The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Tue, 22 Apr 2025
How do you get someone to learn everyday? Make it addictive… in a good way. Luis von Ahn has mastered engagement with Duolingo, transforming it into the largest education app on earth with over 40M daily users. And in our exclusive interview, Duolingo CEO announces the next product: Chess.In this episode, you’ll hear…Why the CEO (proudly) calls Duolingo “addictive”Why he will never open an office in Silicon ValleyThe psychology behind push notifications, streaks, and the unhinged owlDuolingo’s viral super bowl commercial (aka “The Growing Butt”)Using fire to fire fight in the fight against social media “If it’s not fun, it won’t work”Why “screen-time” isn’t a problem — it’s inevitableWhy artists will beat nerds in the age of AIHow millionaires on Duolingo subsidize migrantsWhy Duolingo employees didn’t want to make money (at first)Watch the extended version on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tboypod —-----------------------------------------------------Subscribe to our new (2nd) show… The Best Idea Yet: Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinksEpisodes drop weekly. It’s The Best Idea Yet.GET ON THE POD: Submit a shoutout or fact: https://tboypod.com/shoutouts FOR MORE NICK & JACK: Newsletter: https://tboypod.com/newsletter Connect with Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-martell/ Connect with Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-crivici-kramer/ SOCIALS:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tboypod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tboypodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tboypod Anything else: https://tboypod.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What makes Duolingo so addictive?
Well, the biggest thing I keep telling people and nobody seems to listen to me, first person I ever had to fire, we're adding another subject. And it is not one that many people have expected. You could see his butt crack. And then it started growing, like his butt started growing. Started really realizing, okay, we can be a little more savage.
I actually believe that as AI matures, what's going to be most valuable, the only thing he wants in life is for you to do your lesson. And the obstacle is that you're lazy.
Our guest today can say hello in every one of those languages.
True.
Probably Dothraki too. Because Duolingo is the largest language app on the planet used by 40 million people every day. But Louise Von Ahn aspires for more than just language learning. because he wants his app to become the world's first super app for all things education. Our guest today, Luis Van An, was born in Guatemala, but launched this tech business in Pittsburgh, PA.
Although his app uses all the growth hacks that were invented in Silicon Valley. He created a mascot so popular Dua Lipa is trying to date it. An unhinged owl mascot. That's such a meme. It got its own skit on SNL. And on today's show, Luis will announce Duolingo's next product. That's right. Duolingo's next new thing will be revealed right here on T-Boy.
Yetis, today we are sitting down with the lord of the language. The sultan of streaks. The baron of being bilingual. Luis Von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. There ain't any subtitles in today's episode, yetis. Nope. But watch out for that unhinged owl. Because that thing is a raptor with some major boundary issues. Today's interview with Luis of Duolingo is the best one yet.
Luis, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. That's quite an intro.
Welcome, man. Great to have you. Really great to have you. Although, we have been doing extensive research on you for weeks, and we did discover you're a people pleaser. Is that true?
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Chapter 2: Why did Luis von Ahn choose Pittsburgh over Silicon Valley?
Yes, we were the biggest fish in this pond. That was good. That helped us. And then the last thing that helped us, I think, is when we started in 2011, Education has never been hot in terms of, you know, funding or whatever. It's just what it allowed us to do here in Pittsburgh is it allowed us to not get distracted by the latest fads.
I'm pretty sure that had we been in Silicon Valley, we would have... Quickly, at the time it was like hyper local apps and then it was like social apps and then it was like crypto. And then it was like, I'm pretty sure that we would have gone through all of this.
And at this point, Duolingo would be like a... I got an AI SaaS platform. We're side hustling outside this podcast right now, Luis.
And, you know, it's not that it's that obviously Silicon Valley is amazing. There's all kinds of good things about it. But for something like education, I think you want to stay for a long time just concentrated on what you're doing and growing it and growing it and growing it. And I think being outside of Silicon Valley helped us for that. Of course, there are many downsides.
I mean, sometimes hiring here was slow. I mean, we couldn't hire. We couldn't find the right person. Most of the people that we've hired didn't. to work here in our Pittsburgh office. We've moved from other cities to work here, which is why we've opened an office in New York.
I mean, we have a few offices, but we have a relatively large one in New York, and that actually helped us hire quite a bit. We're pretty happy with our location strategy at the moment, which, by the way, our location strategy at the moment seems to be to have offices in gray places. Not great, gray. LAUGHTER Like Seattle, we have an office in Seattle. We have an office in Berlin.
We have an office in Detroit. We have an office in Pittsburgh. We're masters of great places. And that was not on purpose. That's just what ended up happening.
You guys look at like the percentage of precipitation every year.
We don't, but we may as well. We may as well. It really is. And we also have an office in Beijing, which is great for different reasons because of pollution. Basically, we have an office in great places. So very quickly, we became the most downloaded app in education. This is even before we became iPhone app of the year. We were the most downloaded app in the education category.
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Chapter 3: How does Duolingo keep users engaged?
How did you get your app to be so addictive?
Well, the first thing we did was to turn it as much into a game as possible. And this is something that came up even before we launched, and it was because we couldn't get ourselves to use our own app. Before, it was a game. I was trying to learn German because Severin's native language is German and he was trying to learn Spanish because my native language is Spanish. I made the Spanish course.
He made the German course. We were learning each other's language. We couldn't get ourselves to use it.
Never go when you don't like the taste of your own cooking.
Yeah, this was not good. So then we decided, okay, well, we need to do something about that. And this is when we decided to make it as much into a game as possible. So the first thing we did is, you know, lessons used to be 30 minutes long. We turned them into like three minutes long. We added progress bars everywhere. We started giving points.
So all of that, it just kind of turned a little bit into a game. That is kind of step one. The next thing we did related to that, this is after we launched, but we added this notion of a streak, which was really powerful, which is a streak just counts the number of days that you've used the app consecutively. And if you stop on a given day, it goes to zero. That
has really been transformative for us, the streak. Now, with the streak, you would think that it's just a number that you put in there and it is, it's just a counter, but it's actually extremely sophisticated. You would not imagine how sophisticated things are. For example, it's not quite true that you can never miss a day.
We give you these things that are called streak freezes in case you miss a day.
I've experienced, full disclosure, I've experienced this. I didn't want to admit it publicly, but I'm willing to do so in front of you, Luis. I've told Jack before in private-
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Chapter 4: What role does psychology play in Duolingo's success?
It works really well. It works really well. And that notification, not only did that notification work really well, it also kind of became the basis of our voice.
Like the brand?
We started really realizing, okay, we can be a little more savage. Yeah. I mean, before that, it was all very technical. And also that notification started giving rise to all these memes about how the owl really wants you back. And that's all the owl wants is for you to do the language.
And he's willing to go through great lengths, including kidnapping your family or whatever it is for you to do your lesson. But it all came from that notification. And then there's all these memes that came about. And our voice really was found. And at this point, we have a pretty quirky voice that is a little savage and makes fun of you sometimes, but it generally works to get you to come back.
We got to ask you about the owl because we have a long list of questions about the owl. But Jack uses Duolingo to keep up with his German, which he studied in college. I use Duolingo particularly before a trip to Italy to catch up on my Italian in the month leading up to it. I'll be walking down the street and someone will hear me say, I am a potato.
And I'm actually using Duolingo, but I'm saying it in Italian. We were curious, in terms of the different languages people are learning and the cultures where they are learning these, are there differences in terms of what gamification tactics work for people in different countries or learning different languages?
No. It's universal. We have heard so much from people who tell us that there are differences. And we also employ country marketing managers in every country, not every country, in every large country. And they tell us all kinds of things like, oh, you know, Brazilians, they're different for the following reason. And they tell us all this stuff.
But people in China, they are different for this reason. Nope. It turns out pretty similar. The things that work...
work pretty much everywhere generally and we just have not found things that are that are very different everywhere there's a little bit of at least not in the app the app is the same everywhere our social media you have to be a little different in Japan Japan's a little different in our social media but every other country is pretty much the same
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Chapter 5: How does Duolingo's mascot influence its brand?
At the same time, on the other side, we have a bunch of famous people or billionaires that use Duolingo. And it really is because it's accessible to everybody. And this really is what we wanted to achieve. We wanted it to be the case that if you had more money, you couldn't get a better system. It's the same system as being used by people who have no money versus billionaires. So that's usage.
Now, we have to make money somehow. And it turns out the way we make money is quite compatible with this because the way we make money is we have this freemium model, which is if you don't pay us... You can use tooling as much as you want, but you have to see an ad at the end of a lesson.
We make some money from the ads, but if you don't like ads, you can turn off the ads by paying us to subscribe. Turns out a small fraction of our users pay us to subscribe. So if you look at our monthly active users, only about 10% of them pay us to subscribe. But this 10% gives us 80 to 90% of our revenue comes from this 10%. So we don't make that much money from ads.
We make most of our money from the subscription.
As context with like Netflix or other subscription services, it's a much higher percentage that are paying.
Much higher. You just, yes, that's where the money comes from. Now, what is interesting for us is because the app is freemium, what ends up happening is that people who don't have a lot of money just don't pay. The people who pay are usually relatively wealthy. And I'm not talking, they may not be millionaires, but, you know, people with stable jobs in well-to-do countries. That's who pays us.
And the people who don't pay us are usually people who don't, may not have a job or who live in a poor country, like, you know, in a
Brazil or Vietnam or something so what we like about this is that it really is the case that the wealthy people are paying for the education of everybody and they probably don't even realize it probably not but it is something that we like a lot have you ever thought about making these wealthy users realize it? Yeah, I mean, we tell them, actually.
Sometimes we say, by subscribing, you're helping support free education for everyone. So we say that, and that does get people to buy, but the main thing that gets people to buy is turning off the ads.
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Chapter 6: What unique strategies does Duolingo use to monetize?
And what they did is they basically started messing with large language models. And for the first several months, they made an entire chess course through large language models, no engineering required. And they came to me with prototypes that they had made, even though these people are not engineers, of like how to learn chess on Duolingo.
And it was just the two of them, and it took them a few months. Now, of course, by now, we're about to launch. We now have a team that has actual engineers to put the stuff in the app, et cetera. But for the first several months, normally, we would have put a much larger team. It would have taken us much longer.
But this really is a case that with large language models, we were able to do this really fast, actually.
100%.
That is what happened. Again, I do want to emphasize, we now have engineers and a team and everything. But this is what happened for the first, call it, six months.
How big a bonus are you going to give Tyler and Edward?
Why'd you ask that? Because I know these two dudes are going to be listening to this podcast and now they're going to be like, yo, where's my bonus? Why'd you do that?
Jack, I think I see the owl showing up behind Luis with a checkbook.
What is this? Don't do that. Don't do that. Anyways, they deserve huge bonuses. They're amazing. And what they did was amazing.
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Chapter 7: Why is Duolingo popular among both migrants and MBAs?
The same thing happens to me. When I speak a language that I'm not very comfortable, I mumble it. Because I'm like... Because I'm shy. I'm shy about it.
It makes you feel foolish.
Yes. But when you're talking to a computer, you don't feel foolish. So I really do think it can be a positive. You know, in terms of the threats, I, you know... People say all kinds of stuff. Like, for example, you know, like you said, there's going to be real-time translation. Why do you need to learn a language? The reality is that real-time translation has been around.
You know, Google Translate has worked really well, and it has been very fast, and it's been around for a long time. It's actually quite useful for things like traveling. If you don't really want to learn a language at all, and you're traveling to a country that for some random reason nobody speaks English, which, by the way, these days is very rare,
You can use this to kind of get around real-time translation, and it's great. But if you look at our users, the two buckets of users, one is people who are learning as a hobby. I don't think they're going to be affected by real-time translation. It's a hobby. It's the same reason why people learn chess, for example. Computers have been really good at chess for at least 20 years.
People still learn chess. So it's this hobby. And then the other big group of people that are learning a language here are learning English. And they actually want to learn. It's not going to be good enough for them to be walking around with airports all the time. They actually want to learn English.
Luis, there was one word you've mentioned before that Jack and I were fascinated by. We were shocked you used because we haven't heard any other techies use it. Maybe because we are with so many in the Bay Area. But you said the word artistic. You employ literally hundreds of artists everywhere. At Duolingo, they craft the branding, the imagery, the clever notifications that you mentioned before.
We were curious about the artists.
I really believe that this is something that has differentiated Duolingo. We call it the design department. It's mostly art. There are a lot of artists in there. About 150 people in there. Wow. By the way, bear in mind, the entire company has 900 people. So about 150 people are, you know, artists. Art majors. And they really, it's amazing because they come up with all the unexpected stuff.
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