Xoogler.co Growth Series with Gina Gotthilf

Gina Gotthilf joined the Xoogler community for a Growth Series event moderated by Holly Chen to speak on her time at Duolingo, Tumblr, and Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. She provided a wide range of insights and advice from growing a small business into a global powerhouse to best practices running large-scale marketing experiments. Thank you Gina for speaking with the community!

Four key takeaways:

1. Focus on PR early on when trying to grow a company. It is free advertising! Get as many journalists as possible to publish articles about your product. Gina personally emailed hundreds of journalists when growing Duolingo in the early years.
2. To establish credibility as a marketer, especially when leading a cross-functional team of engineers and designers, use your social skills to facilitate great communication and earn trust by listening. Marketers and growth specialists are there to make the product and everyone around them look good, so it’s best to build up your credibility through results over time.
3. Run experiments constantly. Often, slight modifications to copy or design can bring major improvements to marketing campaigns but if you’re in very early days, test big changes and use your gut before statistical significance is really possible. If something works negatively (rather than neutrally), that means it’s a lever worth pulling so iterate.
4. Keep messaging simple! Short copy with clear calls to actions tend to perform better than longer messaging as people’s attention span continues to get shorter. In some cases, when more trust is required from a customer, this won’t hold true (like on political campaign landing pages, vs. consumer products).