Duolingo

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Get insights into Duolingo including business profile, stock information, news, and rankings from Fortune.

Duolingo (DUOL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Duolingo | Fortune

Duolingo (DUOL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | 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.

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

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On the latest episode of Executive Exchange, Ruth Umoh sits down with cofounder and CTO of Duolingo Severin Hacker to discuss why the company is now offering math and music lessons.

Duolingo launched its music learning program late last year. So one can take piano lessons for instance, why this pivot to music? And do you see other areas for growth? Yeah. So it's, it's an expansion to, to we actually we're expanding to both math and music. Now, why, why math and music, we looked at a lot of subjects, you know, we looked at, you know, coding and well, math, music, geography, history, you can teach almost anything, right. Um Or, but the, the reason we started with math and music is because the Duolingo method, the way you learn languages on Duolingo lends itself well to those two subjects. Um you can learn them on the phone and you can learn it with this implicit learning method. So, you know, if you use Duolingo, it's uh it's not explicit learning. You know, we don't tell you like, OK, this is how you construct descendants in French or in German. Like you kind of pick it up on the go. I mean, we do have uh you know, hints and tutorials in there as well, but it's mostly like learning by doing and we believe at least for some parts of math and for many parts of music, that method works too. And that's what I started with math music. Your mascot is quite famous, uh, great marketing strategy. When did you decide to introduce the owl as your mascot? And, and why? Oh, that's a, that's a good story. Um, so that was, uh, very early on. It was actually my co-founder. He said, like we need to have a mascot. I don't know actually why he thought we needed a mascot. But anyway, he, he thought like we needed to have a mascot. And uh we, we, you know, hired a design agency uh to help us, you know, with Mac. And they said, like we're actually not your mascot partner. We can help you with the design of the, the first protype, but we can't get you, you know, we can't make them to mascot. So they outsource that to another company and they came back with two uh proposal. One was like a little cute little robot and the other one was this not the current out, like an earlier version of it actually said duo in its eye. It's kind of cool. And uh you know, we looked at the two proposals in the company and we had a basically everyone, both and everyone in the company preferred a little robot. Uh and it was like, oh yeah, we're gonna go with the little robot and then Louis said, you know what we should maybe ask some people outside of the company. So we asked all of our partners and friends, etcetera and all of them said that you have to go with the L LA. Uh So, so that's why I picked out Duolingo is also very popular on social media. What, why do you think that is oh on social media. So it's, that's another story, you know, when we started. So Louis and I, we're both like engineering products, uh minded people, you know, for a long time, we were like very good at product engineering and design. Um And we didn't really know how to do marketing and we actually had a good pr team and, and pr works quite well, but we just like, we, we wished we had good marketing and, and then at some point, uh you know, uh uh uh you know, we, we, we hired a, you know, a CMO and she hired a lot of people, young town and we just let them, let them go. And I was like here, you know, as long as you are not in the product because the product, no, no, no, you can mess with the product. But as long as it's outside the product, you can do whatever you want. And so that's when they started using tiktok, actually, we had, you know, Tik Tok before we used, was extremely unsuccessful. And then we had this, this mascot, uh the, you know, the, the, the costume appear in our tiktok and since then it's been like a huge success. Yeah.

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