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THE PERSON BEHIND THE NOTES

I’m Ali.
Growth is my thing.
Now I’m building.

FOUNDERLazywebPREVIOUSLYDuolingoLAZYWEB BACKED BYa16z Speedrun

I’ve spent my career in growth. I love understanding why a product takes off, what makes someone come back, and which small experiment changes the trajectory.

Today I’m building Lazyweb, backed by a16z Speedrun, and documenting the journey here. Before taking the leap, I worked on retention and monetization at Duolingo—work I’m proud of, and the foundation for much of how I think about building products.

The habit that changed my career.

At Duolingo, I started tracking the purchase flows of roughly 220 consumer apps. Every six months, I went back, studied what had changed, and used those patterns to sharpen our roadmap.

The experiments worked. I developed a reputation for knowing which monetization ideas were worth trying. More importantly, I learned how much better your judgment gets when you pay close attention to what people actually do.

That research habit became the foundation for Lazyweb: bringing real product evidence into the places where people—and their AI agents—make decisions.

The full story, in my own words ↗
A FEW CHAPTERS, NOT A PERFECTLY STRAIGHT LINE

How I got here.

  1. 2019

    Write it down.

    An ideas journal became a habit: recording product ideas, questions, feelings, and the arguments going on in my head.

  2. 2020–2023

    Study the beginnings.

    During COVID, I started researching how companies got their first 1,000 customers. I interviewed great founders, talked to early employees, and tried to understand what happened before the success story became obvious. That became First 1000.

  3. 2022

    Join Duolingo.

    I started in retention, moved into monetization, and found my footing in the cycle of research, experiments, and learning.

  4. 2024

    Make a tradeoff.

    Bigger projects at Duolingo meant stepping back from the 20–30 hours a week I was putting into this newsletter. I kept researching and began automating parts of the work.

  5. 2026

    Take my own shot.

    At the beginning of January, I took the leap and started building Lazyweb. I built versions that didn’t work, found a direction people used, met my cofounder Francesco, and eventually left Duolingo for real. Lazyweb is now backed by a16z Speedrun.

Six months into that decision ↗