$DUOL bear argument: "it will not be necessary to learn languages due to live translation tools" Friction. "It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth." (Anthony de Mello) Babble CEO: "short of a neural implant nothing can make language learning unnecessary"

Content for $DUOL is what tires are to F1 Teams. Do not overrate it.

$DUOL will be to short-form videos and doom-scrolling what GLP-1s are to the obesity epidemic "in 10 years we can get billions of people actually learning something as opposed to either doom scrolling or giving up in life because AI can do everything" youtu.be/ADggr7xZaFI?si=jL3D… min 28:20

$DUOL 2036 2 billion MAUs "at the moment we have north of a 100M active users... that's too small of a fraction of humanity for me to claim victory we'll have billions of people learning meaningfull things in 10 years" youtu.be/ADggr7xZaFI?si=jL3D… min 28:20

Q2 2026 wishes: $HIMS to the moon $DUOL to the doom and further load the boat like crazy

Luis von Ahn: "for 1, with $DUOL what we do is we try to built a habit of learning. For example, 15M of our DAUs have a streak of longer than 365 days (...), so we are really trying to built a habit for that." youtube.com/watch?v=QxHsLoV4… Habits are the compound interest of self-development. Every teacher, in every country, in every era, has given the same advice: 'do a little bit every day.' It has never worked. It seems this stupid owl has hit on something.

$DUOL bear arguments are at this level. They have a psychological explanation. They cannot be avoided. They are predictable. It's human behavior. It will happen again and again. And I'm gonna massively leverage this. Not only now, but over the next decades. "A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. The answer "10 cents" jumps to mind instantly. It's wrong (it's 5 cents) - and ~50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton say it without checking."

$GOOG changed the world by giving the top 0.1% of brains free access to information and the possibility to share their outstanding mental frameworks, bypassing institutions. $DUOL will change the world by pushing the 99% of non-motivated learners to study a little bit every day, leveraging the educational equivalent of compound interest.

$GOOG has already disrupted education: most retail investors, millionaires included, have learned mostly through YouTube and Google Search. Add to that FinX, Substack, and books. No university degrees, formal education, just some online courses. $GOOG did not set out to disrupt institutions. $DUOL will follow that path. It’s the frictionless path.

A particular moat nuance is when a sector is so tough that there are no incentives to fully get into those waters. That’s education. That’s $DUOL’s garden. Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI… We’ll see them wet their feet. That’s it. Nothing else. And regarding small fish… Even with a product still in development, Duolingo has already achieved 80% of the market. What do you think will happen as the product gets much better?

No institution in history has driven 10M people to sustain willpower-dependent behavior for 365 consecutive days. $DUOL

I'm seriously considering the idea that according to Pat Dorsey's and Hamilton Helmers' famous books about moat Today $DUOL is already a Wide Moat stock Not financial advice Do your own research

Languages being learned in my family: English, French and German. English monthly cost: 200€ 3,3€ Guess which figure belongs to $DUOL From this month on, total cost just 3.3€. Savings: 2.000€/year. No switching costs. No riscs. Easy.

I speak four second languages, and the learning experience has never been as seamless as it is with $DUOL. 8 s. to start a lesson bite-sized format structured path = unbeatable convenience. Video calls other speaking exercises = real, rapid improvement. What will happen? It will take some years for Duolingo to be regarded as a top language learning method by hundreds of millions of learners. Word-of-mouth in education is very slow by definition. But it is unstoppable. Competitors have no chance: data, CAC, cash, process, world-class management, and profitability. Even if they overcome those difficulties, building a 100-million-user base will take them many years. Word-of-mouth in education is very slow by definition, also for competitors.

Word-of-mouth in education is so slow that it actually protects $DUOL's dominance from disruption. Let’s assume a superior product emerges—one that surpasses Duolingo in teaching efficacy and engagement for non-highly motivated users (a feat already very difficult). The learner's 'efficacy awakening'—achieving the 'mastery experience', 'self efficacy' and 'flow' necessary to validate the product—takes a minimum of 4–6 weeks according to second language acquisition research. Compare this to Netflix: In January 2007, Netflix launched 'Watch Now.' A standard Blockbuster user could test the service in a single evening. You can bet that by the next day, that person was praising the experience at work, school, or the gym. It took Netflix a decade to reach the streaming pivot, but after that milestone only three years for Blockbuster to file for bankruptcy. Word-of-mouth was lightning-fast and seamless. Contrast that with Luis von Ahn’s reality: 'We expect that it's going to take a couple of years for word to get around that our English courses are good for intermediate and advanced speakers.' (Q3 2024 Earnings Call). If it takes years for even a category leader like Duolingo to shift user perception, any competitor faces a multi-year uphill battle to build a multi-million-user base. That window of time is a massive competitive advantage for a powerhouse like $DUOL.

Appreciate the detailed bear thesis, @moneyflowinvest. However, your conclusions are misinterpreting the underlying data pools. Consider this peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Education: 'Their average daily app use was between 15 minutes... and 27 minutes (the 75th percentile of subscribers’ daily app usage).' frontiersin.org/journals/edu… Whenever you evaluate engagement percentiles, the denominator is everything. This paper explicitly benchmarks metrics against active premium subscribers—not casual free accounts, and certainly not the total historical registration base of 600M users. Confusing these cohorts fundamentally distorts the platform's true retention architecture. When you talk about percentiles, which total figure are they drawn from? In footnote 7, it seems you don't know the base, which is somewhat astonishing.

$DUOL Revive your streak

In the convenience economy (Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and $DUOL), things happen like this: I switched my phone's language to German. Now, I have a continuous flow of German language input with zero effort. That's convenience. It takes less than 8 seconds to start a $DUOL lesson—not just any random lesson, but exactly the right lesson. That's convenience. People who say you can learn a language by prompting an LLM: Don't know much about language learning. And don't understand human brain functioning. Or Are both highly sophisticated AI users and learners.

$DUOL The following seems obvious to me: - Resurrected users can get their streaks back. - The algorithm will select high performers among resurrected and current users on the Free and Super tiers. - A one-month Duolingo Max free trial will be offered to them. - A Duolingo lab focused on AI tutor A/B testing will plug high performers into speaking practice to push them even further. - An astonishing language conversation boost. - Iterate on this process. - Plug this framework into the billions of frustrated second-language learners from current year and past decades who have some level of grammar, reading, and writing, but low conversational skills. The result: hundreds of millions of delighted users.

$DUOL will likely be the easiest behavioral market play over the next decade. Daniel Kahneman: 'The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story...' Right now, the market is flooded with highly seductive stories backed by weak or non-existent evidence. Among them: - AI will effortlessly replace Duolingo. - Users can seamlessly learn a language just by prompting with raw LLMs. - 'I don’t personally know anyone who has learned a language through Duolingo' (anecdotal bias). - Anyone can 'vibe-code' an app like Duolingo over a weekend and destroy its market share. - Live translation tools will render language learning entirely obsolete. Whenever I discuss these narratives on X, the common denominator is a glaring absence of foundational research. Commentators consistently ignore the fundamental mechanics of public education systems, language acquisition pedagogy, behavioral psychology, neurobiology, and how polyglots actually develop fluency. If you do even a piece of structural research, you instantly place yourself ahead of 99.9% of casual Duolingo analysts.