Revealed for the first time: What did Duolingo do to trap 500 million people?

In the digital age, language learning app Duolingo has won the favor of more than 500 million users worldwide with its unique gamification learning method and social-first strategy. This article will reveal how Duolingo leverages large traffic with a small budget and how it creates a unique "crazy feeling" in different markets around the world, thus becoming an indispensable part of users' lives.

This year, I believe everyone has a very similar feeling, that is, the market is very difficult to operate. Obviously, the investment is increasing, but the growth is decreasing.

However, in such an uncertain environment, many brands that are thriving and making steady progress have emerged in the market. For example, Duolingo, a foreign language learning app that has exploded in popularity in China and has been downloaded more than 500 million times worldwide, is a popular app this year.

As of the second quarter of this year, Duolingo has 104 million monthly active users and 34.1 million daily active users. And about 7 million daily active users have been using Duolingo every day for a year or more.

Everyone says that it is difficult to increase user growth, and it is even more difficult to make users dependent on a brand. How does Duolingo do it?

On September 11, Daofa Research Institute invited Xiang Haina, the Asia Pacific Marketing Director of Duolingo, to give a keynote speech entitled "First Reveal: What did Duolingo do to trap 500 million people?"

In this sharing session, Haina not only generously disclosed Duolingo's growth secret - leveraging a social-first strategy to leverage large traffic with a small budget, but also combined with a large number of first-hand cases to reveal for the first time how Duolingo has flourished around the world through gamified product design and social media gameplay tailored to local conditions!

1. What is Duolingo?

Hello everyone, I am Haina, Duolingo’s Marketing Director for Asia Pacific.

Before I start, let me give you a brief introduction. Duolingo is a foreign language learning app with 500 million users worldwide. It now has more than 34 million daily active users and more than 100 million monthly active users.

We have been ranked number one on the foreign language learning app rankings in many markets around the world for many years, so much so that when people talk about learning a foreign language, they think of Duolingo.

What is the hardest thing about learning a language? I believe everyone can agree that it is easy to start but hard to stick with it. So how can we make users stick with it and integrate language learning into their daily habits?

First, through product design, Duolingo makes learning a language very fun.

You can find that when you study in Duolingo, there is no teacher to teach you. But it is like playing a level-breaking game, and you can feel refreshed every time you solve a problem. You may be very tired today, but as long as you come to Duolingo, you will be affirmed, and you will gradually accumulate confidence by solving problems and solving problems day by day.

Second, Duolingo offers a wide variety of languages ​​for learning.

In addition to English, we also support learning of more than 40 languages, including Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, etc. In addition, many friends like our first dialect course: learning Cantonese from Mandarin. We teach the words "shrimp dumplings" and "rice rolls" right from the start. Not only will you get hungrier the more you learn, but you can also apply what you learn.

Third, how can we make it easy for everyone to stick with it? The answer is free.

Whether you pay or not, you can get equal and high-quality learning resources in Duolingo. Because we have 500 million funnel users, we can also provide different functions for everyone through membership subscription payment, thereby earning revenue.

2. Treat users as flesh and blood people

After briefly introducing Duolingo's product ideas, you will have a basic understanding of us. Next, I would like to focus on sharing Duolingo's marketing methodology.

Because I know that many brands have very limited budgets for advertising when doing marketing. So how can we leverage large traffic with a small budget?

Duolingo has achieved a huge traffic leverage through a social-first marketing strategy, which can provide a reference for everyone.

The core idea of ​​all our marketing is to urge users to check in at all costs.

But why are users so willing to pay? Back to what I just said, the hardest part of learning is persistence. We will use various ways of playing with memes to make everyone think it is fun.

First of all, the character design of our product is very interesting.

Everyone is very familiar with the green owl on the left, which is called Duoer. His character traits are "shameless" and "making jokes". He will cry, make a fuss, and even threaten to commit suicide to urge you to study.

Duoer

The girl on the right is called Zhajie. Actually, her name comes from her Chinese fans. Because she has a very arrogant personality, whether you answer the question correctly or incorrectly, she will roll her eyes at you. So many of our users said, "I am particularly afraid that Zhajie will look down on me."

Everyone will find that the characters of Duoer and Zhajie form a very sharp contrast, which naturally attracts various different fan groups.

Sister

At the same time, we have assigned everyone check-in tasks through gamification design. Just look at our rankings and you will know how competitive our users are. In order to be the top one or two on the list today, users have spent a lot of time and energy on Duolingo to get on the list and learn.

There is another little trick that our users are well aware of, which is that we make all the learning reminders very interesting.

Take, for example, SMS reminders.

Depending on the user's check-in status, our SMS reminders will give different emotional feedback. For example, if you didn't check in on the first day, he will say to you, "I miss you so much, do you want to practice Japanese today?" If you haven't checked in for several days, he will say, "You haven't studied Japanese for 4 days, what do you want? Forget it, I don't want to care about you." What if you still don't come back? He may pretend to be disgusted and say, "I send you messages every day, but you ignore me. If you don't start studying, I will never care about you again!"

In fact, when we send reminders, we treat users as flesh-and-blood people. And we are also very willing to establish an emotional connection with users.

In addition to SMS reminders, we have designed a variety of widgets.

The widget will change in various ways depending on your clocking in. For example, if you haven’t clocked in by 10pm, it will look aggrieved, but if you have completed the clocking in, it will become very happy.

In order to stand out from the crowd of apps, we occasionally transform to attract attention. Our users also joke, "Why is Duo'er so ugly? Did you catch the flu recently?"

Through our product design, you will find that our users can play with us. After everyone gets the meme of Duolingo's desperate urging to learn, they even start to actively create memes for us on social media.

In my opinion, when a user is able to get you, play with you, and actively produce content for you, it means that there is a strong resonance and emotional dependence between you and him.

So what are the key points of our social priority? I think there are three specific points:

First, we look for inspiration from our users.

We have a saying internally: "The next hit is in the comments section."

For example, we saw a user leave us a message: "Hey, your arrogant sister is very outrageous. Why is your mouth crooked and you keep rolling your eyes?" Therefore, we made a very funny Douyin video with the arrogant and cool image of the arrogant sister, which was well received by everyone. Many users commented below, "I am really afraid of her. Every time I answer her questions, I am very careful, for fear that if I answer incorrectly, she will roll her eyes again."

Secondly, and what I want to share and emphasize with you, the path to achieving social priority is explosive attributes + shareability.

Because we create content, we often fall into a state of self-satisfaction. We think it is very funny, but when others see this content, they don’t even understand what it means.

So we set an evaluation standard: Am I willing to share this content I created with my friends and family? Will my friends and family forward it after seeing it? We believe that only when users get it and forward it a second time can we create a hit.

Third, we personify creativity.

Whether it is Duoer or Zhajie, we hope to make them into flesh-and-blood people with their own personalities. Next, I will use many examples to illustrate how we present Duoer and Zhajie in a three-dimensional way.

3. Create different “crazy feelings” in the global market

As a global brand, Duolingo is often asked: How did you become so popular around the world? In a nutshell, we create different "crazy feelings" in different markets.

First, let’s take a look at a marketing case we did in the United States.

As we all know, the Super Bowl (the annual championship game of the NFL) is like the Spring Festival Gala in the United States. But the budget for the American Spring Festival Gala is very high. We can't afford the high advertising costs, so we started to think about how to quickly catch the user's attention within the limited attention span?

We found that users particularly like Duoer's hip-shaped joke - Duoer has a hip-shaped buttocks, and his other face grows out of his hip-shaped buttocks. In the US market, many girls will do hip-enlargement exercises. So we built a peach hip for Duoer based on the hip-shaped joke.

After creating a social media video around the butt-lifting meme, we bought a five-second spot during the Super Bowl. But in just five seconds, it generated a lot of discussion on social media.

When you watch this ad, you will also receive a reminder from the APP: it's time to do your duolingo. It's time to come back and study and check in, don't just watch this competition.

Let me share with you another example we did in Germany.

We found that young people in Germany love to go clubbing. Before everyone goes in to go clubbing, the staff will check their ID cards.

We came up with an idea: What if you want to attend Duoer's party? We will check your check-in streak. Only if you have completed today's check-in can you join our party. So after we posted this video, everyone was commenting enthusiastically.

Another very interesting example is an event we did in Japan this year.

As we all know, Duolingo's persuasion to study and chasing you to check in at all costs are talked about by fans. In Japan, we found a group of parkour athletes. If you don't check in with Duolingo, they will chase you and never let you go. After this activity, the persuasion to study has become very concrete.

To summarize the above three examples, Duolingo, when carrying out activities in different markets, not only adheres to the spiritual core of the brand and urges everyone to check in and learn at all costs, but also combines local culture to formulate corresponding social marketing strategies.

4. Little Green Bird in China: From Obscurity to Entertainment Star

Duolingo will not use one set of strategies to conquer all markets around the world. We have an underlying methodology, which combines "what local young people like" and "what are the latest hot topics" to create popular content and fun activities.

So, how did our little green bird become so popular in China?

When I first joined Duolingo 5 years ago, few people knew what it was, and the team could only look for partners in obscurity. But now, a large number of partners come to us every week and hope to collaborate with us. For example, we have done some very interesting IP collaborations with DingTalk, Snow King, and Taobao.

At this year's GQ Fashion Festival, Duoer dressed up as Chunli to walk the red carpet and shoot blockbusters, ushering in her "peak of bird life". Many of our friends joked that Duoer, as the only "bird", even had a higher click-through rate and eye-catching rate than the stars.

In addition to participating in offline activities, we also often create memes on Xiaohongshu. For example, during the Dragon Boat Festival this year, we made Duoer into a zongzi, which has received 31,000 likes on Xiaohongshu.

In addition, we have also integrated into China's subculture circles. Such insights actually come from our careful observation of what kind of users are, they like animation, Korean wave, travel, etc. Because users like it, we naturally do everything we can to enter these circles and let Duoer closely integrate with these circles.

After doing various ways to encourage students to check in, we found that Duolingo has become an indispensable part of users' lives. We no longer need to urge them, as they have integrated the idea of ​​checking in into their lives. As the saying goes, if you stick to something for 28 days, it will be hard to stop. For example, on Duolingo, we saw a user who kept checking in while receiving an IV drip in the hospital.

Therefore, through this series of funny, meme-filled, and throwaway gameplay, we have integrated the act of checking in on Duolingo into everyone's blood.

Looking back, when we were building the brand, we didn’t want to be just another brand, but we were trying to be an anti-brand. Duolingo is such a brand—it is not cold, but a flesh-and-blood image that makes you smile when you think of it.

Author | Xia Xia This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Knife Skills Research Institute], WeChat public account: [Knife Skills Research Institute], original/authorized to be published in Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.