little fluffy thing that everyone loves." Instead of being like, "No, like, we're, like, we get that people think this is funny and we're just gonna run with it." You know? Because being, using the Duo voice, it gives us the permission to do that because we're not just, like, we're not square. We're not going to do that thing that you read in the textbook in school. We're just, we're kind of gonna play along with it.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky54:28

       That's an incredible lesson. It reminds me of this famous Duolingo meme that I'm sure you've seen where someone shared these, they got these two notifications in a row, I just pulled it up here, where first they got this Duolingo push notification, "Looks like you forgot your Spanish lessons again. You know what happens now?" And then the next push was from their security system, "Intruder alert. Back door. Proceed with caution." And I imagine Duolingo even linked into, like, leaned into that, uh, I think when this started spreading.

    7. GGGina Gotthilf54:53

       100%. And, and it wasn't an easy decision, you know, because of course a lot of people in the company were like really concerned about the brand image and like what are people doing and what do, how do we revert this? That kind of thing, right? So it was like, uh, a-... it was a, it was a bet that we made where we're just gonna like, no, we're gonna lean into it because that's what having this unique voice means. It's about getting it, it's about being part of something bigger. It's about, you know, connecting with people outside of just teaching them a word a day or whatever it is.

14. 55:19 – 56:31

    How Latitud uses niche humor as part of their branding

    1. GGGina Gotthilf55:19

       And with Latitude, I think w- we do that, we do that all the time in our newsletter and it's a lot of, like, self-deprecating humor for Latinos and using expressions that, like, could be almost offensive but they're not. Not in terms of Latinos only, but also the tech world, making fun of, like, being a tech founder and, like, the, the things that we do that we think are okay and, like, it's- it's just a lot of that where I think I would call it irreverent. It- it's- it's a- it's a tough line. It's a lot easier to be, I think, a copywriter in a place that doesn't want to do that because the lines are a lot clearer and you don't have to take as many risks, but it's so less fun which I think makes it so less fun for the user, because people are used to getting emails from their banks with corporate lingo that you don't understand. But if they get a- an email from their bank that's funny, ironic, but also very informative, like that's- that's a bank email I'm gonna read, you know?

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky56:12

       I think that's a really good lesson. Part of this is just taking a risk. I think that's one of the big takeaways here is just take some risks. Uh, we had Lulu Cheng on the podcast who is a huge advocate of that. She's, uh, a PR comms person that's worked at Substack and Blizzard now, and that was her advice too, to people.

    3. GGGina Gotthilf56:27

       Take risks.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky56:27

       Take risks. Do things that are a little, a little controversial 'cause that'll get attention.

15. 56:31 – 59:02

    Duolingo’s TikTok

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky56:31

       I definitely wanna talk about Latitude. Just a couple more questions on Duolingo. One is, today it feels like one of the most interesting, interesting things about Duolingo is their TikTok presence and feels like they're doing so well, kind of leaning into exactly what you're talking about, just being really silly and different, with the owl especially. Uh, I guess the question there is just, what is it that you think allows for that? Is it just this, like, very special social media person they hired that was just, like, incredibly good at this thing and being irreverent, as you said? Or is there something else that contributes and allows the company to win in social media the way that Tik- uh, the way that Duolingo has?

    2. GGGina Gotthilf57:07

       Look, I haven't met the person who does the TikTok, and they're fantastic. Uh, definitely don't wanna demerit their work. It's- it's awesome, and I don't think it's easy to do, especially on a consistent basis. So, I think, yes, finding someone who gets, who gets humor, who gets the platform, who's able to produce content, like, quickly, but then also reacts to learnings. Like, all of that is not easy to do. However, I do think that everything we just talked about is at the bottom of that, because if Duolingo didn't have this unique voice and leaned into the humor and wanted to be irreverent as a brand and was so focused on connecting with people where they were and- and- and ready to take risks that might seem, you know, maybe unorthodox in terms of, especially in terms of education, then s- an opportunity to build a TikTok like that wouldn't exist. So, it- it- it's both, and I think it goes back to the brand DNA, it goes back to the culture of the company to, and to the attention, as I said, to every single text that was published and whether or not it was in the right voice or not. It has to do with having those conversations with the executive team where you talk about who is Duo and what are they like and how do they talk and, you know, what do they sound like and is this a Duo thing to say, is this not a Duo thing to say? And- and- and committing to- to this idea that you're gonna be remembered, that you're gonna do things that are, sometimes are- are gonna rub people the wrong way and you're not just gonna sit, you know, squarely in one place. I think that opens the possibility for a TikTok like the one that Duolingo has today to exist. But again, whoever's running the TikTok, you're amazing.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky58:41

       (laughs) That- that's such a good lesson. A lot of people are looking at Duolingo right now, like, "We need to find that person at our company." And what you're saying is it's- it takes a lot more than that. Like, that person is not gonna have a good time if the culture of the company isn't set up to be that sort of, uh, to have that approach to try to just take risks and be irreverent. So, that's a really good point.

16. 59:02 – 1:03:51

    Lessons from internationalizing Duolingo

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky59:02

       One final question, uh, around internationalization. You said that you helped drive internationalization of Duolingo, and I read somewhere that one of the learnings you had there was essentially treat everyone the same, almost, across countries, which I think people think is the counter. Like, they should often, like, "No, we should be super personalized for every country." What did you learn there?

    2. GGGina Gotthilf59:22

       I think that this is very controversial because not only is it the case that it, that, you know, when you're working in reg- regulated industries, maybe in, like, more B2B situations, like, looking at specific countries is important. They're, uh, looking at specific countries and- and- and elements of these countries are important, especially when you're looking at, like, I don't know, laws, and if you need, like, l- legal differences and fin- There's a lot of things that make countries different is wha- where I'm trying to get. However, humans are very similar, and we think we're very different. I don't think we're that different. I think that maybe we were brought up differently, and like, so for example, in Brazil we like to dance forro. In Mexico, we like to dance salsa. In some places it's okay to hug and other places it's not okay to hug. Like, yes, there are cultural differences and it's important to love everyone and to adapt, et cetera. But a lot of these differences when it comes to, like, core human behavior are, like, that, like, final, like, 5% of getting people, l- of understanding people. And if, as a startup, whether it be early stage but as a startup, you focus too much on those marginal differences between groups of people, you can run the risk of making big mistakes, which is making too many changes too soon and learning very little and adding c- crazy amounts of code complexity and overall organizational complexity to what you're building. And with Duolingo, because it was a consumer app, because we weren't dealing with a lot of regulatory issues except for, like, China where we had to, like, w- watch out for certain words and phrases, in general, people want to learn a language and people learn a certain way and people use apps a certain way. So, there's a lot of commonality. We just found that by...... treating the world as one. And whenever we deployed, uh, you know, an A/B test or, or tried something new in terms of marketing, we would just look at it as like, "Okay, well this, if this worked here, it will work there, and we should just try it out everywhere." Which meant, like, you know, every time I went and launched Duolingo New Market, I got the same feedback, whatever country it was. "Here it's different. People are different. You don't understand, and what you're doing is not gonna work, and here's why you need to change." And if we had actually listened to that, it would cause all kinds of problems. Like, in our country, we, we think that green is, is a negative color. Like, owls are, like, poorly seen as an animal. Or here, people think that free things are actually of low value. They like things that are expensive. "Oh, people here really like free things." I'm like, "Everyone likes free things." They're like, "Oh, in this country, we..." Whatever. So, yes, I think that countries are different, but it's more important to realize that people like to think they're different and people like to think their countries are different and, like, highlight those because it makes them feel special, u- unique. We're all special and unique in all of our amazing ways, but this is not necessarily it. And when you're trying to be super cautious of your resources, you have to ignore some of that, because then you're able to roll out things once, which is important. But that, but in addition to that, every new A/B test you want to run or every new hypothesis you have, if you now have a version of your app that's different in Mexico, in China, in India, whatever, you're gonna have to run that test and whatever change you have in all of those versions. And then you just start having all of these different versions of the app everywhere. And good luck managing that in terms of code, in terms of processes, in terms of personnel, in terms of cost, and most importantly, in terms of time. Because now every single experiment or, or, or hypothesis is gonna take you way longer to be able to deploy. And time is almost more important than money when you're a startup. So, it's important to keep things super simple, and this was something that we did that actually ended up paying off with few exceptions like India and China.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:12

       That is such cool advice. It reminds me of a quote that I think of that a friend of mine shared once. "Life is maintenance." Anything you add to your life is just something you're gonna have to maintain (laughs) from that point forward. And similar in products. Anytime you add new code, you're gonna have to maintain that code forever. And the more you can not add anything new and not make things really different, the easier everything gets. Like, people forget that. It's like, "Oh, we're just gonna spend a bunch of time to make it awesome in China or Brazil," and then, oh, now you have to maintain that forever, and every feature has to...

    4. GGGina Gotthilf1:03:42

       And it's an 80/20. So, you know, like, uh, just focus on what will get you the 80 and, and not the 20. And then when you have the luxury of focusing on the 20,

17. 1:03:51 – 1:09:26

    Why Gina was drawn to the tech industry in Latin America

    1. GGGina Gotthilf1:03:51

       then you can.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:51

       Okay, so speaking of different cultures and people being different but not that different, you pivoted your career basically to focus on Latin America. First of all, why did you decide to do that? That's a pretty unique path, and what pulled you there?

    3. GGGina Gotthilf1:04:09

       So, Lenny, I don't see it as a pivot, because as we were joking, you know, in the beginning, I, you know, I've been an employee, I was an operator at early-stage startups, and now I'm a founder, and I'm a VC. So I'm still kind of, like, in this little, like, stack of, like, roles that we have in our little tech ecosystem. And in my time working with Tumblr and my agency in Duolingo, I had the, the pleasure of speaking with entrepreneurs all over the world, in part because I, you know, I started getting some media because of the work that I'd been doing at, at, starting at Tumblr. So, a lot of entrepreneurs reached out to me. But also because I became a mentor for an organization called Endeavor, which is global. So, I, I started working with entrepreneurs in Japan and, like, in Brazil on my free time, just mentoring. And I know that the opportunity for growth in terms of tech in, in Latin America is huge, because first of all, the opportunity for growth in tech is huge all over the world, meaning there's just more, just more and more to do. There's more pieces of our lives that can become more efficient or, or better or cheaper by making them s- digital in some way, shape, or form because digital products scale. We are behind when it comes to that in terms of Latin America, and our economy is also not, you know, like, doing super great right now. There's a number of things that make it tougher to succeed in Latin America, but make the outcome of potential success much higher. And i- im- simply put, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, because a lot of what has already been digitized and, and productized in the US and more developed markets just hasn't in Latin America. And every time I took these calls, I would think, like, "Well, you know, this is not very efficient for me to be doing this one-to-one call. It's, I feel very good about myself, like, I feel great. And this entrepreneur learned a lot, but I wish I could do this more at scale." And also, it doesn't seem like this is what's going to help this entrepreneur succeed. Like, maybe it's a little bit of advice, but it's, like... And, and not only that, but I, I had a lot of experiences where I would mention something about growth that I had learned and that would blow the entrepreneur's minds. And I would think, "Why do I know this, but not this entrepreneur who honestly is smarter and more ambitious than me?" Oh, it's because I've had a career in Silicon Valley, it's because I've gotten to work with some of the best people in the world, and I have access to this information just free-flowing in my way all the time. And that's, you know, we take it for granted. So, how can we make this more accessible to, to Latin America's entrepreneurs so that they can have access to that? What else is hard to get access to that could really get in the way? Oh, like access to capital. Okay, so what's, what's the VC in the angel ecosystem looking like, and what can we do that can actually impact that at scale? And then there's other pieces of the ecosystem that are missing. Like, if you're gonna start a company, you have to incorporate it. Sounds super boring, but, like, and Brazil's one of the countries that takes the longest time to incorporate a company in the world. But then if you're gonna get investment, you probably can't, uh, get investment in your Brazil entity, because investors are like, "I don't know anything about Brazil, and sounds like a lot of p- employers get sued by their employees and lose," which is totally true, "and there's all this liability. I'd feel much more comfortable investing in a Delaware company."So then entrepreneurs are like, "Oh, man. Like, now I have to create this entity in Delaware. I'm never... I don't even know where that is." And like, "What's a C Corp? What... you know, what's this other thing?" Like, so there's just stuff that needs to happen for Latin Americans that we don't think about here in Sil- like, quote-unquote "Silicon Valley," talking about it as in the cloud, in the US, in developed markets. But also like, okay, then you're able to raise money, how do you get money down to your country? That's not simple at all. Like, how do you think about like the FX transactions and not get screwed in the process? And who's gonna do it? And so a-anyway, there's like a number of these things that make it super hard. And so, that's the... some of the problems that we wanted to solve. Why it matters to me. I'm Brazilian, I'm Latin American, and I know that I had all of the opportunities in the world. I went to an American school, I got to go to school in the US, I got to work with some of the best tech companies in the world, and 99.9% of people in Latin America will not have these opportunities. And so for me, if I don't use this privilege to somehow make a huge impact where I came from that will last, then I kind of wasted my life. So, that's why this matters so much to me. And I met my co-founder, Bryan Reckworth, at On Deck, if you've heard of On Deck before.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:23

       Mm-hmm.

    5. GGGina Gotthilf1:08:23

       I'm a big fan of-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:24

       I'm wearing On-

    7. GGGina Gotthilf1:08:25

       Yeah.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:25

       ... On Deck socks right now. Yeah, I am.

    9. GGGina Gotthilf1:08:27

       I love their socks, and I just had a conversation-

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:30

        (laughs) Very comfy.

    11. GGGina Gotthilf1:08:30

        ... I just had a conversation with them yesterday.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:32

        Hmm.

    13. GGGina Gotthilf1:08:32

        I really lo- like, I'm a big fan of what they, of what they built. I met Bryan doing On Deck. I actually was thinking of starting (laughs) a completely different company, but also focused on community as we were talking about. Like people want to find connection, and I think that there's a lot of oppor- business opportunity there. Um, but I met my, my co-founder, and he was working with our third co-founder, Yuri, who is actually the guy, we joke he's the guy who builds things. He's the CTO. He actually knows how to build. And started talking about what it is that we can do to make an impact in the speed at which tech startups succeed in Latin America, because we think we can have a huge impact on the GDP of the whole region, uh, developments, job opportunities, and so on and so forth. So, to me, that's what motivates me. It's like figuring out how I can use my time to-

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:14

        Hmm.

    15. GGGina Gotthilf1:09:15

        ... as leverage to make the biggest impact possible in terms of socioeconomic, social and economical mobility for people in the world. And focusing on the part of the world that I came from made the most sense.

18. 1:09:26 – 1:17:20

    What Latitud does

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:26

       So, you referenced this company that you started, Latitude. Maybe just describe briefly what it... just broadly, how do you pitch what Latitude does to folks that might find it useful?

Episode duration: 1:36:48