Let’s take a closer look at the factors that have shaped Duolingo’s growth: There are two main things that helped Duolingo grow a huge, successful company while sticking close to their original vision: they went after a big market, and they meticulously experimented and used their data to inform all of their decisions.

Along the way, Duolingo has built a $700 million company-without charging users a cent. Currently, they have over 25 million monthly active users learning a language right from their web browser or smartphone, each at their own pace. So Duolingo created a free app to help people around the world learn different languages. They wanted to tap into the hundreds of millions of people who wanted to learn a new language but couldn’t afford to shell out a ton of money for expensive software. The Duolingo founders identified a way to go after an even bigger market than Rosetta Stone’s. And based on Google trends, it seems like a lot of the world now agrees with them.

The Duolingo founders thought they had a better idea. Rosetta Stone was only targeting a tiny portion of the language learning market-and charging them a fortune. They’d built a successful public company by going after a huge but fragmented market-worldwide language learners-and recorded over $209 million in annual revenue.īut the founders of language learning app Duolingo thought Rosetta Stone was capturing too small a market and growing based on a bad business model. When the language learning software company Rosetta Stone went public in 2009, they raised $112.5 million on their first day of trading. “We believe true equality is when spending more can’t buy you a better education.” – Duolingo founders

Cost of duolingo