Your Next Customer Is Already Inside

Recently Duolingo mentioned something almost as an aside on an earnings call, that their chess feature hit seven million daily users in under a year, which is a wild number for a language app that decided to teach chess. And after twelve years in this field, here's what jumped out at me: they didn't go find seven million new customers. They found seven million new reasons for their existing customers to open the app.

This is Option Two from my book, Strategy is not Planning. Breaking your audience down into subsets without changing your core product, kind of like disposable cameras coming back for weddings and festivals even though the camera itself never changed.

I always tell people to define their audience devoid of emotion, because the second you get attached to who you think your customer is, you stop noticing who they're actually turning into.

Duolingo already had over fifty million people opening the app daily for language lessons. Instead of spending a fortune trying to drag in a new audience, they looked at the people already inside the app and asked what else they might want to learn, and chess quietly became one of the fastest-growing things they've ever launched.

Lego did the same move from a completely different angle. They didn't reinvent the brick, they just started openly building for the adults who never stopped loving it, the ones building Formula One cars and botanical bouquets out of Lego on their kitchen tables. It helped push their growth well past the rest of the toy industry, which itself has been riding a broader wave of adults buying toys for themselves.

Seth Godin's whole career is basically built on one idea: you can't be everything to everyone, so stop trying. He talks about finding your smallest viable audience and actually serving them instead of chasing some imaginary mass market that doesn't care about you. Lego didn't try to win over people who think Legos are just for kids. They doubled down on the ones already building sets at thirty five, forty, fifty years old.

So before you go chasing a brand new audience that doesn't know you exist yet, look inside the one you already have. There's probably a whole segment in there you haven't given a reason to stick around for yet.

Sources: Duolingo Q4 2025 earnings call (Chess DAU figures); Lego FY2025 financial results, reported March 2026; Circana kidult and adult toy-buying data, 2025 to 2026.