YouSaid · the spoken record

Gina Gotthilf

lines on the record: 109
first: 2023-10-19
most recent: 2023-10-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Look, I haven't met the person who does the TikTok, and they're fantastic. Definitely the one that they merit their work. It's awesome. I don't think it's easy to do, especially on a consistent basis. So I think, yes, finding someone who gets humor, who gets the platform, who's able to produce content quickly, but it 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 ready to take risks that might seem maybe unorthodox in terms of, especially in terms of education, then an opportunity to build a TikTok like that wouldn't exist. So it's both. And I think it goes back to the brand DNA. It goes back to the culture of the company and to the attention, as I said, to”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 an email from their bank, that's funny, ironic, but also very informative, like that's a bank email I'm going to read, you know?”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%, and it wasn't an easy decision, you know, because, of course, a lot of people in the company were really concerned about the brand image and what are people doing and how do we revert this, that kind of thing, right? So it was like a bet that we made where we're just going to like, no, we're going to 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. with latitude i think 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 in terms of Latinos only, but also the tech world making fun of like being a tech founder and like the things that we do that we think are okay and like it's just a lot of that where I think I would call it irreverent 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”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to play along with it.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The owl, the wool is the owl, sorry. The green owl will cry, and we AB tested the size of the puzzle, the size of the puddle, and the number of tears that came out of his eyes in terms of effectiveness. So we used that duo and like, you know, in one of those emails. And then it started, you know, someone picked it up on Twitter and the message, like the passive aggressive message and this like sad duo, they started making their own versions, which was like study now or duo will eat a poison 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 the 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 get that people think this is funny and we're just going to run with it, you know, because being using the dual voice, it gives”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think for Duolingo, we constantly looked at every copy we wrote and asked, could this have been written by other companies? Like, could this have been any other company 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're not used to that style and they might even think it's unprofessional or whatever. You're like, nope, this is a dueling away. 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, the passive aggressive message that I'm sure people have received, which started and then became a meme. And then Duolingo use as well. But like the whole, like, this doesn't seem to be working. We'll stop sending them for now message, which you got after five days of inactivity.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too seriously, and it makes the person receiving this message feel something again, it's about how you make people feel in it. You feel like either you giggle or you're like, wait, what? They just did what, you know, and like, and using that to your benefit, we use that a lot at latitude today as well in terms of especially our newsletter, just self-deprecating humor, and 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're a company and I'm a consumer.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To millions of people, that actually improved the metric. People cared enough to make the payment, you know, so it really can be anywhere. In addition to that, 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 being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it and understands it and 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, but I've helped employ that I've used at latitude in 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that has to be an integral part of your communication, like in the early days, like we tested a lot of stuff on social media, we made again mistakes at one point 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 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 the 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 the PR pitches that we were making in terms of whatever we were able to communicate out into the world and then make sure that 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 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's more. There's more. So I think a brand that stands for something but truly stands for something. That's where the mission piece comes in.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 something like that, that's much more interesting and has played an important role in honestly my work at Tumblr, at Duolingo, not that my Bloomberg presidential campaign, but definitely latitude as well.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and things 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 going to improve their lives and their ability to make a life like a living or it's going to improve companies' ability, whatever it is, like the bigger the bigger idea behind it and focusing on creating something that people like whichever your audience is. It might be a more serious audience than 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 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, this is something I might have said, is like something that Duolingo did really well, but I think it goes hand in hand with mission. But, you know, throwing the mission thing aside, Brandon PR. So the importance of building a lovable brand that really resonates with people and makes people feel something and want to stand behind an idea that's bigger than themselves is not easy to do, but possible and core to being able to increase word of mouth. So at the bottom of this is the mission, which is we, you know, DuLingo, the mission was always to originally to bring free language education to the world, then 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 mostly people can get behind. It doesn't matter if you think Bloomberg or Trump should be president. Do you think everyone should have access to great education? Like most people would.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And so first thing that you can do, 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,”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's so many languages in India. Really, it's crazy how many, how people don't speak the same languages across the whole country, but also it means that people in India are very fluent in so many different languages.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and I'm like, this is just me as 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, and that's so hard to do, especially when you're young, and I think I will add that, especially when you're female as well, or maybe, you know, maybe other minorities, it's just really hard to trust your instinct because you're constantly telling yourself, like, what do I really know anything? Or am I just being lucky? But you have to. And I think that 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 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, you know, as we're building a banking platform at latitude, I was looking at it and I was like, 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 ABC because like I don't match 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From English, and they were all trying to learn English, so they didn't find what they were looking for, they left. There were so many mistakes, you know, and luckily I think we were able to bounce back from most of them in terms of how Duling was doing today.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know we were clever, but people didn't use it and we didn't figure out why we tried making a duolingo for schools platform. We couldn't get it to pick up. I went and launched Duolingo in China and got downloaded by a million people in the first day. And then the app got blocked. And because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do. And then everyone rated the app like one star because it didn't work. And so then we had a really 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 UI you open your app, 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Onto Duolingo and how we would do that, and badges was just pervasive in all of the top games. And so it seemed like a no-brainer. But since we ranked all of our experiments in terms of ROI and return being like how much But it's like easy to talk about a mistake that ended up being a win. So that's why I compared it to the interview thing in the beginning. But, you know, we tried making Duolingo a social app really early on and failed. It was called duels. Duo duels like you could dual, you know.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, a lot of things didn't work out. More than 50% of our AB tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense. I will say, though, that 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 talk so much about all the stuff that worked that it's hard to remember all of those moments that didn't actually work. And the moment, and the thing that 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 spend 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 those apps would potentially overlay.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like questioning them, and that rigor is a culture, a dual lingo that was there from day one before me and continues to be there today.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At mixed panel 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 a hypotheses that allow them to get to the next step. So it's almost like they just like copy-pasted something. You know how I think it is of that? It's like those students who are able to copy their best students 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 going to get it right. And so that, I think, still misses, and 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 the code or outsource the growth. And they're not just looking like hawks at the quality of the data and statistical significance and running hypotheses.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An obsession for the product Again, sounds obvious, but isn't when we look back to products that existed before the internet, before the app store, you built this thing, you made it, and then you tried to convince people to buy it. That was kind of it, right? So like, look, I make it, I made a chair. This beautiful chair. And then you spend all this money trying to get it out into the world and people buy the chair and you like 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 going to win. So 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 use Duolingo. 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't mean to say that I don't believe in paid at all. I think paid has its value. I think 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 argue that if you found your perfect user and where they are, you should go figure out a way to get them organically because if you can really provide them value, they would come and they would stay.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't believe, I think we all know, by at this point, that the most important thing for the growth of anything tech, 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 terms of like, oh, 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 going to 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 going to”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, please keep this a secret. I've only been good. I think I could develop that muscle 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 logic behind it was, listen, we with Duolingo, 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 made in the early days that we thought were going to help really sustain the company, like translations that didn't end up panning out. And then the dualingo English test.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's number two when I was hired by Duolingo as a consultant and as an employee, my mandate was make Duolingo grow. Here's 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 know like this is between you and Milani. I actually am quite bad at paid ads. It's just not like a muscle that I ever developed. I'm only good Huh?”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Survivorship bias. So if I speak to a founder and I can tell that 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. I think it's a capitalist world that we live in and it's fine. But just that drive 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 acts 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”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fix those spots because if they got back, they survived, they were like missing the plane that fell, right? So I got to ride in a plane that survived. So I have a, oh, it's called Survivor Bias, maybe?”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that mission. But I speak to a lot of education founders, you know, ed tech founders. And I'm very biased probably because of this experience. I will say that I had one of those, what's it called, the experiment where 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 should be fixed.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 really hard to measure the importance of just really being obsessed.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obsession for the mission that sounds cliche. I think a lot of founders and started people like to talk about the mission and I get it and I think 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”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very few people really believe that we were going to make it not surprisingly, right? Even though we had this amazing team, et cetera, now it looks almost obvious. It's like, yeah, B2C language learning just seems so niche. And plus education, there's no money in education. Like, you know, it's been stuck for so long. So, you know, and what I kept hearing, you guys, did you hear about Rosetta Stone? Like, this solution already exists. I think that there are a couple things that really made Duolingo success, which are very hard to replicate. Number one.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, myself included. So you can write all of this beautiful messaging that you've thought through, but if people are not going to 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 first, you know, restricting copy a lot and 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 buttons 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 of Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then like a whole explanation of what and then the blood in is like, I don't know, apply, whatever, right? Like it's like apply for what?”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of this is going to 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, the core copy, the message and button need to be above the fold. Or if you're not going to keep the button above the fold, which I still recommend, but if you're not going to do that for whatever reason, then you need to have a very clear indicator that there's something to scroll towards on your page. The second thing applies to both desktop and mobile is people scale.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get approval for like a new version and deploy it, and then be like, okay, we're at 6% now, and then actually improve three to there was one day where like I brought one page from 3 to 12% conversion rate with statistical significance. So that's, I think, the biggest benefit of having those dollar amounts. I think 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, the worlds are oyster. We can do whatever we want and you lose sight a little bit about effectiveness, which is where growth is so magical.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the McLoomer presidential campaign on a landing page, we could see that three times a day, you know, so like four times a day. So I would be able to do something and be like, oh, wow, this has a 3% conversion rate. And then like,”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the step by step in growth and what that experience looks like, and even just the second or third screen in an experience are as, if not more, important than the first one, because that's where you're quote-unquote leaky buckets can happen. So if you're able to 2x the effectiveness of a landing page, you are able to 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 allocated to the actual ad. So I was just there being like, I'm going to do copywriting and design and figure out 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 AB test within two weeks.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to do with those ads and like how we were going to target them and what are the campaigns we're going to run and what's the copy and what's the design. 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's good to be Google. But yes, it's good to be Facebook. I'll share what I think is most useful here and also what my experience ended up being, which is they brought together a lot of great talent from across the US, especially in terms of tech. This is an organization called Hawkfish that they started working with the Mike Bloomberg. 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 had been 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 effectively deploy your resources and talent across an organization. And that sort of takes a little bit of time to happen. And for presidential campaign,”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's important to share. So the Mike Plumber presidential campaign was spending roughly a million dollars a day, which is crazy. And you can do a lot with a million dollars a day.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, cool Yeah. I guess me too. 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. Now I'm a founder and a VC and an angel, and whatever this is.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 recognize how much opportunity we have in front of us. And as a 26-year-old, I definitely thought my career was over. And looking back, it's funny, you know”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing about. And even after that, 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. Try to hand it that, like had a couple of experiences before going to work for the Mike Bloomberg campaign. Working for the Mike Bloomberg 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, if you really look at it. And yeah, latitude seems like it's a really promising path. But there's A days and B days. So it's just a lot of that and just staying resilient and believing in yourself and getting back on the horse when you fall in your face.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a company or an agency to help? And they said, this girl, and I was 26. And so 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, 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 communication, 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I think is important. And even when I started working for Tumblr, I was like, this is it. I made it. This is a really interesting company. This is going to 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 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 finally they also laid me off because they decided to sell Yahoo. And then I had to figure out like what am I going to do? No one's going to 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 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.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 slash C digital marketing agency in New York City because I wanted to live in New York so badly 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 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's just a lot of rockiness in my start that I don't think he would imagine when you see someone up on stage like leading a conference for 5,000 people.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. I was dropping out being like, yes, this is exactly the path. No, I was miserable. I thought there was no path forward. And I finally went back and graduated. 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 because I was always like the overachiever who wanted to do the maximum curriculum and ace all of my classes and do whatever, you know, like 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 work for other people too is that it's not just about doing things that actually matter and like and learning. It's about being able to tell the story and it's about understanding what other people perceive as valuable.”
2023-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source