Luis Von Ahn

So what I like about this model is that it is a small form of wealth redistribution because we're basically getting the rich people to pay for the education of everyone.

So with smartphones, we can reach a lot of people and we can even get the rich people to pay for the whole thing.

This is great.

However, if you're trying to deliver education with a smartphone, you run into a humongous problem.

And it is that smartphones come equipped with some of the most addictive drugs that humanity has ever engineered.

TikTok, Instagram, mobile games.

See, delivering education over a smartphone is like hoping that people will eat their broccoli, but right next to it, you put the most delicious dessert ever made.

If you really want to deliver education to everyone, not only do you have to make it accessible, but also you have to make it so that people want to actually learn.

And with Duolingo, we've been able to do this, and at the highest level, the way we've done this is by making the broccoli taste like dessert.

I'll say it another way.

What we've done is that we've used the same psychological techniques that apps like Instagram, TikTok or mobile games use to keep people engaged, but in this case, we use them to keep people engaged, but with education.

Let me give you some examples of these techniques.

One of the most powerful ones is the notion of a streak.

What a streak is, is it's just a counter that measures the number of days that you've used the product consecutively.

You just take that number, you put it very prominently in your product, and then people come back every day.

And the reason people come back every day is because, well, if they don't come back, that number resets to zero and people don't want to lose their streak.

It works.

Now, on the one side, streaks have been criticized for, for example, getting teens addicted to Snapchat.

But in the case of an educational app, streaks get people to come back to study every day.

Now, to give you an idea of the power of streaks, in the case of Duolingo, we have over three million daily active users that have a streak longer than 365.