The How Things Grow Podcast

Ascent of a language learning phenomenon - with Gina Gotthilf(Duolingo, ex Tumblr)


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In this episode, we talk about how technology & gamification have dramatically eased the process of language learning. We go behind the scenes of the meteoric growth of the language learning app Duolingo. My guest today is Gina Gotthilf, the VP of Growth at Duolingo.Duolingo has had a dramatic growth trajectory over the last few years. It’s gone from 3 million installs to 200 million installs, doing very little paid marketing or advertising. Gina and her team drove much of this growth. Gina is, without doubt, one of the most engaging and smart people I’ve known. I recently introduced a friend to Gina. Immediately after my friend met Gina for coffee, my friend wrote me an email with the subject line ‘Gina is awesome.’ In this episode, Gina talks about how she began her career as a philosophy major with almost no background in the hard sciences. We talk about Gina’s very unconventional strategies for growing Tumblr and then Duolingo - by leveraging press and media coverage. We go into how she transitioned from working on PR and media outreach to working on the product and experimentation - and how she and her team engineered Duolingo so as to make language learning easy. This is not only an incredibly instructive episode, but also a very fun one that I'm excited to bring to you today.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/language-learning-growth-gamification-gina-gotthilf-duolingo-tumblr/

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The How Things Grow PodcastBy Shamanth Rao

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