YouSaid · the spoken record

Cem Kansu

lines on the record: 107
first: 2025-06-20
most recent: 2025-06-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“More yield than it does today. That's what I assume will do. I think the other thing that will kind of emerge is these AI first experiences. And what I mean by that is now when people think of AI first, they think of, oh, it's chat GPT. It's a text box or a voice input. What hasn't emerged much is UI creation that is also AI first. So I think you'll see a lot of on the fly UI generation off of what you're doing instead of hard-coded UI that comes into play. So I assume in 20 years this will be a thing that we experience where let me paint a picture. You enter a Duolingo lesson. Duolingo has not built a world where you want to engage in hiking up a mountain. However, that's where your conversation leads. That's where your interest is. UI can generate you hiking up a mountain and then kind of put you in that position. Maybe you teach you the word for mountain while kind of you immersively experience that. I think that type of experience.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 years is so impossible to think about. But here's what I imagine it will be. I don't know what platform it will be on. Assuming we're all still using mobile phones, it will be on mobile. But if the different consumer platform emerges, it will be on that. If we're all wearing VR headsets and living in the metaverse, which I don't think it will happen, it will be on that. But Duolingo itself is going to be incredibly personalized in 20 years, meaning rather than I think following standard patterns, I mean, it's already headed there heavily, but this will compound. That's one. It will teach many more subjects, I think that is just going to happen. It will teach you, hopefully, everything that's good for you, maybe dating by then will be part of the thing we teach you how to date better, or maybe you'll be dating AI agents. Who knows? But it will teach you way more things. And since it's personalized, it will teach all of those things with much higher efficacy. So an hour of time spent will give you much more.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm trying to improve on is quicker decision making. One of my fallbacks is I can debate something for a very long time because I would like to try to like in my head reach super 100% clarity or perfection, but that is a massive mistake because you're slowing your decision making down. I think you want 80% clarity and faster decision making. And you know, weirdly everything comes back to AI, but it does. ChatGPT is actually really good at helping me do that because it can be my sounding partner to bounce back and get to clarity quickly or enough clarity. So I'm actually doing that.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similar to, I've actually changed my mind about the same thing, but I'll pick a different one. I thought this change in how we build product was maybe five to ten years out. 12 months ago, if you had asked me like, oh, like, you know, how do you think the PM job will change? I'm like, well, maybe in 10 years we'll be using more AI tools. I think it will get there slowly would be my answer. Honestly now, probably in 12 to 24 months, the job of a PM will look entirely different. So I think we're talking about five years because that feels safe. But honestly, my guess now, or what I've changed my mind on is it's going to be in two years is my guess.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest change will be how they do product is going to be significantly different than today and the tools they use will be obviously a lot more AI based. They will have to learn basically how to be a lot more independent rather than reliant on other functions to build the thing they have a vision for, meaning they will be independently coming up with prototypes themselves rather than today they rely on machines that involve a lot of other humans to even like visualize an idea and then turn into prototype. AI tools will be the main thing they use to do that.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The products I love are the ones I use a lot. So I'll mention two, and they are everyone uses these products a lot. One of them is I'm an Apple fanboy, iOS itself is a beautiful piece of software that is so well designed, so sleek, amazing animations, attention to detail, next level. Another product I love is Spotify, amazingly built product, obviously very successful business on top, but I think they also take care and attention detail is high. I'll mention a third one, which is we actually were chatting about this, is bump from Amo. It's just a high craft, incredibly creative app. So those are the apps when I use them, I get ideas for me to think about for Duolingo.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the one I would do is physics because, you know, as surprising as that might sound, it's very similar to math, meaning we can kind of apply a lot of the stuff we're doing on math and we're doing a lot of product development for teaching math. We can apply it to physics. I'm not sure if it's the largest market or it's certainly not the sexiest market. It's probably the nerdiest thing we can teach. But it's certainly we have a competency or we're building the competence for math that we can apply to physics.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Majority of our users are doing languages. Chess is very new, like counted as kind of zero still. It just rolled out like a few days ago. But math and music are a small percent of our business.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dating is actually not the direction I would go first, but I would love to go in a way where we build better features that you can do with others. So for example, gifting is one area people know that I'm passionate about. So for example, if I can send you more virtual items when you do something well, you can send something back. We build this reciprocity. Imagine I send you a street freeze. You send me a thank you back. When you're in need, I send you another one. We can kind of create more of a positive gifting environment. That would be awesome. But social is one of those hard things where right now, not a lot of our users have friends. So when you build these features that are not easy to get right, they don't like kind of hit massive adoption because not everyone has friends, but it's the chicken and egg. We don't have a lot of features. That's why people don't add friends as much. So we have to invest in both.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like to make Duolingo way more social. And I don't think there's any blocker or anyone against it. I think we need to figure out a way forward and the best way to do that. And then staff teams accordingly to solve that problem. So right now, Duolingo has social features. So I can add you as a friend. If you reach a certain streak, I can congratulate you. You can do it back. So we have this social layer, which is very congratulatory and nice. We can do a friend quest together. We can do friend streaks. So it's a lot about collaboration and congratulations to achievements. That said, I mean, I think this is kind of why I loved your dating idea. It builds on the social potential of Duolingo. Duolingo today taps into this reality.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not embarrassed. A lot of users found it embarrassing to stumble when there's a human looking at them on video. That was problem number one. Problem number two is you have no quality control. So you can't run an A-B test and say, hey, let's do the opener in English. I mean, you do, but then you can't control if the human deliverate experience is what you thought it would be. So we found it kind of impossible to operate a human-based product experience. It's not impossible. It's very hard. And around that time, GPT-3 came out and we're like, oh, hold on. We can solve this. So we pivoted away from that.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we saw Exactly. We have solved the turing problem, which is the biggest problem is scheduling and it's like expensive, et cetera. We made it part of a subscription so you could do unlimited calls on demand. Very cool idea. And also users have been asking us to do this for years. Like we're like, okay, finally we figured out how to do it. There was two massive problems in hindsight now we know One is it is super scary to actually press that button and talk to a human immediately in the language you're not proficient in, even though you think you want it, what we've seen when we observe users doing it, they press up and they're like, okay, I'm ready. I'm going to do it. And then the person would dial in, start speaking Spanish, and then they'd be like, I don't hang up, go away. Is what would happen to most users that ever tried it. So it was a scary experience to be thrown in. And that's why AI is way better for this, because you can stumble, you can talk shitty Spanish.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a big one now in hindsight. It feels like, oh my God, why did we do that? So right now we're talking about how video call and Lily are our speaking feature. There was a short-lived moment where we had a high tier subscription, which was basically an Uber for a Spanish tutor. So you could press a button to speak Spanish to a Spanish speaker immediately. So rather than scheduling, you could press so we figured out how to connect you immediately with someone online. And it would be like a two, three minute condensed conversation. Honestly, at the idea, I was like, oh, this is great.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, there's no investment. That doesn't mean we won't invest again in the future, but today we've chosen not to. It's a complicated problem”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's still usage, it's not zero usage. Some people find use out of it, but it's like thinking about the market of classrooms teaching languages, it's a very small.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can still use it. Like, the school's dashboard exists. If you'd like to try it out, it exists, it's there, it's just hasn't found the adoption we want it to because it doesn't fit the classroom very well. But we worked on it for, I don't know, three to five years maybe.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, we worked on schools. By the way, this product still exists. It's just not a product market. It doesn't have product market fit.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's another one. I think at the VC level, this makes sense. But when you get into the product level, it doesn't. Which is why is Duolingo not catering to language teaching in the classroom? Like, why does Duolingo not have a product that fits into the classroom? So we wanted to solve that. So we tried to come up with a version of our product that teachers could assign, teach certain parts of a curriculum and assign homework through the Duolingo interface, and then they could track if assignments are being done, etc. The problem with this is every language teacher wants to teach a different way, and the Duolingo curriculum does not fit any of it. So you end up having to customize how people should go through Duolingo, and that's not the product we have. So even if teachers could assign assignments, that doesn't match the textbooks they're working on in the French classroom. Anyway, it didn't work.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dead, we were investing in various projects that now, in hindsight, we shouldn't have, like, for example, we were trying to build a schools dashboard for teachers to use. And that was a complete different product problem. That is a very hard problem to solve. Instead of doing that, we should have probably done math and music and chess way earlier.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about the obvious one, so I'll start with that, which is we didn't monetize in 2014. We started monetizing kind of two years later than we could. So I think that's one. We talked about it. We don't need to unpack it. I also think this is in hindsight easier to say, we waited too long to apply the Duolingo magic to new subjects, meaning we first launched a subject that is not language, that was math and then music followed fairly quickly, but math, we first started working on math three years ago. We didn't have to wait that long. Like we kind of had the duolingo mechanics in place. We could have honestly started our journey in figuring out other subjects earlier. In hindsight, this is very easy to say, but this is a long journey to figure out product market fit for new subjects. However, we had the competency. We kind of knew eventually we would do something like this.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do love the data idea. I think it is the riskiest one because what could go wrong, but just building a dating platform. However, there's already signs that people date on Duolingo. So the best way to build product is capture latent demand that you just can't do on your product today. We have couples that got married because they meant competing on a leaderboard and then they found each other on Facebook and got married. This behavior is already happening. So it's not out of the question for us to figure out, well, how can we do matching better?”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate the school one, if I'm being honest, because building a physical business seems like that's not our strength. I like the movie idea. I love the date idea. That's how I would pick.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's different and it doesn't feel like a company is sending you a thing. It's a human would send you a thing that way.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. While emoji breaks up pattern is why I think it works. So a lot of notifications suffer from, they fall into a pattern and now a sea of everyone sends so many notifications that like it all blends in. So you want to do something that is more interesting than the 85 other apps sending you notifications a day. Emoji is one way to break pattern. The other thing we do is kind of go full unhinged on notifications. So we write them from Duo's voice and we make it sound like Duo is basically screaming at you or to do your not always screaming sometimes sending you a subtle message, but it's like a personalized message rather than Duolingo saying do your Spanish lesson or practice now. That kind of doesn't go very far. But if Duo says, yo, what's up? Are you doing Spanish today and looks like almost a message from Duo, that triggers you to be like, okay, yeah, I'll respond to Duo rather than this app that is sending me sanitized notifications.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've tested many different times, but the 23 and a half hour works way better for retention, because turns out humans do lessons if you're a morning person you do in the morning. And if we schedule it almost 30 minutes before you're ready to do your morning lesson, you're very likely to do a dual-lingo lesson at the same time. So based on your behavior, we timed the next notification. That has done really well for retention. So when you get into like this type of experimentation of like, how do we actually figure out how to make it better for each of our users, there's a lot you can do.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can get incredibly complicated, and this was kind of news to me over my career, incredibly complicated with the limited real estate and copy you write in a tiny push notification. For example, timing is a key factor. Content is a key factor. Personalization of that content is a key factor. Emoji usage is a key factor that moves metric. So if you get into the full details of really optimizing percent of views, which we have, you can do a lot with it. And every year we're like, okay, we invested a lot. Are you going to keep improving? There's a lot to do on improving push notifications. I'll give you one insight that was kind of like tested in and out, and then this turns out to be the winner. We schedule, so let's say you did your dualing lesson today at 1 p.m. We schedule a notification almost exactly at 23.5 hours later from that time. And we've tested many different timing, and the notification will remind you to practice your Spanish because you just did a Spanish list.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly So that's the second one. Third is push notifications, actually. For every app, it is an incredible mechanic that you have to figure out how to make amazing. Still, maybe 10 years ago it was his email, it was a heavy channel. Email is a debt channel for most products at this point. Debt is maybe an overstatement. Like, we obviously invest a good amount of time in making our emails.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some people are like, I don't want to compete, but a lot of users, when you see your name, you're like, I would rather move to the top, not to the bottom. I'm one of them for sure.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The details matter a lot, so every tiny thing that might not even make sense to talk out loud, but when you see it that made the street more exciting has helped improve retention actually. So the streak is this incredibly important mechanic that instills daily habit, helps you learn a language or learn a subject. That is one of the biggest things for retention. I would say second as a feature it was leaderboards. Turns out, no surprise in hindsight, but if you see your name ranked on a leaderboard, there is this human tendency to be not be at the bottom of that leaderboard, but instead move towards the top. So a lot of our learners, even though when they came to Duolinga, they didn't come to compete in French. We have a leaderboard feature where you see your name among a cohort of similar learners. You want to rise to the top. A lot of users want to, at least. So that drives a lot of usage, a lot of retention.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something I've thought about a lot. So one of them is the streak. No surprise. Having the streak and making the streak exciting so when you finish your first lesson, there's this flame animation that lights up. There's a haptic, there's a sound. We make the streak like one of the most important things on Duolingo.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do, however, the difference is a little hard to parse on its causation versus correlation. Do they retain better because they are a subscriber or they were likely to retain because they were more engaged and that's why they decided to subscribe? It's hard to parse in the data. But if you look at just pure users who choose to subscribe their retention and users who choose not to subscribe retention is much higher.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. And not knowing Candy Crush's metrics myself at all, but when tend to see is if you have reached a 30-day streak, so you've built up a 30-day streak, your retention is very close to 100%. It's not 100%, but it's very high because you've built a habit. Like it's not crazy because you've done it for 30 days without breaking your streak. You have built a habit. So you're very likely to continue with that habit. But if you look at retention of users who are streak less than seven days, it's way lower because they actually haven't built a habit. Or maybe they're unsure of doing or they're just playing with it one way or another they haven't built a habit.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is good? I think it's going to really depend on your product. There's no easy benchmark you can put. And also it really depends on what your user base looks like. If it's all new users, you have a different metric than if you have a bunch of users that are already settled users, I'm going to call them like Duolingo, where they've already been using for like three years or above.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High bar exactly with mobile products, that's why it's so important because you have many different things that can steal your time on your moth. You don't, maybe. I didn't have anything. You're like, I don't know what apps are. I don't know what apps are.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct Retention. Retention is everything when you think about building product because it is the best metric to distill down if people are finding value or liking a feature or a new app, whatever it is. What is your daily retention? I mean, if it's a daily app, daily retention, if it's a weekly app, you look at weekly retention. For us, everything we build is around daily usage. So it is daily retention. So if we say, for example, chess, we just launched chess. The thing we're looking at day in, day out is what is the daily retention? Because if it's really high, well, it's going to compound to high DAUs. We know it's going to. For example, you could look at DAUs, but DAU has many inputs that are muddying the...”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two metrics that drive the business. So if you really squint at a business like Duolingo, you have to look at two metrics. One of them is daily active users. And the second one is revenue. But if you just want to spreadsheet a business, you have to look at DAUs and revenue. But I think for me, what matters is retention.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's very annoying. Like we talked about with as the same way, tasteful monetization really matters. It builds user trust and I think user trust goes a long way for the business because you tell your friends they download the app.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people do really aggressive things, and that ends up hurting the experience. So, for example, Street Freeze is so extra, right? We're talking about it because it's like, if you don't buy it, you're doing your experience is going to be exactly the same, but it's this vanity metric that you can choose to freeze. And if you don't, nothing really changes. It's all up to you. Like your French is going to be the same either way. I think what sometimes apps do is they make really core functionality and in-app purchase. And I think then you start killing the fun, the retention producing elements of your app. So imagine if Duolingo was every new unit of a lesson was in that purchase. It was like a dollar per unit, you would get pretty sick of it pretty quickly. It's like buying a chapter of a book for a dollar every time. You could do it. That's a monetization model, but it's a pretty stupid and bad one. So I think you want to find things that people find joy in buying that doesn't hurt the freezer experience.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I think the core experience, of course, matters a lot. Addictive sounds like the bad version of this, but habit building, like you want to build good habits. And the reason we use that term is like, if you want to learn a language, you have to practice, if you want to be fluent thousands of hours. And to get to thousands of hours, you need a daily habit. You can't like binge your way to fluency. So that's why everything at Duolingo is built around a daily habit. Once you've done an experience that people want to use daily, you have good daily retention. then you kind of layer on these benefits that are kind of extra like streak and a streak freeze you don't need it but it is really core to your daily habit and then freezes this extra benefit that you can monetize that's how we've thought about it”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, we really don't ask that many questions and we're lenient. But yeah, so there's like time switches and there's like, I was on a mountain with no connection. What was I supposed to do? And of course I understand.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely get it. And we fixed those. So, like, if you actually reach out to customer support and they were like, I have this legitimate reason we're like lenient. We're like, of course. Like, we'll fix your streak.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High volume request. I think that most of the tutorials are time zone switches. And honestly, this has happened to me. So I actually have full empathy for this, where I actually did my lesson, but the reason is I flew to Australia. I was on the plane for 14 hours. And when I landed, the day had already moved forward. So I lost my streak.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We give gems and you can either buy gems or earn gems, and you can spend those gems in virtual features. So you can, for example, one of the most popular features is a streak freeze. So streak, as you might know, is a very popular feature. People take pride in their streak. They don't want to lose it. But if for one reason or other, you can't do Duolingo that day. You can use a streak freeze. This is a very valuable item. People love it. And if you earn gems, you can spend your earned gems on it. If you're out of gems, you can buy gems to purchase a streak freeze. Items like that exist, and that's part of our gem economy.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am curious what you cut and what you keep. So I was going to end up really being interesting. It's going to be fun. A surprise for you and me.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in app purchases for us was very similar to how games have designed in app purchase mechanics. So we have a virtual currency. It's called Gems. It's not named after me. It's the actual diamond gems.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, that's not the product we're building. We're not building just for entertainment, but we're also not building just to educate and ignoring the fun element of it. So that's why it's like right in the middle.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is how we see it, but what we eventually compete for is your screen time. So everything that takes up your screen time that might be social media, that might be gaming, that might be streaming, whatever it is, at the end is what Duolingo competes for.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, neither is the reality. We have maybe in somewhat of an identity crisis is also the reality. We don't identify as an education company, but we also don't identify as a game or entertainment. So we're kind of in our weird own league and own market that we've created. The reality is what we compete for, if you're like, okay, but what are you? Who do you compete with? We eventually compete for screen time. We would like to make your screen time very useful for you to learn something and get better. The reason we don't fit into education very much is if you look at the education space, honestly, this is a bit of a hot take, but it's all boring ass products. So I think we would like to not be a boring ass product. As you can see, we try to do everything super fun. And I think if you say, well, you guys do a lot of fun, then are you a game? Well, we're not a game either. We also want to teach you something. So we're kind of in this zone league of our own.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why not? Exactly. We would love to become the Disney of the next generation. I think that is hard for sure, but that would be awesome.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do have this revenue line, but it's incredibly small today. But I think it'll be way bigger merchandising. We have a store. You can buy Duolingo merch. Our most selling item is the Duo plushie. It's like a very funny plushie of duo. I think we are one of those brands where our characters are quite, duo is quite recognizable at this point, and we're trying to build more IP around our characters. There's a lot we can do on creating better merch and expanding our merch offering.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source