Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene

Gina Gotthilf is a co-founder and COO of Latitud, a company that helps build early-stage tech startups in Latin America, and previously led growth at Duolingo (scaling it from about 3 million to 200 million users) and worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign's digital ads. The conversation covers Duolingo's organic growth, retention and product-focused tactics, brand voice, lessons from failed experiments, and the opportunity and challenges of building startups in Latin America.

01Key learnings

• Anchor the company in a mission people can rally behind; it helps with organic growth, hiring, and resisting short-term metric-chasing decisions.
• Keep growth lean and avoid paid acquisition early, since rising CAC and dependence on paid users can become an addiction that is hard to turn off.
• Focus relentlessly on retention by asking whether the product delivers real value; users who find real value stick around.
• Dogfood your own experiments: use the product yourself before testing, since untested badge-style ideas can be dismissed for the wrong reasons.
• Optimize the post-click experience, not just the ad: mobile-first layouts, skimmable copy, and a headline and button that reinforce each other can dramatically lift conversion.
• Build a distinctive brand voice with a quirk and humor, and treat it as a deliberate, cross-team commitment so it survives hiring and pressure.
• Resist over-customizing the product per country; most core human behavior is similar, and per-market versions add maintenance cost and slow down experimentation.
• Treat communication as underrated: the goal is for the listener to feel something, understand, and remember the message.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.