Luis von Ahn: Yes. Well, first of all, the press reports, they’re kind of a trigger point for me. The press reported that we did layoffs based on AI that is actually not what happened. We’ve always had a contractor force that these are some of hourly workers doing, stuff like translation and stuff like that for some of our content. We did reduce our contractor force but this was not like full-time employee layoffs or anything like that. And yes, probably the biggest reason for the reduction of the contractor force was the use of AI. I mean we are — wherever we can in the company, we — if something can be done by AI, we’re going to take the opportunity. The places where we’re using AI, there’s kind of two big places. One is just in our content creation.
And we’re just — not only are we reducing costs there, but probably even more importantly, we’re able to do things a lot faster. And what’s good about that is, it also allows us to experiment faster. So, it used to be the case. For example, we have this feature that we’re rolling out that’s called DuoRadio that requires the generation of a bunch of data. If somebody had asked me to do DuoRadio five years ago, I would have told them you’re crazy. It’s going to take us 10 years to generate that data. Now, we know that it will take us a few months to generate that data. So now we’re actually willing to create a feature based on it. So, it’s the fact that we’ve accelerated this just opens the doors for a lot of stuff. That’s what I’m most excited about.
That’s one place for AI. And the other place is just generating features or putting up features that are interactive based on AI. So we have role play. We have explained my answer. We’re starting to experiment with actually having a spoken conversation with one of our characters, and it’s a really cool feature. So that’s the type of stuff that you’ll see us do. I mean we’re leaning very hard on this and it’s a great technology.
Zach Morrissey: Great. Thank you.
Deborah Belevan: And next question comes from Andrew Boone of JMP Securities.
Andrew Boone: Great. Thanks so much taking my questions. I wanted to ask about top-of-funnel trends as it relates to the mid-50s percent growth guidance that you guys gave. I understood last year, I had a bunch of eye-catch moments in terms of Barbie and everything else the clip you guys showed at the beginning. Can you just talk about top-of-funnel and maybe download growth as it relates to 2023 versus 2022 and then extrapolate that into 2024? Whatever top-of-funnel metric you want, Matt.
Luis von Ahn: Yes. I mean I can let Matt talk about some of the stuff, but we feel pretty good about top-of-funnel. Like I said, the vast majority of our growth comes from just word of mouth. And these are — there are some nice events like the Barbie and stuff like that, and they’re good. But still it is the case that most of it just comes from people telling their friend or a family member to download Duolingo that just remains pretty constant. So, we see — from what we see just looks very strong. I don’t know Matt, if you have anything else to say.
Matt Skaruppa: No, I think that’s right. I think we’re getting — we have visibility, obviously, into Q1 and that’s the mid-50s. And being in the 50% to 60% range and seeing that go up or down, the point we are trying to make is just that it’s not always going to accelerate from here. In terms of top-of-funnel, I think I’d just remind everyone that like there’s brand new to the platform users and then there’s resurrected users, which we call folks –we call folks who haven’t been using the platform for the past 30 days but come back resurrected. Those are about an equal proportion on any given day. And so, it’s a word of mouth that Luis talked about, but then it’s also just making sure that folks are reminded that they like Duolingo and they’ll come back even if they haven’t been using it for a while and that’s a big portion of this.
So like Louis said, like we feel pretty good about it. And I don’t — we don’t see anything right now that says, it’s going to be all that different than what we’re talking about.
Andrew Boone: And then I wanted to ask about the tiers that you guys are testing. I understood that you guys are going to have a premium kind of standard and a free model. But what about the opportunity to just take price within the US, right? I understood you guys were regionally – how do you guys think about pricing more broadly for kind of US, where you guys are seeing that strong demand. Thanks so much.
Luis von Ahn: Yes, generally with pricing I mean we’re going to experiment. I mean we’re pretty open to price experimentation and we do that. And just to remind you in terms of our improvements in monetization, we just have a lot of levers where we can pull and we try to order them by kind of return on investment. Pricing is one lever. We have the multi-tier strategy as another lever. We have the family plan as another lever. We have all these. And so the teams that are working on this have a long list of things and it’s ordered by return on investment pricing. We will probably see us experiment pricing not just in the US but worldwide. And I just can’t tell you what the results of those experiments are going to be because I just don’t know myself. But you’ll see us experiment for sure.
Andrew Boone: Thank you.
Operator: Next question comes from Alex Sklar Raymond James
Alex Sklar: Thank you. Luis, I know it’s a bit early to talk about the results from having some of the advanced English content that you had talked about in the shareholder letter but 17 courses now with advanced English available. How do you plan to kind of grow the awareness of the – any formal marketing plans behind that? And then thinking about broader monetization now that you have that in there.
