In-person beats digital for conversion

People like to buy from people, but we as operators get so excited about the scale of the internet that we forget the basics of humanity. Here's some fun data points, we did a bunch of studies on this. So prospects who meet you in person, and this is not just for profit, all the data I've shared, it's all global-level data or segmented depending on how we did it. It's not just our findings, it's like we looked at probably a minimum of 2,000 companies per factoid and most of the time much more. But prospects who meet you in person have 10 to 30% higher willingness to pay than those who didn't. Churn for those folks who you meet in person is typically 20% lower than those folks who have never met you. Expansion revenue is typically 15 to 20% higher.

You wouldn't believe how great of a salesperson someone can be when you were literally trapped in a car with them going somewhere. And so you have this captive audience, captive attention, you have someone who has the incentive to cross pay or cross sell someone into GoPay.

It's now content, community and commerce, and building good content that is really smart SEO, that has the ability to drive people back to your site to be able to build you as a thought leader.

My mandate was make Duolingo grow. Here is no budget. I had no budget. People are shocked. They're like, 'Oh, but when did you turn on the ads?' We're like, 'We just didn't.'