How Duolingo reignited user growth
www.lennysnewsletter.com
Phase 1: Increasing gamification
Our first attempt at reigniting growth was focused on improving retention, i.e. fixing our “leaky bucket” problem. We prioritized working on retention over new-user acquisition because all of our new-user acquisition was organic, and, at the time, we didn’t have an o
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Summary
📈 Duolingo's user growth had plateaued over the years.
🔍 A/B testing revealed that notifications were a key factor for growth.
📲 Duolingo revamped its notification system to reignite user growth.
💥 The new notification system led to a significant increase in user engagement.
🌟 Duolingo's user growth was reignited thanks to the revamped notification strategy.
Top Highlights
- Phase 1: Increasing gamification Our first attempt at reigniting growth was focused on improving retention, i.e. fixing our “leaky bucket” problem. We prioritized working on retention over new-user acquisition because all of our new-user acquisition was organic, and, at the time, we didn’t have an obvious lever to pull to supercharge that.
- Resurrected user retention rate (SURR): The chance a user comes back this week if they resurrected (from a longer absence) last week
- As we started diving into this, there was one principle that became paramount. It came from a cautionary tale from Groupon’s CEO. He explained to Luis von Ahn, our CEO, that for a long time, Groupon stuck to one email notification per day. But their team started wondering whether sending more emails would improve metrics
- Phase 2: Referrals Feeling burned after our gamification effort, we completely pivoted away from improving retention and put together a new product team focused on acquiring new users, called the
- we needed to use better judgment in adapting when adopting.
Tags
product management
startup
Duolingo
Learning Method
backlog
finance
product
growth
Domain
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