I watched Luis Von Ahn’s talk at TED. If you don’t know him, he’s the co-founder of Duolingo and he was the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009.

In his TED talk he talks about education. He says a lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes whereas some find it contrary to the fact that it’s something that brings inequality as people who have a lot of money can buy themselves a really good education, and therefore continue having a lot of money.

Whereas people who do not have much money barely learn how to read and write and therefore never make a lot of money; this is especially true in poor countries like Guatemala where the founder comes from.

All of Education is just too general of a problem. So the founder, brainstormed ideas on what to teach people.

He thought of Teaching maths and computer science but eventually, they found that the best subject to start with was teaching foreign languages and that is because :

1. There is a massive audience for that

There are about 2 billion people in the world learning foreign languages, both in school and outside of schools.

Most of these people, by the way, are learning English. About 80% of them are learning English as it can truly transform your life in most countries in the world. Knowledge of English can significantly increase your income potential.

So that is another reason why he decided to start with foreign languages. At that time only a smartphone was very accessible and affordable which is true until now so they made an app then they called Duolingo.

Now to truly be accessible to everyone, rich and poor, Duolingo uses a freemium model to support itself. It means that you can learn as much as you want without ever having to pay.

But if you don’t pay, you may have to see an ad at the end of a lesson.

Now, if you don’t like ads, you can also pay to subscribe to turn off the ads and it turns out that the vast majority of the revenue for Duolingo comes from people who pay to subscribe to turn off the ads.

Who are these people who pay to subscribe to turn off the ads?

Well, they’re usually well-off people in rich countries like the US and Canada.

Who are the people who don’t pay to subscribe?

They usually come from poorer countries like Brazil, Vietnam or Guatemala.

The best thing about this model is that it is a small form of wealth redistribution because they’re getting the rich people to pay for the education of everyone.

So with smartphones, they can reach a lot of people and they can even get rich people to pay for the whole thing, which is great.

However, if you’re trying to deliver education with a smartphone, you run into a humongous problem as smartphones come equipped with some of the most addictive drugs that humanity has ever engineered.

Eg. TikTok, Instagram, mobile games.

See, delivering education over a smartphone is like hoping that people will eat their broccoli, but right next to it, you put the most delicious dessert ever made.

If you want to deliver education to everyone, not only do you have to make it accessible, but also you have to make it so that people want to learn and with Duolingo, they’ve been able to do this.

At the highest level, the way they’ve done this is by making the broccoli taste like dessert.

In another way, they’ve used the same psychological techniques that apps like Instagram, TikTok or mobile games use to keep people engaged but in this case, we use them to keep people engaged but with education.

Let me give you some examples of these techniques.

One of the most powerful ones is streak.

What a streak is?

It’s just a counter that measures the number of days that you’ve used the product consecutively. You just take that number, you put it very prominently in your product and then people come back every day because if they don’t come back, that number resets to zero and people don’t want to lose their streak and you know the best part it works.

Now, on the one side, streaks have been criticized for, for example, getting teens addicted to Snapchat.

But in the case of an educational app, streaks get people to come back to study every day.

Now, to give you an idea of the power of streaks, in the case of Duolingo, they have over three million daily active users that have a streak longer than 365 which means they haven’t missed a day in the last year or longer.

Which country do you think has the longest average streaks for an educational app?

It’s Japan.

Shortest-ever streaks?

Latin America.

Another important mechanism to get people to come back to your product is notifications. On the one side, notifications can be spammy and annoying, but in the case of an educational product, people want to be reminded to learn.

In the case of Duolingo, they have a very sophisticated AI system that chooses when to send the notification and also what to say in each notification to maximize the probability that people come back.

Now, interestingly, even after all this sophistication, it turns out that the algorithm for choosing what time to send you a notification is pretty simple.

Do you know what is the best time to send people a notification?

It’s 24 hours after they used the product last.

There’s an easy explanation. If you were free yesterday at 3 p.m., you are probably free today at 3 p.m. as well.

Now with notifications, you shouldn’t be spamming and they’re not spamming, with Duolingo, They stop sending notifications after seven days of inactivity. If they’re stopping to send people notifications, they should let people know. So they started sending this notification to people saying,

“Hey, these reminders don’t seem to be working.

We’ll stop sending them for now.”

Do you know what people do when they get this notification?

They come back. It’s Passive-aggressive.

These passive-aggressive notifications are good at getting people to come back because they feel like our green owl mascot has given up on them, so they come back.

Luis says I don’t believe that there’s a way to make an educational app be engaging as something like TikTok or Instagram or mobile games.

But the good news is that I don’t think you have to.

See, here’s the thing. When you’re learning something, you get meaning out of it. Whereas when you’re scrolling for two hours on Instagram, a lot of times afterwards, you feel like you just wasted your time.

So I think it’s OK if your educational product is only 80 or 90 per cent engaging as something like TikTok because the other 10 or 20 per cent will be provided by people’s internal motivation, though of course, not much more than that.

In the case of Duolingo, for example, there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States than there are people learning languages across all US high schools combined.

And this is true in most countries in the world.

Thank You 

This is Navneet signing off from today’s blog.

Peace🕊️

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