Duolingo Delights | Product School HW -

Left Out
Share what company you picked, what opportunity you are focusing on, any designs you
have, and any GTM plans you have. Also present how you picked and validated that opportu-
nity.

Objectives

Culture may even be described simply as

 that which makes life worth living.

-T. S. Eliot (1948 - Notes Toward a Denition of Culture)

Create a platform where Duolingo users can learn more about the culture around the lan-
guage theyre trying to learn and not just the grammar.

This objective will be achieved by inserting mini culture-related tasks throughout the users
learning process.

These culture-related tasks will be calleddelights.

Features

Each language will have delights specically associated with it that a user can get recom-
mended to complete while leveling up in the language.

Each delight is meant to encourage the user to explore more cultural aspects related to the
language through music and video recommendations.
CATEGORIES

Delights come in 3 key categories meant to introduce cultural aspects of the language to the
user:

1. music
2. video
3. food

The reason books and news are not mentioned right now is because the delights aim to be a
break from the heavily text-based platform and are meant to be more visual and hands-on in
nature.

All music and video delights will be PG or PG-13 rated.

DIFFICULTY LEVEL

Each delight itself will have a diculty level associated with it corresponding to CEFR stan-
dards.
SCORING & FEEDBACK

Delights are optional but if the user completes them, some amount of XP should be given.

After user checks that theyve completed them, Duolingo can ask for feedback (Did you enjoy
this delight?) by providing a rating slider with an excited face on one end (I loved it!) and a
neutral face on the other (could be better).
Go To Market Strategy

TOOLS IN USE

Mixpanel: analytic platform that is particularly optimized funnel/work-ow optimization

Amazon SES: scalable, bulk, transactional email-sending service for businesses and de-
velopers
Facebook Custom Audiences: makes it possible to reach people who visit your website
and deliver right message to them on Facebook
Get published to popular blogs (TechCrunch, CNET, Product Hunt, The Guardian,
Forbes)
Create press kit
Post new product on company blog

INBOUND MARKETING

Search engine optimization (on-site optimization, link-building)

Content generation (writing compelling content with relevant keywords)
Social media marketing

EMAIL

List building
 Template design and optimization

DIRECT MARKETING

Paid Search (Google Adwords, etc.)

Facebook advertising
Sponsored Tweets

CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

A/B testing
Landing pages

Opportunity Hypothesis

FLUENT CITY

oers awesome language classes and cultural events that caters to young professionals.
 They run a broad range of cultural events: from Italian Cooking to seminars on How to
Move Abroad. Their courses claims to oer amazing cultural experiences in the form of
events, workshops, classes and trips in food & wine, art & design and language & travel.
For that reason, educational startup Fluent City has just secured a $2.5m USD round to
help breed more polyglots through its unconventional teaching practices and experien-
tial philosophy. The backing will also help the culture school expand its course oerings
as it delves into frontiers outside of languages and into the similarly culturally oriented
themes of art and design, food and drink, and culture and travel. - September 2016

FLUENTU

2.3 million, 200K per year o mobile app

4.5/5 overall score, 1,300+ ratings
MANGOLANGUAGES

earn 5 million annually

Impact
If a Duolingo user gets tired of getting tested on vocabulary and grammar, they have
thesedelights to fall back on that will keep them engaged and get relevant cultural knowl-
edge in a fun way. Delights are meant to be laid-back and optional and are there

Another aspect that physical classrooms try to provide through cultural outings or exercises
will now be integrated into Duolingos platform, thereby appealing more potential and exist-
ing users.

After the feature is released for a while, analytics data can be looked through to see which
delights users enjoy the most for each language, which would Duolingo a leg up when it
comes to understanding what appeals to users when theyre trying to immerse themselves
in a language.
PARTNERSHIPS

This partnership is assuming that recommendations will be more specied and customized
for users.

In order to avoid a lot of tech debt in the recommendation area, Duolingo could partner
with several or a few key companies that specialize in recommendations for food (Yelp,
Google), music (Spotify, YouTube), and video (YouTube, IMBD). In exchange for getting tai-
lored recommendations, Duolingo oers a market of millions of diverse users.
Risks

copyright legalities
 legal issues with recommendations
parents may dislike the idea of having their kids get certain content recommended
to them
how can one verify whether user acted upon delight