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Duolingo, Inc. (NASDAQ:DUOL) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 28, 2024
Duolingo, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.26, expectations were $0.21. DUOL isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Deborah Belevan: Good evening, everyone and welcome to Duolingo's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Webcast. Today after market close, we released this quarter's shareholder letter, a copy of which you can find on our IR website at investor.dualingo.com. On today's call we will have Luis von Ahn, our Co-Founder and CEO; and Matt Skaruppa, our CFO. They'll begin with some brief remarks before opening the call to questions. Analysts will be able to ask a question by using the raise hand feature. And please note this event is being recorded and all attendees are in listen-only mode. Just a reminder that we'll make forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance, which are subject to material risks and uncertainties.
Some of these risks have been set forth in the risk factors of our filings with the SEC. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions we believe to be reasonable as of today and we have no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Additionally we'll present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from a substitute for or superior to our GAAP results and we encourage you to consider all measures when analyzing our performance. And with that I'll turn it over to Luis.
Luis von Ahn: Thank you, Debbie, and welcome, everyone. We delivered stellar 2023, surpassing the ambitious expectations we set out for ourselves at the beginning of the year. This was capped off by a record user growth, bookings and revenue profitability and free cash flow in the fourth quarter. Stepping back, I'd like to put our 2023 performance in context by talking about how far we've come in the last few years. When we went public in July 2021, we laid out a plan showing rapid growth with increasing profitability over time. In 2021 and 2022, we delivered 55% and 45% year-over-year revenue growth, respectively and had about breakeven adjusted EBITDA margins. In 2023, we reached an inflection point, demonstrating our ability to get operating leverage and added over 13 points of adjusted EBITDA margin.
That took our margin to over 17%. In short, we've been able to demonstrate that we can turn our incredible product into a profitable business. Now how did we do this? We did this by making our app more fun, engaging and effective, which encourages learners to tell their friends and family about us. The more learners we attract to our platform, the more learners we convert to subscribers. And the more subscribers we have, the more money we have to invest in our courses to make them even more fun, engaging and effective and so on. Since our IPO, we've added about 18 million daily active users and over 50 million monthly active users, most of whom have come to our platform through word of mouth. We've supplemented that organic growth with a cost-effective social-first marketing strategy, which earned us three billion social media impressions last year alone.