30 Million Subscriptions Later: Babbel’s Julie Hansen on Global Expansion and AI

Babbel was one of the first companies to bet that people would pay for a language-learning app, going premium in 2009, long before subscriptions were the norm. Nearly two decades and more than 30 million subscriptions later, it has grown from a Berlin startup into a global brand, with the US now its largest market by revenue.

Julie Hansen, Babbel’s Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO, has been central to that growth. We spoke with her about taking a German app to America, why motivation looks so different from market to market, how Babbel is tackling subscription fatigue, and where AI fits into the learner experience.

Q: Firstly, would you be able to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

I’m Julie Hansen, Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO of Babbel, based in our New York office. I joined Babbel in 2017 to lead our expansion in North America, scaling the US to our biggest market in terms of revenue. Today I oversee revenue across the company worldwide. 

I’ve spent my career building digital businesses. I was Business Insider’s fifth employee and later its President and COO, where I oversaw its rapid growth and eventual sale to Axel Springer in 2015, the largest M&A transaction in NYC digital media up to that point. Before Business Insider, I worked in a number of traditional and digital media companies including CBS, Conde Nast, and Time Inc. I’ve spent about thirty years figuring out how to get people to pay for something digital and keep coming back, which turns out to be great training for a subscription language app.

Q: Babbel was one of the first online language learning platforms, and it has since sold more than 30 million subscriptions. Take us back to the beginning: the idea started in Germany, with a need to learn Spanish. Was there a moment when you realized the company needed to go beyond the home market and expand?

Our founders were originally building a music platform when a casual conversation about wanting to learn Spanish led them to find that there were no online resources to do so. The gap in the market was a surprise to them and, because they already had the skills and vision to address it, they pivoted to language learning. Europe was a natural place to start since it is one of the most linguistically fragmented regions in the world.

Babbel’s demand grew across the EU, but the US was a big bet for us. Babbel was a household name in Germany, but the founders weren’t sure if that recognition would translate to the US. And more important, would Americans even want to learn a language? 

We opened our New York office in 2015 and I joined in 2017. What we successfully tapped into was the enormous culture of self-improvement in the US. At the time, Americans were wildly underserved when it came to digital language-learning resources. By 2022, the US had overtaken Germany as our strongest market.

When you’re weighing expansion, the green light is usually the demand and willingness to pay. When those two factors are in place, invest properly, with local leadership and a local point of view. 

Q: Learners in different countries study languages for very different reasons, like travel, work, or relocation. How did that shape what regions you targeted and the messaging behind that?

Enormously. Motivation is everything in language learning, and we’ve found that it looks different in every market. 

In the US, the number one reason people learn with us is to communicate with family and friends. In fact, our research shows around 40% of Americans who want to learn a language want to connect with their family and/or heritage, compared with about 10% in most other countries. Other countries are more motivated by their career, seeking to learn language to advance their work. Travel is a major motivator across the board. 

Because we have multiple motivations depending on geography, we shift our message to resonate locally. In the US, we lead with connection: talking to your grandmother, understanding the culture you love. Elsewhere, we may lead with the career benefits of language learning or the experiences you can unlock abroad if you speak the language.

My advice is to know the “why” behind your users in each market before you nail down messaging.

Q: Were there any regions that you thought may not be successful but were or vice versa?

The US itself was the biggest gamble. When I joined, there was a real assumption that Americans don’t learn languages because English gets them by – and to some extent that’s true. And where it’s not, there is technology available to help translate, which we actually fully encourage. But despite all the resources available in the translation space, today the US is our largest market by revenue. What we underestimated was how emotional the motivation is here: heritage, family, culture.

Also, there were elements we couldn’t account for or anticipate. For example, when Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl halftime show this year, sign-ups for Spanish jumped 266% versus the previous hour, and the lift held for more than a day and a half.

It was such a clear indicator that these large culturally significant moments influence motivations as well. Americans wanted to be a part of this larger movement. So while we didn’t plan for a moment like that, we were ready for it when the time came. 

Q: There’s a lot of talk about subscription fatigue in the app ecosystem right now, with most apps asking users to sign up or pay. Did you run into reluctance around subscriptions at any point, and how did you tackle it?

Subscription fatigue is very real. U.S. consumers have an average of eight active subscriptions, spending about $118/month, and over one-third of consumers have 10+ subscriptions (including services meant to manage or cancel other subscriptions!). So, yes, the current state of fatigue is palpable. 

However, we’ve been at this for a very long time. Babbel went premium in 2009, when paying for an app subscription was unusual, even controversial. The early team even had to build its own subscription engine because the infrastructure didn’t exist yet, so we’ve always had to earn the payment.

We learned that the value has to be obvious and early. Our promise is that you’ll be having real conversations, and when people feel that progress, they often stay. That’s also why our efficacy research with Yale, Michigan State and CUNY mattered to our users – people wanted the proof that if they invested in their language learning journey with us, it would work for them. 

It’s also crucial to listen to what’s behind the user's hesitation. Our learners told us Babbel can feel expensive and that it’s hard to stay motivated on your own. So we built Group Plan, which offers one subscription for up to six learners so people can learn together. It brings the cost per person down and adds an accountability factor that keeps learners motivated. We also offer a lifetime subscription for people who want to be able to dip in and out of learning on a long-term basis.

So while subscription fatigue is definitely real and present, I’d argue that value fatigue is really what people are experiencing. People tend to cancel the things they don’t use, so we’ve found retention is as important as new user acquisition. 

Q: I’d like to talk about the integration of AI. How, in your experience, has AI transformed the learner experience and the business?

AI has changed almost everything about how fast we can build, and almost nothing about why people learn.

For learners, the biggest shift is speaking. It’s vulnerable, it’s anxiety-inducing and, frankly, it can be embarrassing to get things wrong or put yourself out there. So we created our AI conversation partner, Babbel Speak, to combat some of that anxiety.

It allows learners to practice realistic conversations out loud before having to speak with an actual person. We have found over time that the “average” learner doesn’t really exist, so as we head into our 20th year, we’re gearing up to reveal the largest change to our platform in the company’s history, using AI to personalize every learner’s journey.

Our philosophy is that AI is the workhorse, not the teacher. The pedagogy stays human, designed by our linguists and educators.

On the business side, AI is certainly an accelerant. It helps us move faster on content and creation, but it doesn’t replace actually understanding a market or its learners. We’ve found in our own research, the people who use AI translation most often also report the highest motivation to learn. AI is sparking the desire for connection in a big way, and we’re happy to be there to meet that demand. 

Julie will be joining us in San Francisco next week for her session, Blueprint for Global Expansion, where she’ll share what it really takes to scale internationally: building brand relevance in new markets, structuring monetization across different audiences, and using AI to accelerate the whole process.

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