Didn't grow much this year?

This week, 2 equally important things happened:

• The LatAm Tech Report by Latitud surpassed 4,000 downloads in 3 languages (Wuhu!); and
• Spotify's 2022 Wrapped was out and you can no longer deny you love Bad Bunny.

In the inexplicable and nonsensical case that the report hasn't reached your hands yet, even when people have been sending the PDF version through WhatsApp groups and PRINTING THE +350 PAGES WHY ALEX THE TREES, here it is.

And plan a kick-ass Q1 with the right info (ours 😎)

Expand like an owl

Some of you actually believe that Gina Gotthilf, one of our founders, writes this newsletter.

Honey, Gina is on a mission to slay the entrepreneurial world and make Beyoncé proud *snap* *snap*. She's kinda busy, ya know? 💃

And she's been busy for quite some time.

Back in the day, she was the head of Duolingo's growth strategy – yes, the language learning app with a green owl. Leading a team of engineers, designers, and product managers, she got Duolingo to grow from 3M to 200M users, giving us all a lesson on how you slay.

📌 How did this famous Duolingo growth happen? She explains it all in this episode of the Latitud Podcast. But basically, 3 things to keep in mind: A/B testing, retention metrics, and a killer green owl.

A/B testing

Disclaimer: to effectively run A/B tests, you need to have statistically significant results, aka a very large number of people using your products. So, if you are just starting, keep this in mind for later – you'll get there, we know it ✨

Duolingo's growth team ran experiments every day, all day long. These were focused on the main channels that brought people into the app – their product, but also their emails and notifications.

50% of the experiments they ran failed. But just by running them and optimizing, they got to improve retention from 15% to 50% over the course of two years.

👉 Test, fail, repeat, succeed, and take over the world.

Retention metrics

When you think about growth, acquisition is the first part – how to attract new users and how much this would cost you. And that's a really important part of the puzzle, as long as you don't forget about the retention piece.

"If you can't retain a user that you got, not only does it means that your thing isn't very useful to that person (...), it also means that you're paying money or spending effort on getting people to try your product, and then you're losing them immediately," says Gina.

👉 Focus on product-market fit, which is measured by retention. Answer truthfully: does that person like your thing and will use it again?

The killer green owl

Just google Duolingo owl memes for this one. Genius copywriting for emails and notifications. Sassy. Intentionally passive-aggressive. Out of the comfort zone.

Made people talk and complain about a 3D owl trying to "hurt them". Beautiful. Similar to what happened to us and our subject lines a few weeks ago 🙂

We weren’t REALLY saying that your defense was a disgrace or that your deck looked pretty bad, Antonio 🙂 (Or were we?) Luckily, most of you double-checked your decks and strategies to see if there was a way to 10x it, which was the o b v i o u s point 🙂 – If you know, you know.

👉 Like most early-stage founders, your growth strategy now might be focused on acquiring users that will stay with you from now on.

Then, you must keep in mind that things aren't funnels anymore. They are loops built with product, iteration, marketing, and more. To succeed in the acquisition, you must create your own little engine that tackles it all, because everything impacts it.

📌 OR you can just join us this December 13th for the second edition of Latitud Nights. Why? Because Courtney McColgan, the kick-ass founder of Runa – who is ALSO slaying the world – will give us a master class on how to nail user acquisition in LatAm.

Courtney will be joined by Latitud's co-founder Brian Requarth to guide us through:

• ​​How to build acquisition loops
• ​​The correct way to evaluate the success or failure of your tactics
• ​​Paid acquisition vs organic acquisition

And more, so don't miss it!

"Hey, I've got a podcast"

That was one of the first things our founder, Brian Requarth, shared with Gina when they met.

And that's funny because the Latitud Podcast has now over 120 episodes and, according to Spotify Wrapped, is among the 1% most shared podcasts globally.

Here's a present for you, for being part of that 1% of listeners. Your personality!

And if you haven't been part of that 1%, it's never too late!

⛵ Hot News Ahoy!

🚀 AltScore scored a round

AltScore, a fintech that provides B2B lending infrastructure, announced this week that it has raised US$ 3.5 M in Seed funding. The Seed round includes US and LATAM funds, follow-ons from all previous pre-Seed investors, first-class angels, and fintech operators.

👑 A Paulista running Slack
Longtime Salesforce cloud executive, Lidiane Jones, will become the next Slack CEO after the announcement of Stewart Butterfield’s exit from the company.

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-> Every time one of your friends subscribes to our Newsletter, a growth team has a successful experiment ✨ So ask them to subscribe!