Here's how Duolingo plans to expand their coverage to math and music lessons

Fortune

On the latest episode of Executive Exchange, Leadership Editor and host Ruth Umoh sits down with cofounder and CTO of Duolingo Severin Hacker to discuss why the company is now offering math and music lessons and its popular owl mascot Duo.

Transcript

00:00Duolingo launched its music learning program late last year so one can take piano lessons,

00:05for instance. Why this pivot to music and do you see other areas for growth?

00:11Yeah, so it's an expansion. We're actually expanding to both math and music.

00:17Now, why math and music? We looked at a lot of subjects. We looked at coding,

00:23math, music, geography, history. You can teach almost anything, right?

00:27But the reason we started with math and music is because the Duolingo method,

00:32the way you learn languages on Duolingo, lends itself well to those two subjects.

00:38You can learn them on the phone and you can learn it with this implicit learning method.

00:43So if you use Duolingo, it's not explicit learning. We don't tell you like,

00:48okay, this is how you construct a sentence in French or in German.

00:53You kind of pick it up on the go. I mean, we do have hints and tutorials in there as well,

00:58but it's mostly like learning by doing. And we believe, at least for some parts of math

01:04and for many parts of music, that method works too. And that's why we started with math and music.

01:10Your mascot is quite famous. Great marketing strategy.

01:15When did you decide to introduce the owl as your mascot and why?

01:19Oh, that's a good story. So that was very early on. It was actually my co-founder. He said like,

01:26we need to have a mascot. I don't know actually why he thought we needed a mascot. But anyway,

01:30he thought like we needed to have a mascot. And we hired a design agency to help us with the mascot.

01:40And they said like, we're actually not your mascot partner. We can help you with the design of the

01:45first prototype, but we can't get you, you know, we can't make the mascot. So they outsourced that

01:51to another company. And they came back with two proposals. One was like a little cute little robot.

02:00And the other one was this owl, not the current owl, like an earlier version of owl.

02:05It actually said duo in its eyes. It was kind of cool. And, you know, we looked at the two proposals

02:12in the company and we had basically everyone vote. And everyone at the company preferred the little

02:16robot. And it was like, oh yeah, we're going to go with the little robot.

02:21And then Louis said, you know what, we should maybe ask some people outside of the company.

02:25So we asked all of our partners and friends, etc. And all of them said like, you have to go with the

02:30little owl. So that's why I picked owl. Duolingo is also very popular on social media. Why do you

02:36think that is? Oh, on social media. So that's another story. You know, when we started,

02:43so Louis and I, we're both like engineering product minded people. You know, for a long time,

02:48we were like very good at product and engineering and design. And we didn't really know how to do

02:55marketing. And we actually had a good PR team and PR worked quite well. But we just like,

03:01we wished we had good marketing. And then at some point, you know,

03:09we hired a CMO and she hired a lot of people, young talent, and we just let them go. As long

03:17as it's not in the product, because the product, no, you can't mess with the product. But as long

03:21as it's outside of product, you can do whatever you want. And so that's when I started using TikTok.

03:28Actually, we had, you know, TikTok, before we used owl, was extremely unsuccessful.

03:35And then we had this mascot, the, you know, the owl, the costume,

03:39appear in our TikTok. And since then, it's been a huge success. Yeah.

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