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how_duolingo_reignited_user_growth.md

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How Duolingo reignited user growth by Jorge Mazal

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth

My big takeaways:

  • What worked - "including launching leaderboards, refocusing on push notifications, and optimizing the “streak” feature"
  • "The first attempt to reignite growth through more gamification resulted in a dumpster fire." On the new user attempts - "We implemented the feature and hoped our second attempt would be more successful. Instead, new users increased by only 3%. It was positive, but not the type of breakthrough we needed. Still, the team doubled down and pushed through, shipping iterations to the referral program and making some other bets, but no avail." (Feels so familiar)
  • Great questions to ask when evaluating competitors:
    • "Why is this feature working in that product?"
    • "Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e. will it translate well?"
    • "What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?"
  • "We needed to be better at basing our decisions on data, insights, and foundational principles. "
  • "One of the biggest benefits of focusing on CURR was deciding not to work on things that seemed paramount before, especially new-user retention. This was a huge mindset shift for a company that had tremendous success spending years running the bulk of its growth experiments on new users first. "
  • "I had hypothesized based on my personal experience as a player that the closeness of the competitor’s engagement would be more important than the closeness of personal relationships." Translation: BS2 people might connect better with other BS2 people, than with other coworkers. 😲
    • "Overall learning time increased by 17%, and the number of highly engaged learners (users who spend at least 1 hour a day for 5 days a week) tripled."
  • With regards to communication tests, "One often underappreciated risk with aggressively A/B testing emails and push notifications is that it results in users opting out of the channel; and even if you kill the test, those users remain opted out forever. [...] This was the outcome to avoid. For our push notifications, we established one foundational rule: protect the channel."
  • "Streaks work for a number of reasons. One of those is that a streak increases user motivation over time; the longer the streak is, the greater the impetus to keep the streak going. When it comes to user retention, this is the exact behavior we want in our users. Each day that a learner comes to Duolingo, they care a bit more about coming back the next day than they did the day before, hence increasing retention and DAU." (Emphasis mine). This is what I mean by creating a retention streak badge!
  • We should consider prioritizing increasing DAU (to a lesser extent, WAU) relative to MAU... DAU is a early sign of retention (in Duolingo).
  • After these changes (streak, leaderboard, notifications to 'keep your streak', etc.) Duolingo had a "much higher number of active users now, [...and they] are much more likely to keep coming back, refer their friends, and subscribe to Super Duolingo. This growth was key to Duolingo’s successful IPO"