Hannah Parvaz: The Full Duolingo Funnel Breakdown

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Hannah Parvaz

Hey, I'm Hannah Parvez and I'm the founder of aperture.

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Steve Cerasoli

Welcome to fix that funnel. And today I am here with an award winning growth expert and the founder of aperture. Hannah Bavas. Hannah, thank you so much for being with us today.

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Hannah Parvaz

Thank you so much for having me. It's really lovely to be here with you, Steve.

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Steve Cerasoli

And I think we could start off by kind of getting to know, like, how did you get into the app growth industry and like, why is the space so interesting to you in general?

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Hannah Parvaz

So I got into mobile tech and mobile marketing and growth in general and a bit of an unconventional way, like I started in the music industry. Originally, I was in the music industry from when I was about 13 years old. I just fell into that as well by planning events. And one thing led to another, and I started working at a music tech company, a music app, called dice, a music ticketing app.

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Hannah Parvaz

When I was there, it was a it's a music company. We were selling tickets. And so web was a huge part of our product and a huge part of what we were doing and optimizing. And this was over a decade ago. So web has always been a massive part of my kind of product and marketing mix. We've always been leveraging it.

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Hannah Parvaz

So I've been building these flows for, yeah, over a decade, 12, 13, 14 years, and we have seen incredible results from them. So I was in-house as head of growth at four different companies, scaled them all up to millions of users recently. Well, recently two and a half years ago now, my gosh, I launched aperture, which is a kind of two sided business, one side focused on creative strategy, advertising, media buying, and the other side focused on the product and how we're optimizing and building products.

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Hannah Parvaz

So that's what I had been running in house for all of that time. I've been running marketing, and I've been looking after product, so it really made sense for that to be the next step. So web, building web funnels, building those flows is a huge part of what we do at aperture. Constantly working with companies on optimizing those, on making sure that we can build profitability in the in these different ways and opening up these different avenues.

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Steve Cerasoli

Awesome. Well, it seems like you are the perfect person to look into. Duolingo is all strategy then. So Duolingo, I don't think it needs too much of an introduction as a company. You know, I think I've used Duolingo. A lot of people I know if you do it and go, I'm sure you've used to a lingo before or know someone who has used Duolingo before.

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Steve Cerasoli

We'll jump right into their web to app strategy. So you can obviously can get Duolingo on the App Store. You can also log in to Duolingo or on board to Duolingo on the web, whether it's a desktop or like mobile web. So they're running kind of this like hybrid web two app strategy. What are the benefits of running a strategy like this for a language learning company like Duolingo?

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Hannah Parvaz

Yeah, everyone has heard of Duolingo, right? They've been around since 2012 now. And web is a huge part of their mix as well. There are so many benefits, actually, for having web. So, because we have to think about web in lots of different ways as well. Like web is a great place for us to acquire customers, but it's also a really great place for us to prime users, get them to come in to the app.

00:03:05:20 - 00:03:28:05

Hannah Parvaz

Some people actually just want to stay on web. So we need to be thinking about that. But some of the reasons that companies like Duolingo go after web, and usually the very first reason that companies go after web is because you can save a good bit of money on their. So in case whoever's watching this doesn't know, Apple and Google charge you to have your app on the App Store.

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Hannah Parvaz

They don't charge you upfront in that way very much, but if you have subscriptions inside your product, then they're going to take a cut of that subscription. So if you're making less than a million a year, they're going to take 15%. And if you're making more than a million a year, then they're going to be taking 30% of that first year and 15% off every subsequent year.

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Hannah Parvaz

And so this is a huge reason that people go over to web, because when we're on web, you're not paying those Apple and Google subscription fees, you're just paying your card processing fees, which is usually around 3 to 5%. So immediately you're saving potentially a massive chunk, you know, potentially 25, 27% of that total amount, which really allows you to house a lot of different benefits.

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Hannah Parvaz

Like you can have a slightly higher CoC because people are being acquired in a way that you're giving away less money or more profit, or from them. People on web actually tend to stick around longer, like they they churn less. They cancel their subscriptions less, which helps your bottom line. They're also going to convert usually their trial higher.

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Hannah Parvaz

So if you're offering a free trial on your product, those people are actually probably going to convert from trial to paying higher on your app. You might be kind of 35, 40, 50% on your web. You're usually going to be kind of over 50 or 60% trial to paid conversion, which is it can be a substantial increase. There are a lot of other reasons as well, like this is a big part of it.

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Hannah Parvaz

But building out web for us has been really key because it's helped a lot with our SEO as well, helps with that discoverability. It helps us with better linking on the web. One of the reasons that we started building out what float one of my companies was, we needed a place to link to, like we were selling tickets for gigs.

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Hannah Parvaz

And so for posting online, we needed a destination for them, not just send saying go to the app. Like people want to just be able to preview things before going to this unknown app and downloading it to see something that they don't know and trust. So it reduces that friction. You know, there's no immediate app download required.

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Hannah Parvaz

You can start using or interacting with it immediately without having to go through all of these extra hoops it works across. Or it should, at least across all devices. There are other kind of technical benefits as well. For example, you can have faster deployment if you're releasing onto your website, you're kind of the custodian of your website, so you can just launch stuff.

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Hannah Parvaz

You don't need to go through. Apple and Google as long approvals process, which have been getting better, but historically were over a week sometimes to get something live. And if you submitted something that didn't work then oh my god like it's an absolute nightmare. You know, like there have been several, many times where we've had to kind of ask for expedition on our, on our products because something has gone wrong.

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Hannah Parvaz

So that makes it easier to experiment on, on, on, on our flow, on our onboarding, on the product. Over all, it helps us do more AB tests and have more flexible AB tests. And another really, really important thing, and the last thing I'll mention before we continue is the data. So back in 2021 and some new, founders or, or people working on this may not know, but in 2021, there were some changes to how we were able to collect data.

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Hannah Parvaz

So whenever we were running ads and things like this, especially to our apps, it meant that we weren't actually able to have the visibility on who we were, who were requiring the volumes that we were requiring. But by putting three people and targeting people and sending them on a destination to the web, we're actually able to capture that first party data again, we're going to own that data so we can capture their email addresses, their phone numbers, whatever information is, all of that onboarding information, and we're able to direct it back and attribute it back to the advertising campaigns that we had.

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Hannah Parvaz

So this allows us to have better and more accurate campaigns that have more data in them, which means they can optimize faster, which means we can learn faster, which means we can get better results, which means we can become more profitable quicker. So overall, there are a lot of really good reasons that we should be exploring web. And I'm really glad to see Joel and guys doing such a good job of it.

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Steve Cerasoli

Now, for sure. The, like the attribution data element, I feel like that keeps getting brought up over and over again as being like a super, super important thing. You know, that people always think like, oh, the Apple fees are probably the number one thing or whatever, just because it's there's a lot of smoke around that. But I think everyone we talked to for the most part has been like, no, the actual the attribution data is like super, super important.

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Steve Cerasoli

And to get into a little bit more about that, the attribution element of it and kind of actually getting people into the onboarding process through advertisement. So like, let's actually go to the actual onboarding page for and go here. Yeah. Cool. So if we go to get started.

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Hannah Parvaz

Here, we're going to do this together.

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Steve Cerasoli

Yeah. Oh yeah we're going to go for it. It's so actually get to this page. Right. Like I'm just going here on the actual website. So some someone might say like, you know, I heard about Duolingo through word of mouth or general interest, but a lot of times people are actually coming here through like an advertisement. Right.

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Steve Cerasoli

What is the process of actually, like marketing out your product through like a web advertisement campaign like that?

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Hannah Parvaz

It's a little bit different if you're sending traffic towards your website rather than your app. Actually, there are lots of differences. So let's just take matter, for example, which is where a lot of companies spend the majority of their advertising budget. There are a few different campaign objectives. So when you're setting up your advertising you're directed to selected objective.

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Hannah Parvaz

And so one of those objectives is related things. So you can do app controls app events. And one of those app events is typically something like start trial or something. Whenever you're sending traffic towards your app this is what you would be selecting. I'm going to select app installs with or app installs, but I'm optimizing for the app event of start trial or something.

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Hannah Parvaz

Whenever we're sending to web. Actually, we are creating a different kind of campaign entirely. So we're creating a wheel, usually some kind of sales campaign or conversions campaign, but we can actually have that destination on the web. So what this means really is we need a whole different way of doing our attribution. Whenever we're sending to App, usually what we're doing is we're integrating with the mobile measurement partner.

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Hannah Parvaz

So a mobile measurement partner is something that sits between your product and the product that you're advertising on. So this is in place of putting in the Facebook SDK for example, which you could also do. You can put in Facebook SDK and map all of your events into there. Or you can pick an MMP map all of your events into your MMP, and then your MMP will send the events to matter to TikTok, to app 11, to all of these different places where you're then going to be running your campaigns.

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Hannah Parvaz

Whenever we're thinking about web, instead, you're going to be using the conversions API for matter, for example, or using, whichever kind of platform set up, probably by Google Tag Manager to send those events back to that platform so that you can get your data in there. So whenever you're sending it from conversions API for matter, for example, that's your service, your data.

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Hannah Parvaz

Hopefully you're sending your own own data back so you have more visibility on that. So are the main differences. As a part of that, it means that one of the things I mentioned before is that you've got more visibility. So what that means essentially is you're going to see pretty much full transparency on on the numbers that you're getting through on your web campaigns, on iOS.

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Hannah Parvaz

At the moment, it's still very cloudy. If you were deciding that you wanted to run scan campaigns on there, you still need to go 88 over or over 100. Sometimes installs per day to be able to get your post install events posted back with, you know, conversion values and on web. That's just not the case. So even if you're just getting one sign up a day, you can hopefully just see that.

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Hannah Parvaz

Whereas on on app it's a bit different. So our structure is a bit different actually since September on matter. A good thing to know which a lot of people don't know, is that you can create web and up campaigns which capture attribution across both of these, and that's been really, really helpful. But for this in particular, we can just imagine that we've set up a web campaign.

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Hannah Parvaz

The destination is potentially the home page for the duolingo.com AI lander. The first thing I see is a get started button. I press on the Get Started button, and now I'm here and this is the first thing that we see.

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Steve Cerasoli

And we could talk a little bit about like what makes this like first page with like choosing the actual language you want to learn. Why is this a good page to start off with? To kind of hook a user to keep going through the process?

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Hannah Parvaz

I think that this is a really good page for a lot of reasons. It's quite different from a few from the kind of interaction on a few different language learning apps. First screen where the first thing you notice here is and it's the the only time I think you see, or maybe one of the only times I think you see in the onboarding flow for Duolingo some social proofing.

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Hannah Parvaz

So here you can see Spanish 50 million learners, French 27.9 million learners, Japanese 25 million learners. So you can see very quickly what are the most popular languages on the product. I must say that the most popular on Duolingo overall is English learners by Spanish people, but the the second most popular is actually Spanish linked by English people.

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Hannah Parvaz

So you can see that there are over 50 million people learning Spanish on the app. One of the things you'll see is as you scroll down, there's loads and loads and loads of different languages. They're all sorted by how many people are learning them. That's something that could make a little bit harder for people to find the one that they want.

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Hannah Parvaz

You know, if people are learning Spanish or French or something like this and it's right at the top, really simple, very easily discoverable. But if you're learning Latin or Klingon, which are some of the ones at the bottom, which probably not so many people are, you know, it's one 360, 419,000 people learning Klingon. Maybe they'll know to look at the bottom for that.

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Hannah Parvaz

But also it might mean that they're scrolling up and down quite a lot, increasing the the time spent on this page, which isn't necessarily a good thing. They might not be able to find what they're looking for, but let's just say we're going to get started with French or Spanish or something. So this is really nice because previously in their previous iterations of their onboarding flow, actually Duolingo just jumped straight in.

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Hannah Parvaz

They didn't actually introduce duo. And so this is a new addition in the last little while where you say or they are saying, hey, I'm Juho, you continue and straightaway you see the confetti. You see those like cute little stars in those eyes and you're starting to feel already the sense of connection because you're celebrating with you.

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Steve Cerasoli

Yeah. He guides you through the whole. He ends up guiding you through the whole process. So it helps kind of familiarize you with him as a character, which is kind of cool. So this page here, I thought this was interesting. Like to have this so early on in the onboarding flow, basically telling you how you got there is this kind of similar to what you were saying earlier about like the attribution data and like, do you think like whoever selects this, they take this data and then they kind of can double down on, you know, spending ad on whatever the most popular thing people select is or kind of make informed decisions.

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Hannah Parvaz

Exactly. This is self attribution. So this is something that's got more and more and more and more popular and important since 2021. And ultimately it is to help the team just understand where people are coming from. So, you know, I would I hope and I believe that these are all just kind of randomly organized so that, you know, I don't think news article and blog or the top when I was going through this on my phone earlier, Google search was at the top.

00:15:09:09 - 00:15:35:20

Hannah Parvaz

It's interesting to see them changing. This is really important so that people aren't just all selecting the top option and creating like a false positive there. But yeah, this is used by the team. So they can they can really just understand where people are actually coming from or the people believes are coming from. It's important at the beginning because one of the things that used to happen is you later on get a survey a couple months later, just in general by product saying, oh, how did you find out about the app or things like this?

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Hannah Parvaz

And people don't remember. Yeah, a few months.

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Steve Cerasoli

Yeah, exactly.

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Hannah Parvaz

People know right now where they've come from, but they don't necessarily remember. I'm not going to remember, like in two months how I found out about this latest product. So it's nice. Yeah. It's good. It's helpful.

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Steve Cerasoli

So this is kind of interesting too. I was going in a lot of these onboarding flows we've noticed like so you basically you answer a question right. And then it's kind of like a give and take. So this one's not as as intense as something like Blinkist where you know, if you answer something it'll give you kind of a little paragraph almost of like, you know, explaining, you know, how they'll help you with whatever decision you chose.

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Steve Cerasoli

Do you want to comment a little bit on like, just like kind of this, like, I guess you could call I'm struggling to figure out a where to call, a call and response or like you give and take kind of with these flows.

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Hannah Parvaz

Well, I love this one because one of the things I noticed about this is whenever you're you're clicking on any of them, what Joe's responding is different every single time. And that just shows you this kind of real engagement with it. You know, it's asking, why are you learning French? And I like what happens on the next page.

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Hannah Parvaz

We won't go there. Yeah, but I like what happens on the next page too, which we'll we'll show you in a second. But this is really just to one provide data again to the team and two, to help you feel like this is personalized to you when you're going through it. A lot of the times, products are putting these kind of questions and positive friction elements into their onboarding flows, but actually aren't, especially at the beginning of a lot of products life cycles, putting that content or personalizing the product based on your responses.

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Hannah Parvaz

But it helps you think that it is. It makes you feel nice to share that. And so this is something as well that will help the Duolingo team understand context so they can produce content later. You know, if it's just for fun or for work or whatever it is, like they're going to be able to then say, okay, actually, we've had a 50% increase in people learning French for their for work, like, let's produce more content.

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Hannah Parvaz

That's about work. And so having this here is is setting the scene. It's providing context. It's helping inform them for their advertising campaigns as well. It's helping them understand what content to produce. And those little responses that change every single time are helping build duo's relationship with you as well upfront. So it's really nice. And I think it's really interesting what happens on the next page.

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Hannah Parvaz

So yeah, like boost my career. Oh, that's interesting on the mobile version, which will be interesting to show later. There are these interstitials that happen between each of these. And so when I select it's for my career. It returned. That's actually 65 people. Percent of people or something like that was in French for their career. So that would be a really interesting thing just to maybe include there, like the difference between mobile.

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Steve Cerasoli

Cool. Yeah, I was curious. I think we asked, Nathan Hudson this to like, the difference between setting up, web onboarding flow versus a mobile app onboarding flow. Like, I've noticed that, I mean, there's a lot of similarities, obviously, but sometimes there are like little changes like that. Is that just like, kind of just testing out to see what works or is there like actually like it kind of like trends there or any like informed decisions people make on choosing what they want to do for web versus mobile web.

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Hannah Parvaz

I think it's a combination. Duolingo run more than 10,000 tests per year, so they're running a lot of tests. So we could just be in different buckets. We could be getting different pieces of different information returned to us. So at the moment we have been seeing some of these little components of celebration and delight. But I think on mobile you're just getting a lot more.

00:19:12:12 - 00:19:20:06

Hannah Parvaz

But again, this could be are these could be our inflows that we're getting. And it's really interesting to see that, you know AB tested in live potentially.

00:19:20:06 - 00:19:37:10

Steve Cerasoli

So this screen here so you can choose like kind of how much you actually know about the language. And this will actually come in handy later on when it gives you kind of a test lesson to test out the product. So depending on what you choose here it'll kind of choose the lesson for you, which is interesting. So let's say we select new go on here.

00:19:37:12 - 00:19:59:04

Steve Cerasoli

So this is interesting too. This is kind of the first time we really see where they're kind of like highlight what the product can actually do for you essentially. Like I mean obviously you kind of go in knowing that it's going to help you learn a language, but I like that this page kind of does a little bit to break up the kind of, I wouldn't say, monotony of answering questions over and over again, but I like how it breaks it up for you and kind of gives you something.

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Hannah Parvaz

I agree, I think it's really interesting to how the differences between mobile and the web are so different. There's so much more celebration on the mobile experience that I've been seeing, and I think maybe that's because also people are much more used to playing mobile games as a part of, as a part of the experience. So yeah.

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Steve Cerasoli

The mobile version, when you click right, it's like you literally get like a confetti pop. Yeah, I honestly yeah, it's lit. It gives you that dopamine rush whenever I remember doing the onboarding for this. As for mobile and being like, I was like, it made me want to just get back into Duolingo all over again. Honestly, I'm was going through it.

00:20:38:02 - 00:20:39:20

Hannah Parvaz

What which language did you learn on there?

00:20:39:23 - 00:20:53:12

Steve Cerasoli

So I was like, I chose like one of the hardest ones. I tried to get into Chinese for some reason, like, no, no actual reason. I don't plan on going to China anytime soon. But I was like, you know, I heard it's really hard, and how crazy would be if I just could speak fluent Chinese in a year.

00:20:53:13 - 00:21:01:12

Steve Cerasoli

And I think I made about I think I made about two weeks, it's two weeks. And then for duo for two, it was less on the left side.

00:21:01:14 - 00:21:03:10

Hannah Parvaz

Sending you those crying emojis.

00:21:03:14 - 00:21:08:08

Steve Cerasoli

Oh yeah. Yeah. He's still emailing me to this day.

00:21:08:10 - 00:21:29:19

Hannah Parvaz

So yeah, I love this page. It's this is kind of the first page on the web flow that it's not interactive as well. This one is just talking about, you know, like Joe saying, here's what you can achieve and then telling you a little bit about it, and it's just a moment for you to pause, reflect on what you've done, and then after you've understood, okay, this is going to help me build my vocabulary, converse with confidence and develop a learning habit.

00:21:29:21 - 00:21:34:01

Hannah Parvaz

Then we can continue. Now that you're primed a little bit better about what you're going to achieve.

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Steve Cerasoli

Yep.

00:21:35:14 - 00:21:52:20

Hannah Parvaz

Those were personalized, by the way. Yeah, I want to know on this page as well, like Duolingo is something that I like the whole time with his notebook. Like writing, you know, as if he's like really paying attention to you, which it makes you feel really nice, like, oh, this bird is bobbing up and down. He's constantly moving and blinking, like.

00:21:52:22 - 00:22:09:01

Hannah Parvaz

And also whenever you select each of those, it will give a different response and it'll tell you how many words you're going to learn per week, which just gives you a little bit more validation and confirmation that this is a product that's going to benefit you. So if I only spend five minutes a day, I'm going to learn 25 words.

00:22:09:01 - 00:22:25:23

Hannah Parvaz

Maybe that doesn't feel like a lot, but over time that can add up. You know, it would be really cool to see. And potentially this could be a test is how many words what I learned per year, you know, 25 words is that is that does that feel like a lot. Does that feel achievable. Does that not feel like a lot?

00:22:26:00 - 00:22:27:18

Hannah Parvaz

I'd love to understand a bit more about that.

00:22:27:19 - 00:22:44:12

Steve Cerasoli

That could be interesting. Yeah. I'm curious. Like psychologically like if you were to say like for a year, right. Like whatever, 25 times how many weeks in a year? It's like a lot more words if you're seeing that. Like, you know, maybe there's more incentive to the larger number might give you more incentive to go on.

00:22:44:14 - 00:22:46:12

Hannah Parvaz

My yeah, it's interesting. Achievable. Like if.

00:22:46:14 - 00:22:47:02

Steve Cerasoli

Exactly.

00:22:47:02 - 00:23:09:06

Hannah Parvaz

If it's like I'm going to learn a thousand words in a year, for example, which it would be, maybe that sounds like too many. And because that would be then 4000 for for 20 minutes a day. And like also these are quite nice. Just 25, 55, 100 as well. So we don't know if that's true either. This could just be yeah this this could just be what they're saying.

00:23:09:07 - 00:23:21:11

Steve Cerasoli

So we'll say five minutes a day and then start from scratch or find your level. I don't know which one I've selected. I think I've selected both of these. And they usually take me to a similar page.

00:23:21:13 - 00:23:26:10

Hannah Parvaz

But as we see the same kind of thing is really just going to take, you know, straight into a lesson.

00:23:26:12 - 00:23:42:15

Steve Cerasoli

Yeah. And I think I selected, I know little, little French. So it's probably gonna just take me to whatever it would take me for you to start from scratch. So we find our level here cool. And then this is where it gives you your kind of practice lesson. We don't have to actually go through this whole thing.

00:23:42:17 - 00:24:03:07

Steve Cerasoli

But basically, you're going through, like, the actual product itself. Like, this is, it's basically it's kind of a test lesson for what the actual product is like. What's the importance of doing something like this? This is the only company I think we've literally look at this year that kind of gives you like almost an example of what the product experience is like before you actually even create your profile.

00:24:03:07 - 00:24:07:15

Steve Cerasoli

Yeah. What does that how does that work for like a customer who's going through the flow?

00:24:07:17 - 00:24:40:15

Hannah Parvaz

I love that about Duolingo because they don't really pay attention to what everyone else is doing. They're not looking at what are the kind of best practices which a lot of other companies have to implement, because they're not as ubiquitous as Duolingo. Duolingo, because of their size and scale, like they're the number one education app on the App Store, potentially in the like world, they just have this power because people who hear about it have quite high intent, because a lot will for, say, a lot of people who've used it before.

00:24:40:15 - 00:24:58:14

Hannah Parvaz

So there a lot of them are returning and a lot of people have spoken about it. There's a lot of brand trust. And so what they're trying to do very quickly is just get people to experience value as quickly as possible. And so this is a part of that. They're putting you straight into a lesson so that you don't get distracted by anything else.

00:24:58:14 - 00:25:17:03

Hannah Parvaz

You're like, okay, straight into the game. You've had these kind of little celebration moments throughout the onboarding flow. And now you're being asked like a very simple question, you know which of these is one like, and it's got a number one that are like you, you're going to get that right. Like is it a picture of a man, a picture of a kid or, or the number one?

00:25:17:05 - 00:25:28:03

Hannah Parvaz

And when you click it and, and check it, you, you straight away get that sound which is actually the first time you get sound. I believe in the. Yeah, I.

00:25:28:03 - 00:25:29:03

Steve Cerasoli

Think it is.

00:25:29:05 - 00:25:48:10

Hannah Parvaz

And you get that moment of like, oh, didn't let everyone know that. So, you know, when you hear that on the bus or like you're walking on the street and you hear, you know, someone's playing Duolingo, they've sonically branded that so well. Yeah. And then you get that pop up. Each mistake costs one heart. So, you know, stay sharp and focused like yeah prompting you.

00:25:48:10 - 00:25:52:05

Hannah Parvaz

It's giving you like feedback straight away. And they do that really really well.

00:25:52:06 - 00:26:11:12

Steve Cerasoli

Yeah it's cool to how they almost go with the hearts. Like I mean the Duolingo it kind of gamified the idea of like language learning. It makes it obviously a fun process. But I think it's really funny how they have like they start off with little like, just like, you know, you have like lives too. It's like you're playing a game, you know, and they kind of I think that's a good way to kind of hook you into it.

00:26:11:17 - 00:26:13:16

Steve Cerasoli

It's like stakes to it almost.

00:26:13:18 - 00:26:33:15

Hannah Parvaz

It it's giving yourself a challenge as well. Like, am I going to be able to finish this without losing my five hearts there at the top? I also like that you've got the progress bar. I mean, progress bars can go one of two ways, but when it's gamified like this, you know, people just feel like, okay, you know, I've got maybe ten questions to answer here.

00:26:33:17 - 00:26:56:00

Hannah Parvaz

I'm learning a new word. I think that's an important thing to highlight here. New word is what's being highlighted because you're learning the man, which is a new word for us in this instance. If you selected the wrong word, then you would lose your heart, as well, which makes it feel like, yeah, Pickler shot looser and you'll see now you've lost a heart.

00:26:56:00 - 00:27:07:02

Hannah Parvaz

It's gone down to four. You know, we've been corrected. We've learned actually, that's the correct solution long. And then we can continue.

00:27:07:04 - 00:27:24:07

Hannah Parvaz

Exactly. Yeah. And so that instant feedback, you know we're learning new senses now the previous ones were reading. Now we're listening. And so it's giving us a little bit of a breadth of different types of lessons as well.

00:27:24:09 - 00:27:28:01

Steve Cerasoli

Yeah. It's super interesting.

00:27:28:03 - 00:27:38:04

Hannah Parvaz

And one of the things on that page too is at the bottom there's I can't listen now you know a lot of people on the computer like if they're people in the computer.

00:27:38:06 - 00:27:40:15

Steve Cerasoli

Hey stop it.

00:27:40:17 - 00:27:53:09

Hannah Parvaz

When people are on their computer a lot of the time they're at work. And so some of the times they can't be just playing that out loud, you know, if they're playing headphones. So that's what that is for, to.

00:27:53:11 - 00:28:14:01

Steve Cerasoli

Yeah, it's it's definitely it's definitely a fun interface for sure. And I think yeah they do a good job of the first lesson. Like I think the combination of it being easy and like showcasing all of the different types of, kind of lesson structure that they have. I think it's, I think it just does a good job of kind of hooking you in, just for time's sake, I think we can jump ahead here.

00:28:14:01 - 00:28:31:07

Steve Cerasoli

I just have, like, I think we'll jump to kind of. So you after this, you kind of make your you make your profile. It gives you like a little bit more about what Duolingo is about. It'll show you, like the gym process or whatever. Like kind of like how you can, you know, reach your goals and kind of gives you more of like a system of how it works.

00:28:31:09 - 00:28:58:12

Steve Cerasoli

And then it kind of sends you over it. You make a profile, obviously, and it'll send you over to this screen here, which is basically like the dashboard, I guess you could say. And then to actually get to Duolingo Premium, which is where it kind of interested in with the web funnel here. They don't actually like offer up premium on a screen in the onboarding flow itself, which I thought was kind of interesting.

00:28:58:14 - 00:29:24:00

Hannah Parvaz

Yeah, this is just another way that we can see their confidence in their product. 80 to 90% of all subscriptions are started in the first two minutes of downloading your product of any in the most, for the most part in the industry overall. Like that's just what happens for two minutes. And with Duolingo, they kind of flip that on their head.

00:29:24:02 - 00:29:55:12

Hannah Parvaz

Because you have to go through that big, long onboarding flow. You're experiencing that value very, very quickly. And you actually have to go and try and discover how to even pay for them. Like they make it kind of hard to even go and start a subscription. And so a part of this is because they know that people who take out that file, you know, here they're giving two weeks free, who take out that trial after that, who have become activated, are more likely to convert and go from trial to paying.

00:29:55:14 - 00:30:20:15

Hannah Parvaz

And so activation isn't just us having done our first lesson, no activation will be the point at which we are going to be sticking around, and the point at which it becomes kind of painful for us to to keep using the product without subscribing. So for Duolingo, I think over 90% of their revenue comes from subscriptions. About 8% or just less comes from ads.

00:30:20:17 - 00:30:40:12

Hannah Parvaz

But the free users are all as we go through this flow and as we go through, our lessons are going to continuously be hit by ads. And this is one of the prime times for them, for people to be subscribing. Because they're just sick of the ads. Actually, I was just like forced closing every time I got an ad and then going back into the product just to dismiss the ad because they're so annoying.

00:30:40:14 - 00:31:03:05

Hannah Parvaz

But then another thing they do is they actually give you an unrelated trial. A lot of the time they'll just be like, oh, you've got two weeks for free now without you even taking out or putting in your card details on web or taking out an in-app purchase on your phone. They will just give you that two weeks free because they know, like once you've tasted what it's like without a life, without ads like you're going to stick around.

00:31:03:10 - 00:31:22:00

Steve Cerasoli

Yeah, I think when I, when I joined, I think I got free like free two weeks of premium just kind of out of the blue. Yeah. For you. Yeah. It's super interesting. Yeah. For my friend learning Chinese, it didn't work unfortunately. Did not stick around. Was too hard. Cool. So if you go if you click on the actual track two weeks free, you get to the paywall here.

00:31:22:01 - 00:31:39:07

Steve Cerasoli

This is kind of where, you know, paddles, bread and butter would be I guess you could say, we've actually put this through a VPN and you can see that, you know, they adapt their pricing to kind of be localized here. So if you're in England it turns to pounds. If you are in France, I think we over here is the country, which is interesting.

00:31:39:07 - 00:31:54:13

Steve Cerasoli

So we chose French as our language. That was not intentional. It's euros. When I was, you know, didn't have my VPN on over in the US, USD. What's the importance of like localizing your currency both like cosmetically and kind of adapting your price to people who pay, who are willing to pay more or less?

00:31:54:18 - 00:32:10:10

Hannah Parvaz

I mean, the cosmetic side of it, and just showing what the actual currency is helps people with trusting the brand. So a lot of people, if they're seeing, you know, if I'm in England and I'm seeing dollars, a lot of the time people think, okay, well, now I have to pay a conversion fee that's going to add to my cost.

00:32:10:12 - 00:32:34:07

Hannah Parvaz

You know, if I'm in, if I'm in Germany and I'm seeing pounds as well, like a lot of people don't trust other currencies, they want to feel like this product is made for me. And so seeing a different currency creates a disconnect. But then in terms of the localization of the pricing, this is kind of different. You know, if you're a company that wants to become truly global, then that localization of pricing is extremely important.

00:32:34:09 - 00:33:01:14

Hannah Parvaz

Different countries have different economies. So they've got they're earning in different currencies, earning different amounts relative to the kind of global averages. So and also on top of that, they have different propensities to spend. So a market like India or some places in South America, you should be pricing very, very differently than in the US, for example, where people will be willing to pay a bit more for their products and services.

00:33:01:14 - 00:33:21:00

Hannah Parvaz

And a big part of that is just the cost versus salary ratio. So when you decrease your price, you're actually going to be able to or localize your price. You're going to be able to open the opportunity up to more people, meaning actually, you're going to get so many more people in that it will be better for your unit economics anyway.

00:33:21:02 - 00:33:43:05

Steve Cerasoli

The other thing on the paywall that we're super interested in, I've been asking everyone, is the actual like diversity of payment methods that they're offered. So you'll see some companies obviously offer like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App, Duolingo is is credit card only, which I thought was interesting. Do you see any opportunity for them to like offer more of a diverse set of payments, or is this just something that works for them.

00:33:43:06 - 00:34:11:01

Hannah Parvaz

100%? When I have tested having credit card only versus having multiple payment options, we do tend to see much higher opt in here with more payment options. This is creating more friction by just having credit card only, which in turn is going to increase the Tal to page conversion. So if you're just doing a one click Apple Pay, you're going to have a higher cancellation rate than if you put your card in, because you just have to work more.

00:34:11:03 - 00:34:40:08

Hannah Parvaz

So these are things that they're going to be maybe they've been testing. Maybe they haven't. Probably they have. Like they must see that people who put their credit card details in are converting higher. So because of that friction. So that's what we're going to offer. But for the but I'm not sure. For the most part we do see by having Google Pay, Apple Pay and of course many, many products, I've seen that the trial opt in is going to be so much higher that your actual net revenue is going to be higher as well.

00:34:40:08 - 00:34:57:10

Hannah Parvaz

Like even if your cancellation rate is a tiny bit higher, you can set up Google Pay and Apple Pay on your desktop as well. And when you go through the mobile onboarding to you, you don't have those options, which is kind of surprising. So yeah, I would love to see them test out or see the results of those experiments if they have been running them.

00:34:57:16 - 00:35:17:00

Steve Cerasoli

If we jump from the paywall to our next steps, let's say we actually bought the product for all of our wonderful credit card information in. We would get back to our screen here that tried two weeks free would definitely say you're now on premium. That whole box would probably disappear, I'm sure. And then basically that's pretty much where we end up.

00:35:17:06 - 00:35:33:02

Steve Cerasoli

So we see a lot of companies like in their web two app flow, particularly on desktop to, to mobile. They'll show like a QR code or some sort of link to the app Store, or maybe send you an email to, like, just let you know, like, hey, download our award winning app. We have an app out there.

00:35:33:02 - 00:35:46:19

Steve Cerasoli

You should you should definitely download our app. Duolingo doesn't really do that. Is that because Duolingo is just like such a ubiquitous like figure in the space of language learning that they don't feel like they need to do that? Or is there room for them to do something like that to kind of alert people?

00:35:46:23 - 00:36:08:17

Hannah Parvaz

I think they will have been testing this. I'm working with one company at the moment, which is a gardening company, and it's a gardening app, sorry, fruit. And they basically they have a web product as well. It's not at the same scale as Duolingo. Yeah, but they have this web experience as well. And some of the people that have signed up on web didn't actually even know that there was an app.

00:36:08:19 - 00:36:25:19

Hannah Parvaz

When we've been speaking to customers, they've just been like, oh, I when we asked them about why they're not using it, they didn't even know they found out about it on web. They went through the onboarding on web, and they've been sticking around on web. And when they found out about the app, that's amazing. But the way in which they've been interacting with that product and experience has been on web.

00:36:25:22 - 00:36:47:03

Hannah Parvaz

And so for whenever you're on mobile web, they do prompt you to download. They do have a little banner at the top which asks you to download, or if you have the app already though, it will just ask you to open the app. But on web, they've clearly done a lot of research here and said, okay, the context in which people are trying to use the web product is that they want to stay on web.

00:36:47:07 - 00:37:09:07

Hannah Parvaz

They also probably one of the things is they want to keep that the option to subscribe on web too. So the point in which they are building this for, for Duolingo, they will be over a million a year. You know, they're they're making like 600 million a year. They will want to save as much of that 30% as possible.

00:37:09:07 - 00:37:24:18

Hannah Parvaz

So keeping people on that web experience will be really key for them. So getting them through that, getting them to be activated, getting them to experience as much of that as possible on the web, starting that trial on the web, I don't know why they would be sending people to that. If people are happy on that website experience.

00:37:24:18 - 00:37:42:16

Steve Cerasoli

So cool. Well, that takes us to the end of the, actual word funnel itself. I think we could jump into just overall takeaways. I think we will do like two things they did really well, and then one thing that they could improve upon and, in 2025 or like something they could experiment with, test out.

00:37:42:18 - 00:38:07:01

Hannah Parvaz

Yeah, I think on mobile and on on desktop, I think of course, Duolingo are doing personalization incredibly well. Like I love how they're bringing elements that you've answered before into that experience. They're doing it even better on mobile. And so this is something they're doing really well. This is something that we can all take away from the gamification.

00:38:07:03 - 00:38:30:10

Hannah Parvaz

Elements of Duolingo are also really key on mobile. They have one screen which is after you have said how much time you want to spend on the product, they ask you, what is your commitment? You know, they say like, how long do you want to commit for? Whether that's seven days, 14 days, 30 days, 90 days. But just putting that screen in and we've done similar screens on other products.

00:38:30:10 - 00:38:53:16

Hannah Parvaz

We've seen a 50% increase in day 30 retention just by adding a screen. And so that's pretty significant. And so that gamification element and that personalization, both of these are doing unbelievably well like Duolingo absolutely smash it with this. And something they could test. I mean just calling back to what we were just speaking about. Well, a couple things.

00:38:53:16 - 00:39:13:12

Hannah Parvaz

They could bring some more of these and maybe it's an AB test, but bringing in some more of these elements, these celebration elements, these moments of delight into the web experience. And then secondly, just trying out, the Apple Pay and Google and seeing what the options for these are. It could be that there is higher friction.

00:39:13:12 - 00:39:27:00

Hannah Parvaz

So there's a higher trial conversion rate. But they might be they might see that there's such a higher trial opt in by just having a one click or a fingerprint option that, that their bottom line could really that their bottom line could really improve.

00:39:27:05 - 00:39:33:06

Steve Cerasoli

That was great. Cool. Thank you so much. And I appreciate you jumping on with us talking to a lingo, hoping to have you back soon.

00:39:33:08 - 00:39:35:04

Hannah Parvaz

Thank you so much for having me. It was great to be here.