I have a soft spot for tech companies that enable a net-new job: Roblox Developer, Etsy Seller, YouTube Creator. Flagship creates a new job: online boutique merchant. The platform underpins a new economy of small-business owners—tastemakers who power discovery-driven retail.

I imagine that in a year, we'll be talking about Vision Pro's disappointing sales. In 5 years, though, it will be a very different story. As pricepoint drops + killer apps emerge, the device will take off. But that's not going to happen in the next 12 months.

Customer acquisition is at a unique moment: On the one hand, it's never been harder to grow. Apple's ATT changes have driven up costs & decimated measurement. Big Tech has never been bigger, with built-in distribution. On the other hand, it's never been easier to go viral.

There's a saying in tech: "The battle between every startup & incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation." TikTok levels the playing field. The For You Page is egalitarian: if your content is good enough, you can go viral.

Savvy companies understand this & learn from Duolingo's example: • Hire talent who lives & breathes the platform. • Be creative. • Take risks. The payoff: a highly-efficient acquisition channel that inflects the entire business.

Duolingo has accomplished this with just two people—the team is just Zaria and one other person. TikTok isn't a fun side project for Duolingo; it's a real acquisition channel. The team tracks attribution with a "How did you hear about us?" question during the sign-up flow.

Duolingo's strategy is working: Its TikTok account now has 6.6M followers—more than iconic brands like Disney (4.1M), Apple (2.8M), and Nike (4.3M).

Most companies on TikTok are stiff & corporate. Not Duolingo. Duolingo is weird, chaotic, even inappropriate at times. Zaria wanted to break the "rules" of corporate marketing. She says, "Who decided what brands can and can't do online?"

The trailer for the show is brilliant, hilarious, and designed to break through the noise of the internet. It immediately went viral and now has 13.2M views on TikTok.

For April Fool's Day, Duolingo put out a trailer for a new dating show called Love Language. The premise of the show is 10 “confident & flirty singles” come together “to share a house in paradise in hopes of finding true love.” The catch: None of them speak the same language.

In Zaria's words: “The reality is people wanted to be entertained, not sold to.” Duolingo's videos are hilarious. They still remind people that Duolingo is for language learning, yes, but in an engaging way—the team realized that product promotion and entertainment can co-exist.

When Zaria came to Duolingo, the company's TikTok wasn't working. It needed a fresh start. Zaria made Duolingo's green owl mascot, Duo, the face of its TikTok. She began to take risks. In one of the first videos, Duo twerks. The video got 6M likes in the first 4 hours.

If I had to crown one company the king of TikTok, I'd go with Duolingo. No one is savvier at going viral. To figure out how they do it, I tracked down the woman behind the scenes—24-year-old Zaria Parvez:

There were a few years where many studies claimed that the average consumer downloaded 0 apps a month (though I always found that unlikely). Either way, that’s clearly no longer the case and consumers are hungry for innovation. (3/3)

Of course, Temu is backed by Pinduoduo and CapCut by Bytedance—startups still have to compete with internet giants fueling aggressive acquisition. But the two AI companies here prove that consumers are *open* to new products (2/3)

3 of the top 5 apps in the App Store were released within the last ~6 months. It feels like consumer tech is entering a new era (1/3)

SF still leads in volume—and no, I don't expect the Bay Area to go anywhere. It will still be formidable (top 2) in 5, 10 years.

For the first time ever, New York leads the country in Seed and Series A rounds h/t @shaig @TurnerNovak for sharing

One concern with America's physical retail dollar stores is that they've become the go-to grocery stores for many in "food deserts" This report spells out more of the negative impacts of dollar store chains (h/t @axios for sharing it)

Pinduoduo is following the Bytedance playbook of spending aggressively on user acquisition to win the US market. Part of that plan included not one, but two Super Bowl commercials for Temu (costing $7M apiece). We'll see how long Pinduoduo keeps funding aggressive acquisition.

The rise of dollar stores is a signal of consumer demand for discount retail. Inflation is the most recent catalyst. We're seeing the same thing happen *online* with Temu topping the App Store. (The problem: unit economics for discount retailer are much harder online.)

One interesting change in America's retail landscape: the rise of dollar stores. In 2021, nearly half of all new stores opened in the U.S. was a chain dollar store. There are now 35,000—more than the total of all McDonald's + Starbucks + Walmart locations combined.

4) Both #2 and #3 fuel an even greater rise in freelancing. The cycle spins faster 🔁 This concept—the disaggregation of labor—is a decades-long shift that will define much of the next 30 years.

3) Companies lay off workers that AI renders obsolete, furthering the concept of corporate America as risky. This makes more people not want to put their eggs in one career basket, choosing a more self-directed path.

2) AI is embedded into every productivity tool, augmenting our abilities. This increases productivity, which fuels GDP growth—but individual workers don’t see higher pay or fewer hours. This makes younger generations (i.e., Gen Alpha) even more disillusioned by corporate America.