Duolingo

“If Duolingo didn't have This unique voice and leaned into the humor and wanted to be irreverent as a brand and was so focused on connecting with people where they were and ready to take risks that might seem, you know, maybe unorthodox in terms of, especially …”

“We launched Duolingo in India and didn't realize, because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did, that most people set their phones, phone UI in India to English, because typing in Hindi is hard, and of course there's a lot of languages th…”

“When I was hired by Duolingo as a consultant and as an employee, my mandate was make Duolingo grow. Here's no budget. I had no budget and people are shocked.”

“And we tested the size of the puzzle, the size of the puddle and the number of tears that came out of. His eyes in terms of effectiveness.”

“When we were testing screens to get people to convert into paid users on Duolingo, we found that including something like By paying for Duolingo, you're making language learning accessible to millions of people that actually improved the metric.”

“I went and launched Duolingo in China, and it got downloaded by a million people in the first day, and then the app got blocked, and we, you know, because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do, and then everyone rated the app, like, one…”

“If as a startup, whether it be early stage, but as a startup, you focus too much on those marginal differences between groups of people, you can run the risk of making big mistakes, which is making too many changes too soon and learning very little and adding …”

“More than 50% of our A-B tests didn't work out.”

“More than 50% of our A-B tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense.”

“I went and launched Duolingo in China, and it got downloaded by a million people in the first day, and then the app got blocked, and we, you know, because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do, and then everyone rated the app, like, one…”

“Once you have badges and people want them, you can now ask people to do anything like go find friends. Go buy things like, you know, whatever it is. And so like we had, we impacted almost all metrics across the company positively, including some we hadn't expe…”

“We launched Duolingo in India and didn't realize, because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did, that most people set their phones, phone UI in India to English.”

“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,…”

“We used to say, continue our like standard CTA is continue. And we changed that to commit to my goal. And it was like a massive win”

“We thought once we built you know, a goal picker screen where you could pick between different streak lengths, we were like, oh, well, let's like recommend that users do a hard, you know, a harder goal and thinking that, okay, well, a harder goal is going to b…”

“And so we actually tested, Hey, if you do one exercise, Just one exercise in a lesson will extend your streak... What we realized when we ran this experiment is you know, DAUs moved not one bit.”

“What we found is that if we wanted to drive DAUs and Duolingo Cares, you know, our growth Northstar is DAUs, the metric that is most effective, you know, where a percentage change in that metric is, is most effective at driving DAUs is current user retention r…”

“And we decided, hey, let's add XP in there. And so let's show your XP ticking up as you're going, you know, through a lesson. That's going to make the user feel good. It's going to give, you know, show you what you've earned. You're gonna be less likely to qui…”

“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…”

“We shut down about half of our experiments. So half of our experiments lose.”

“We have tried a bunch of ways to have much more complex logic and what always wins is 23 and a half hours.”

“We captured, you know, just what happens if we add an opt out button and adding an opt out button when you would think like as a PM, oh, I'm like, you know, now users might not engage with my feature. That's a bad thing, but it was a huge win to let them do th…”

“All of our changes at Duolingo go through product review that, you know, are reviewed by Luis. Luis reviews every single change that, you know, we propose or every experiment that we run”

“Eventually you just hit a local maxima and you say, like you talked about lunch and neutral experiments. This is a great example where it's like, all right, cool. Now we need to throw a bunch of this stuff out based on all the learnings. Can we reset this real…”

“We had a feature in the day, you know, back in the day called streak repair. We give you your streak back. You had to pay gems, but we found that worked way better was a feature called earn back. And this is basically where you would have to do a certain numbe…”

“When you can be really laser focused on my goal each quarter is to make this metric go up. I think it's much easier to make sure that you're working on the highest ROI thing. I think when you think more about like, oh, I want to make this feature better. I thi…”

“If we're adding something and it's neutral, we tend to shut it down because it's just more cognitive load. It's something that we're gonna have to start building around a new UI element that we have to figure out how it fits into our system.”

“Your phone, you know, like there being a really cool haptic pattern as you extend your streak all of this stuff wins and it's cool because I think it wins There's a few reasons. One is it just makes you feel good, right? You know, you get some cool moment in y…”

“I mean, if you look at the numbers, I think pretty objectively has been our biggest growth lover for driving DAUs.”

“I ran some tests that just like tried to, in eight words, explain what a streak was. That was it. And it was a massive win because it really required, like it really dumbed down here is exactly how the streak worked. And it really helped users just understand …”

“It was a nice win, but we had added that UI element and You know, at least at the time, it was less clear what we would do with it, and we realized that, like, long-term, it was just gonna get in the way, and we'd rather, for simplicity's sake, pause that, you…”

“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…”

“One of the most impactful experiments we ran was about, this was actually as I was joining, we had, or just after I joined, we had run this experiment was to move it from a XP based streak to just do one lesson a day and you'd extend your streak. And, you know…”

“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 …”

“So we have right now over nine million users with a year plus streak.”

“We find that the more we make it look like a calendar, days on top, you know, little circles that check, like the more we make it look like calendar, the more that people realize, Hey, this is a day, a daily mechanic.”

“And what we found is that once you get to seven days, loss aversion kicks in and you retain. So going from a one to a two day streak, huge jump in retention, two to three day streak, slightly less, but still huge. And it's up until day seven. Once you hit day …”

“If you're gonna go after flexibility which is good finding a way to pull users back into perfection. Is a really important counterweight to have.”

“And I've found this time and time again, it's easy to add things to features that make them win. Like I've worked in retention engagement long enough. I can like add, I know enough like things to pull and bells to add and whistles and to, you know, to make som…”

“One of the, again, the really interesting insight of this experiment was that three streak freezes was actually no better than two streak freezes.”

“We did some UXR in India many years ago, and this was something that just like did not resonate at all.”

“One thing that I can say with certainty though, is give more flexibility when a user is starting their streak.”

“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”

“Over and over and over, like I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Yes, they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. An…”

“The product experience of Duolingo actually like changes multiple times per day for each user, which is pretty shocking.”

“And then we would track back in the product experience. Like, how did you hear about us? And put all those channels in there. And some days it would be like, holy shit, like it's bringing in 20, 30% of like our new users in any given day.”

“So I think these things are usually why I lean toward make sure that the core value proposition that you're providing users is free and is sort of permanently free. And then you layer on kind of a sampling or a taste of some of the premium features that are on…”

“They have templates for everything and like their product reviews are like 10 or 15 minutes. It's just people go in and out. So it's just, it's kind of a surreal environment about how rapidly and consistently they work.”

“We invested actually in some time to essentially add screenshot tracking for, like, a brief period of time in the app, just so we could find out the hotspots of where users were doing screenshots, and you see this in other apps, too. It's not necessarily, like…”

“Duolingo, even though the product they're providing is around language learning, I think the original ethos of how to start the company was really around motivation, right? The hardest thing to its habits, right? How do you build that daily habit? And I actual…”

“If you look at Duolingo, they've done a great job here. There's so many ways you can pay them more for all these little advances, get all these gems, change the color of your app to like something fancy.”