Gotthelf: Duolingo's data history and iteration speed make UI copycats futile
Gina Gotthelf · Growth vs Efficiency: Can You Have Both? · Jul 21, 2023 · at 12:46
Gina Gotthelf, co-founder of Latitud and former growth VP at Duolingo, discusses how Duolingo built a defensible product moat that competitors could not replicate by merely copying its design.
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“With Duolingo, the product is the moat, and that's the most incredible thing because of what I just said before about the iteration and the iterative practice. Anyone at any particular moment in time, and many did try, could actually go and copy exactly what Duolingo was doing. They could, they, in fact, use the same font. In many cases, they use the same design colors, like the same format. You can do that, but you don't have the data and the team behind it that knows how to use that data, that is constantly learning from every single day of, you know, all of the usage that we're getting and understanding what's leading to every single decision and why we're modifying things in a particular way. That's impossible to catch up to. So at every moment in time, even if you mimic exactly what Duolingo is, there's no way you're going to get to the next day of Duolingo because you don't have all of that history or the knowledge of how to use that history.”
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