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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