Duolingo's Journey to Monetization - Deepstash
Duolingo's Journey to Monetization

Duolingo's Journey to Monetization

For many years Duolingo offered a free app, the company running on investor money. After they raised an 100M VC round from Google they realised they have to start making money:

  • Their first iteration was a user generated translation service they offered to CNN & Buzzfeed. It made them so little money it was shut down.
  • They finally landed on ads as a way to incentivise people to get a pro subscription.

The ads were chosen because offering the app for free was a key value proposition. The challenging part was convincing the team to go with it, as most of Duolingo thought ads were inherently evil.

15

625 reads

CURATED FROM

IDEAS CURATED BY

vladimir

Life-long learner. Passionate about leadership, entrepreneurship, philosophy, Buddhism & SF. Founder @deepstash.

Duolingo is the biggest learning app in the world and the founder was cool to share some honest insights.

The idea is part of this collection:

Leading in Product Management

Learn more about education with this collection

How to align stakeholders

Best practices in product management leadership

How to create value together

Related collections

Read & Learn

20x Faster

without
deepstash

with
deepstash

with

deepstash

Personalized microlearning

100+ Learning Journeys

Access to 200,000+ ideas

Access to the mobile app

Unlimited idea saving

Unlimited history

Unlimited listening to ideas

Downloading & offline access

Supercharge your mind with one idea per day

Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.

Email

I agree to receive email updates