Flying: Duolingo’s active users keep soaring. Fun and games: Duo’s gamification and absurd TikToks ar……

Baby bird

‍If you’ve ever been annoyed at having to prove you’re not a robot on a website, and you’ve been irritated by a Duolingo notification to get back to your lessons, you can direct your frustrations toward Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan entrepreneur behind both. Having sold his online authentication software idea reCAPTCHA to Google for “somewhere between $10m and $100m” in 2009, von Ahn teamed up with one of his PhD students, the aptly-named Severin Hacker, to take on the world of education. Deciding they wanted to make language learning affordable, the pair founded Duolingo in 2011, drumming up $3.3m in funding from investors such as Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher.

The platform didn’t launch to the public until June 2012, but ever since the app has soared in popularity, becoming the center of the modern language-learning universe. By leaning into bite-sized lessons, users are hooked in their millions into starting what is otherwise a daunting prospect: learning to speak, write, and maybe even think, in another language.

Saying the right words

‍After its launch, Duolingo picked up traction quickly, nudging towards the top end of the highly-competitive education charts on app stores. By 2014, the company closed a $20 million Series C round, having picked up 25 million registered users. Fast forward a decade, and those milestones look almost petite, with registered users growing to over 500 million by the end of 2020, when we all had newfound time to pursue long-postponed goals for self-betterment.

But, even more impressive, perhaps, is the share of ’Lingo heads who use the app regularly, with 83 million people actively choosing to reckon with reflexive verbs at least once a month, and more than 24 million doing the same every day, per the company’s latest figures. So, how did Duolingo win in a space that’s so competitive? They made learning fun… and addictive.

Word games

‍A huge part of Duolingo’s success is in good old-fashioned entertainment, or — as critics see it — the gamification of the language-learning process.

The company has made no secret of its use of fun to liven up its educational methods, incorporating numerous game mechanics and tactics into the app. As users learn, they are rewarded with experience (XP) points, they can win “gems”, and they need to keep hold of their “hearts” in order to keep playing… all features that could be straight out of a video game. And then of course there’s the streak — arguably Duolingo’s most effective psychological hook — which keeps people coming back to the app day after day, in order to keep their streak alive, with pushy notifications to tell you if you’ve forgotten to log in.

Those mechanics are core to what makes Duolingo so successful, but they’ve also positioned the company for criticism from those who say that they oversimplify the language-learning process, favoring lessons that optimize for in-app engagement over what might be most helpful in real world situations.

Weird is working

The company has also leaned into what has been described as “unhinged” marketing on TikTok. Unlike so many brands that post polished marketing material, Duolingo’s TikTok is meme-heavy… and often just straight up weird.

Videos have included the company’s legal team trying to catch the owl mascot to stop it from posting online, obsessions with celebrities (notably Dua Lipa) and non-stop nonsensical memes. That approach has set Duolingo apart, growing to nearly 10 million followers, as people follow along to see the content that they presumably can’t quite believe is coming from an official brand channel. The company is also planning a 5-second local Super Bowl ad, which executives at the company say will be “quite stunting”.

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Large language model(s)