"How Duolingo reignited user growth by doing things that don't scale"

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Hatched by Glasp

Aug 30, 2023

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"How Duolingo reignited user growth by doing things that don't scale"

Duolingo, a language learning app, experienced a rapid growth spurt after implementing a few key product changes. This growth was crucial for the company, as their user base had been growing at a slow rate for some time. The team decided to focus on improving user retention rather than acquiring new users since their acquisition was already organic. They believed that gamification mechanics could play a significant role in boosting retention.

Duolingo had already successfully implemented gamification mechanics such as progression systems, streaks, and achievements. However, they wanted to explore additional mechanics that would have a greater impact. They looked to popular digital games that had higher retention rates for inspiration. One mechanic they decided to test was giving users a finite number of chances to answer questions correctly before having to start the lesson over. Completing a lesson would reward users with a free month of the premium subscription.

Despite their efforts, the increase in new users was only 3%. The team realized that the mechanics they had implemented did not create the same strategic decision-making experience that players had in games like Gardenscapes. They also discovered that their best and most active users were already using the premium subscription, so they couldn't offer them a free month as a reward. This meant that their strategy inadvertently excluded their most valuable users.

To overcome this challenge, the team needed to be more systematic and discerning when adopting gamification mechanics. They learned from Zynga's approach of segmenting users and measuring retention based on different engagement levels. By understanding the different user segments and their retention rates, they could identify the levers that would have the biggest impact on daily active users (DAU) growth.

With this new approach, they created a model that tracked the evolution of user buckets and retention rates. They discovered that the Current User (CURR) bucket had a compounding effect on retention. Moving this metric would have a significant impact on DAU growth. This insight led them to prioritize CURR as the metric they needed to focus on to achieve their strategic breakthrough.

Shifting their focus to retaining current users instead of acquiring new ones was a significant mindset shift for Duolingo. They also realized the disparity in impact between DAU and monthly active users (MAU). CURR's impact on DAU was six times its impact on MAU. Armed with this knowledge, they decided to invest in leaderboards as a gamification mechanic to improve retention.

The team hypothesized that the closeness of competitors' engagement on the leaderboards would be more important than personal relationships. This would be especially true for a mature product where users' friends may no longer be active. By making the leaderboard feature casual and frictionless, users were automatically opted in and could progress by consistently engaging in their language study. The leaderboard feature became the team's first breakthrough in improving retention.

Another area that Duolingo focused on was notifications. They had previously established through A/B testing that notifications could be a significant growth vector. However, the impact had plateaued over time. They learned from Groupon's cautionary tale that too many aggressive email tests could destroy the effectiveness of the channel. They decided to leverage notifications to improve streak retention.

They discovered that users who reached a 10-day streak were less likely to drop off. This insight led to the development of streak-saver notifications, calendar views, animations, changes to streak freezes, and streak rewards. Each improvement contributed to enhancing retention and providing users with a greater motivation to keep their streak going.

Duolingo's focus on retention and implementing scalable gamification mechanics paid off. The company experienced one of its fastest growth rates in history, with the quality of the user base improving significantly. The share of DAU with a streak of 7 days or longer increased almost three times.

In conclusion, Duolingo's success in reigniting user growth can be attributed to their focus on retention and implementing scalable gamification mechanics. By analyzing user segments and retention rates, they were able to identify the levers that would have the most significant impact on daily active users. Their emphasis on providing users with an insanely great experience, even with an early, incomplete product, helped drive engagement and retention. Three actionable advice from Duolingo's growth story are:

  • 1. Prioritize retention over new user acquisition: If your user acquisition is already organic, focus on retaining and engaging your existing users to drive growth.
  • 2. Analyze user segments and retention rates: Understand the different segments of your user base and identify the levers that will have the most significant impact on your desired growth metrics.
  • 3. Implement scalable gamification mechanics: Experiment with gamification mechanics that provide users with a sense of progress, reward, and competition. Continuously optimize and improve these mechanics based on user feedback and data analysis.

By following these actionable advice and continuously iterating on their product and growth strategies, Duolingo was able to achieve remarkable growth and improve the quality of its user base.

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