Don’t Fade Duolingo
People are missing the scale of what’s quietly becoming the Spotify of learning.
This isn’t a deep dive into Duolingo. I’m not here to dissect revenue figures or monthly active users. This is a qualitative note — a simple argument that the market is underestimating Duolingo’s long-term potential.
I’m long Duolingo $DUOL because I see its addressable market as vast and still expanding. The product is constantly evolving — learning from its own users and improving through data-driven iteration. What Duolingo looks like today will be unrecognizable in five or ten years. It will be doing things we can’t imagine yet.
I actually like hearing people say, “Why learn a language when I can just use AI on my phone?” It tells me they’re missing the point entirely.
You don’t need to learn a language now, especially as an English speaker. If you’re traveling for fun, most people will speak English to you anyway. Of course you can always hold out your phone and have Google Translate do the work, but in all my travels (twenty-nine countries and counting), I have NEVER seen this actually done. Humans are cooperative and work out how to get by in situations. Learning a few key phrases in a foreign language here helps immensely.
Generally speaking, if people are learning a language, it’s because they want to for travel, or because they need to for a longer-term reason (job, relationship, relocation). Those who believe Duolingo will be replaced by the AI app on your phone are ignoring one of the key elements of being human. We want to learn, we strive to achieve; a foreign language, improve our math skills, get better at chess, discover history and culture, and hundreds of other subjects.
Most Duolingo users don’t have to learn, they want to and enjoy learning.
Duolingo is in its early innings. It is to education and mental stimulation what Spotify is to music, Netlfix is to video and Booking.com is to travel. A central facilitator and value-adder to millions of people. Let’s look at some of the monthly active user figures for these brands;
Booking.com: 135 million ($170 billion market cap)
Netflix: 395 million ($506 billion market cap)
Spotify: 696 million ($140 billion market cap)
Instagram: 3 billion
Each one of these apps were doubted or even derided in their early days. They offered a way to do something - book a hotel, watch a movie, listen to music, look at photos - that could easily be done without them.
Duolingo currently has 128 million monthly active users and a market cap of $15 billion. It’s still in the very early “yeah right, not gonna happen” stage of its life cycle, just like the others were in their niches. Yet Duolingo arguably has just as large a potential addressable market as any of the apps above. Anyone, anywhere, that wants to learn anything, for any reason.
Human nature is driven by curiosity, and the desire for challenge and growth. Duolingo is building the digital infrastructure for that instinct — a platform designed to scale to hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of lifelong learners. It will facilitate that process in part or in full — sparking curiosity, sustaining motivation, and accompanying people on their journey of continuous learning.
Don’t fade it.
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