We sent a thank you card that blew up the internet.
I was asked to write a simple thank you card to be sent when a customer purchases a Duo the Owl Plushie from the Duolingo Merch Store. No famous celebrities. No multi-million dollar budget. No shocking images. Just a few lines of text on a small white piece of paper.
To make it a little more fun, I decided to lean into the classic Evil Duolingo Owl meme that Duo will threaten and kidnap your family if you don’t do your lessons. With $0 in paid media or promotion, multiple fans screenshotted the note and shared it on social leading to several wildly popular posts.
The note earned 1 million likes on an Instagram and over 245,000 likes, 24,000 retweets, and 7.5 million views on Twitter. It reached the front pages of both (r/funny) and (r/NonPoliticalTwitter), some of Reddit's biggest communities. And there was even a Newsweek article “Threatening Note From the Duolingo Owl Leaves Internet in Stitches”
We posted a fake job listing for an “Owl Trainer” that went viral.
Duolingo was hiring for a ton of open positions, but it can be tough to get the attention of talent amidst the clutter of generic corporate posts on LinkedIn. So I suggested we promote our several real career opportunities by posting a fake job listing for a Duolingo “Owl Trainer”.
In a listing on the official Duolingo careers page, the job responsibilities include coordinating luxury swimwear fittings, Nobu meals, and transcendental meditation sessions as Duo a weekly birdbath using individual evian® water bottles (330mL).
To parody the sad state of many real listings, the post says exceptional candidates will have the "ability to work under high pressure and extremely unrealistic deadlines" and "30+ years of experience in an identical position."
The post blew up and there was a Business Insider article “A fake job listing for an 'owl trainer' for the Duolingo mascot has gone viral.” and TikTok videos of fans asking for the job and declaring it their dream job.
