Puri: Ambient language plugins like Toucan beat dedicated apps like Duolingo
Shaan Puri · MFM #163: How Chrome Plugins Are Making Millions & How A Studying App is Going Viral · Mar 24, 2021 · at 10:03
Shaan Puri analyzes the consumer psychology and UX advantages behind Toucan, a language-learning Chrome extension.
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“The biggest friction is not that it's that hard to learn a language. It's hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book or download the app, open the app and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. It doesn't sound that hard, but in practice it's like, it's a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what Toucan is doing is You don't have to make it a separate thing. It's like, you're already just browsing the internet. So why don't we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you're visiting? So you're not having, you don't have to go set to start a separate activity to learn the language. You'll learn the language in bits and pieces while you're browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest.”
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