Streak Mechanic
topic on 7 shows · 13 statements across 6 episodes · said 22 times in 10 episodes since 2016
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- Female Led SaaS Company $3m ARR Goal By EOY 2016 with Ishveen Anand of OpenSponsorship EP 213
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13 statements about Streak Mechanic, every show
Evan Spiegel fought hard for years to kill Snapchat streaks
“Streaks are one. Like, I did not like the idea of streaks, did not want to do it. I actually fought very hard to Killstreaks over the years. We've always been anti-metric at Snap.”
Hacker: Duolingo's streak feature relies on loss aversion mechanics
“The streak is exactly this loss aversion mechanic, right? So it's like, it's motivating to build up your streak, but it's like, I absolutely do not want to lose my streak, right?”
Hacker: Duolingo ran ~300 A/B experiments on its streak mechanic
“We've probably run 300 experiments fine-tuning the streak mechanic, and that's where you get the gains in retention, and that's what ultimately drives the growth of Duolingo”
Alvarez: Jungle's new streaks feature drove a 20% boost in engagement
“We just launched Streaks, for example, like a week ago. It's already had a 20% boost.”
Any app can retain users with streaks if the core product works
“I'm kind of the opinion that any team, you know, any app out there can introduce a streak. And if you figure it out, it probably works you know, to retain users, but at the core, like you have to have an app that people want to use and people really like using…”
Streak mechanics should require only one atomic unit of app use
“As you're thinking about building a streak, like, I think it's really important to think about like what the unit of use of your app is. The unit of use for Duolingo is like doing a lesson. And so if what we care about is users coming back every day and doing …”
Duolingo ran over 600 streak experiments in a four-year period
“We we've run in the last four years, over 600 experiments on the street. So every other day effective. We're running an experiment”
Streaks work best for products where daily user progress feels imperceptible
“The streak works really well for Duolingo because with language learning, it's really hard to see day-to-day progress and becoming more fluent, like become, and fluency is, is, is, is not even the right word. It's like becoming better at Spanish or whatever. I…”
Streak design must prioritize functional comprehensibility over elaborate visual storytelling
“As you're thinking about designing around a streak, don't get too bought up, you know, or caught up into like, what is this, you know, like the beautiful story that you're trying to tell at the expense of it being a really comprehensible feature.”
Habit and streak-based products should offer more flexibility to newer users
“One thing that I can say with certainty though, is give more flexibility when a user is starting their streak.”
Over-cheapening streaks for short-term engagement is an irreversible one-way door
“You can almost always get engagement wins up to a certain point by just Cheapening the streak, making it easier to extend, letting users have more flexibility, but you kind of got to hold the line at some point. It's not clear where that line is. And once you,…”
Effective Product Streaks Require Effortful Participation, Not Superficial Gamification
“One pet peeve I have on streaks though, is that people think of it as, oh, gamification. I understand streaks. Let's, let's put a fire emoji and a number next to it and it'll be great. It's a, the well-done streaks are a little different. They're very, very ef…”