The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gotthilf: PR was the primary growth lever for Tumblr LatAm and Duolingo
“And it honestly was the most important lever that helped Tumblr grow in Latin America and that helped Duolingo grow.”
Gotthilf: Statistically significant failed experiments reveal high-leverage user moments
“If you run an experiment with statistical significance and it harmed your product, that means that you found a moment that really matters to users. And if you found a moment that really matters to users, you can manipulate it in multiple ways for positive and …”
Gotthilf: Educational apps inherently struggle with user retention compared to games
“Games get retention, right? And education apps do not get retention, right?”
Gotthilf: Badges became Duolingo's single most effective growth experiment
“It ended up being the most effective thing that we did and collected collection of experiments where we were, we could impact not just growth numbers, but every single metric across the company, like monetization, et cetera.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo's government partnership in Colombia failed to generate real user adoption
“I worked with the Colombian government, the Mintic, which is the ministry of technology there to get Duolingo into public schools. You would think, wow, Gina, that's amazing. You got Duolingo into public schools. You've got the whole population. No, it actuall…”
Gotthilf: Most non-top journalists copy-paste press releases due to workload pressure
“I would say that most journalists, not at the top publications, but you would be surprised with most journalists. Tend to be fairly lazy. And I don't fault journalists. They have way too many things to do. They're trying to click, you know, get clicks. They ar…”
Gotthilf: Latitud grew by giving accepted founders pre-written humble-brag copy
“With latitude, one of our biggest growth levers was when we started admitting startup founders, so we work with early stage startup founders in Latin America and we started admitting them, we created this token that said like, You know, I am, I was selected to…”
Gotthilf: Facebook paid ads are a palliative, addictive growth tactic
“I think this one died a death from day one, but people don't realize it is paid marketing and especially like paid ads on Facebook. Unless you're really smart about how you're doing it and you know exactly like, you know, how you're going to scale this over ti…”
Gotthilf: Hiring senior growth leaders too early harms early-stage startups
“So when you're, so I think that's number one, the number two, I would say, especially for early stage is, and it's something I will disagree with some other guests you've had on your podcast is hiring a leader too soon, because when you hire a leader, they mig…”
Gotthilf: Leaders at successful early-stage startups rarely know what they are doing
“One of the things I learned at Tumblr that I think a lot of people in early stage startups that succeed learn is that no one knows what they're doing at most points in time in life and in business.”
Gotthilf: Tumblr failed to pay her for six months over wire issues
“I wasn't paid at Tumblr for six months, because they couldn't figure that out, and I was like, I was living with my parents, like in my childhood bedroom at the time when I was 25, and like working out of like my childhood bed, literally.”
Gotthilf: Early-stage startups cannot easily run statistically significant tests
“It's really hard really early on in early stage startups, which is where I'm focusing my time now, because you don't have enough people for statistical significance.”
Gotthilf: Retention equals product-market fit and determines startup success
“Retention is everything. To me, retention is almost like product market fit. If you have retention, it means that people actually like the thing that you made, and it's actually useful for them. And that determines whether something's going to succeed or is no…”
Gotthilf: Daily Active Users was always Duolingo's sole North Star metric
“The north star metric for Duolingo at all times was daily active users. That's it. DAU.”
Gotthilf: Product builders are often unable to tell their own product's story
“And often when you are the person who built the thing, you're not the person who can actually tell the story about why it's important.”
Gotthilf: Startups should pitch least important press targets first to iterate
“Make a list of all of this PR sources that you might want to be featured on and start with the least important ones when you're pitching. Because as you pitch, you need to learn what's working and what's not working.”
Gotthilf: Teasing short pitches builds rapport that increases journalist response rates
“If the person has responded to you once, now they have a relationship with you, even if it's a very marginal relationship, but before they had zero relationship to you. So it's very easy to ignore an email that you've never responded to before, but if you've r…”
Gotthilf: Coordinated press embargoes create a surround-sound effect for startups
“Embargo means that you tell journalists they can only publish something at a specific time on a specific date. And if you're able to do that, then you can get all of the new sources to publish something at the same time. And that's magical because you create a…”
Gotthilf: Duolingo rejected paywalled press exclusives to maximize broad reach
“We did not give exclusives, especially to publications that had a paywall, because that would really limit our breadth, and we were going for breadth.”
Gotthilf: Leverage early TechCrunch press coverage to convince other journalists to publish
“If you're able to get something on TechCrunch, even if it wasn't your, you know, core consumer possibility, then very quickly tell other publications that are more, that feel more insecure than TechCrunch, like editors and journalists, and the link to TechCrun…”
Gotthilf: Dictating coverage to journalists is like micromanaging software engineers
“You can't have control and tell a journalist, I want you to write this or that, because I actually will rub them in an incredibly the wrong way, much like when you're working with an engineer and you tell them like, here's the solution I want you to build vers…”
Gotthilf: Duolingo measured PR success directly using daily active users
“So for Duolingo, it was DAUs. Like if we were actually able to get new users that became active users, that was our success metric, because then we knew that we were reaching the right audience and that, you know, the story that was told was the story that we …”
Gotthilf: PR is reaching anyone with a large audience, not just journalists
“I think when people think about PR, they think about journalists and they think about like big media. But to me, PR is reaching anyone who has a big audience and getting them to share that with their big audience.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo relied on shared oral knowledge rather than written brand docs
“Yeah, I didn't, with Duolingo, we never wrote it down on a Google Doc. It's just, it was like shared knowledge. I worked very closely with Luis Van An, the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo in the early days, and so I just heard him tell the story over and over, …”
Gotthilf: Personally wrote 100+ press emails per Duolingo global launch
“When I was doing press for Duolingo and we were doing these global launches, I was personally writing over a hundred emails at a time, like, to get, like, and it had to be within a window of time because this launch was coming up.”