The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
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.”
Duolingo hit 1M day-one downloads in China before a government ban
“I went and launched Duolingo in China, and it got downloaded by a million people in the first day, and then the app got blocked, and we, you know, because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do, and then everyone rated the app, like, one…”
Gotthilf: Tech is one-thirtieth of US GDP share in Latin America
“In terms of percentage of GDP that tech occupies compared to other markets, it's very promising. We're at like one third of India, one 10th of China, one 30th of the United States, meaning that, like, Tech companies can grow a lot so that they occupy that spac…”
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: Learning English doubles or triples income potential in developing markets
“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.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo scaled its early user growth with zero marketing budget
“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.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo reached 1M first-day downloads in China before being blocked
“I went and launched Duolingo in China, and it got downloaded by a million people in the first day, and then the app got blocked, and we, you know, because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do, and then everyone rated the app, like, one…”
Gotthilf: Only 3% of people in Brazil speak English
“Three percent of people in Brazil only, you know, and that varies in Latin America speak English.”
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: 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: More than 50% of Duolingo's growth A/B tests failed
“More than 50% of our A-B tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense.”
Duolingo discovered most Indian smartphone users set their phone UI to English
“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.”
Gotthilf: Mike Bloomberg's campaign spent roughly $1M per day on ads
“So, so my, the, my Bloomberg presidential campaign was spending roughly a million dollars a day, which is crazy.”
Gotthilf: Increased a campaign landing page conversion rate from 3% to 12% in a day
“There was one day where like I brought one page from three to 12% conversion rate with statistical significance.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo's India launch mistakenly offered foreign languages instead of English
“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 th…”
Gotthilf: Mission-aligned paywall copy boosted Duolingo's paid conversion rate
“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 to millions of people that actually improved the metric.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo tested the size of Duo owl's tear puddle in emails
“And we 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.”
Gotthilf: Latin America has 660M people and a $6T economy
“There's actually, you know, six hundred sixty million people living across Latin America, and it's an economy of six trillion dollars. And Brazil is a huge market just in terms of sheer size. Over two hundred million people.”