Our portfolio company Duolingo did something interesting this week. They launched a new product by adding a dashboard to the existing product.
For those that don’t know, Duolingo is the most popular language learning app on mobile phones (and the web) around the world.
They saw many students and teachers around the world adopting the Duolingo app as learning tool in the classroom even though Duolingo was built as a horizontal product without any specific use cases in mind. So they thought that building a version specifically designed for schools would be a good idea. And the big new feature that allowed them to do that was a dashboard for teachers. The students use the same app they’ve always used and the teachers get a tool to help them understand, manage, and react to each student’s individual progress.
This is a great example of the consumerization of vertical applications and markets. There are plenty of companies that try to sell technology into schools and school systems top down. They build all the features to support schools day one and then attempt to get schools and school systems to purchase their product.
Duolingo was shipped as a free mobile and web app that anyone can use to learn a language. Teachers and students adopted it. And then Duolingo shipped a single feature, the dashboard, that makes the service way more useful and impactful in the classroom.
Duolingo is entirely free to use, including the new Duolingo for Schools. Duolingo monetizes its business by providing certification services like Duolingo Test Center. I wrote a bit about this freemium model in education last summer. I think its a powerful model when combined with a bottoms up (consumer) go to market approach.
