Blueprint for Global Expansion: What Babbel Learned Scaling Across Markets

Julie Hansen, Chief Revenue Officer & US CEO at Babbel, opened the morning with a candid look at what it really takes to grow internationally – and why the details you'd never think to test are often the ones that matter most.

Babbel did global expansion backwards. Most consumer software companies start in the US and push outwards; Babbel started in Berlin nearly 20 years ago and had to find its way into America.

"There are not that many software companies that are successful in the US having started elsewhere," Hansen said. Zendesk, TikTok and Shopify are on the list, but it isn't a long one.

Europe made sense at the time. The demand for language learning was stronger there on a per-capita basis, and so was the talent – both the language expertise (Babbel's team now spans around 80 nationalities) and the founders, who had previously built the DJ software Traktor in Berlin.

Success at home didn't travel. Babbel became a household name in Germany but struggled in the US. The company opened a US office in 2015 and sent a co-founder over to carry the company culture – but culture wasn't the missing ingredient. American know-how was. Hansen joined in 2017 to build the US team, and by 2022 the US had become Babbel's biggest market, which it remains today.

She boiled the journey down to three lessons: understand the market, understand the consumer, and use AI to accelerate the whole thing.

1. Understand the market

Hansen called this "strategy 101" but stressed it's where expansion plans succeed or stall.

The core questions:

• Is there a demand? What's the total addressable market, and what share can your product realistically own?

• Will people pay? For a premium subscription app, willingness to pay is critical – and it doesn't always line up with demand.

• Is the market growing or shrinking? Growing markets are easier, and more enjoyable, to enter.

• Can you compete and afford to market? Google's data is a good indicator of overall marketing costs in each country.

• Can you handle the regulatory environment? For American companies, GDPR is more than a legal hurdle. European consumers know their rights and expect companies to respect them.

• Are you operationally ready? Localisation, local payment methods and data compliance all need to be in place before launch.

  
  

She also warned that software and systems are usually built for expansion out of the US, so going the other way creates friction at every step.

2. Understand the consumer

"If you forget everything else, I say today, remember this one thing," Hansen said. ''The same product can mean completely different things in different countries.''

Motivation varies by market. In the US, around 40% of interested learners want a language to connect with family or heritage – Polish learners in Chicago, Portuguese learners in Rhode Island, multilingual households. In Europe, that figure is far lower. There, the biggest driver is a career. So Babbel's US marketing leans on connection, while its European marketing leans on professional advancement.

The one motivation that travels everywhere is travel – and finding those commonalities is valuable because they let you leverage creative across markets.

Creative doesn't always cross borders. Hansen shared ads that worked brilliantly in one region and fell flat in another. A German campaign featuring an alien – the idea being that if you don't speak English, you're the outsider – was a polished, expensive production, but simply wasn't relatable to Americans. Meanwhile, a US ad showing a man struggling, failing and finally succeeding at learning a language to connect with his family didn't land in Europe at all. As Hansen put it, European audiences didn't understand why someone would fail to learn a language in the first place.

Even pricing pages are cultural. Babbel's standard "three-pack" pricing (small, medium, large) is a familiar format. But in Germany, the team tested a five-option layout – and it performed better. "In a hundred years, I wouldn't have thought of that as an A/B test," Hansen admitted. German users wanted all the information. Babbel has since tested its way back to a universal three-pack, but the lesson stuck: test assumptions you'd never thought of question.

Payments are local. During Babbel's recent migration to Stripe billing, the team learned that credit cards aren't enough. Launching in markets like the Netherlands without iDEAL, or Sweden without its local equivalent, means leaving conversions on the table.

"Why every country has its own local payment method, I do not know. But it's a fact," she said. Even the US has Zelle, Venmo and Cash App.

Small localisation, big impact. In Babbel's early US days, the number one customer service complaint was that the app taught Castilian Spanish. American learners wanted Latin American Spanish. After convincing headquarters, the team introduced Mexican Spanish – and saw a two-percentage-point increase in conversions. The top complaint disappeared overnight. 

3. Use AI to tackle the hardest problems

"Being that it is 2026, it would be wrong to end without discussing AI," Hansen said. AI has changed how fast Babbel can build and ship – but it hasn't changed why people stick with a product.

So Babbel points AI at the hardest part of the learner journey: speaking practice, where learners need a space to practise without embarrassment. But Hansen was clear that AI conversation partners aren't the same as teaching. Truly learning a language requires both. She expects the novelty of shiny AI experiences to wear off as consumers come to see them as just part of the package. "The expertise, we believe, needs to be human."

Balancing Central Teams with Local Autonomy

Hansen said Babbel breaks it down by channel. Functions like search marketing can be run globally, with AI taking them a long way. Culturally grounded work – brand, humour, whether a podcast is even relevant in a market – stays local. Babbel's creative team is run from Berlin with people in both Berlin and the US, because, as Hansen put it, an American creative director can't make work that appeals to Europeans, and vice versa.

She pointed to a competitor's well-known stunt in which it killed off its mascot everywhere except Japan, where the local team pushed back on cultural grounds. "Hats off to them," she said. Her rule of thumb: the more marketing is rooted in cultural expression, the more local it should be; the more universal it is, the more it can be run globally. She expects teams to keep shrinking, with more handled centrally over time.

Key Takeaways 

Babbel's path to the US took years; a dedicated local team and plenty of assumptions overturned along the way. Hansen's message was that global expansion is rarely about the big strategic leap. It comes down to doing the market homework and getting close enough to local consumers to spot what headquarters can't. That might be a pricing page, a payment method, or a dialect. AI can speed all of this up, but it won't replace the local understanding and human expertise that make a product feel like it was built for each market.