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The secret to Duolingo’s exponential growth
- Duolingo's VP of Engineering, Sean Colombo, shares five growth lessons learned over a five-year period, starting with the importance of maintaining a sense of urgency for driving compound growth.
- One way to maintain a sense of urgency is to launch winning experiments quickly, compounding benefits over time, which is particularly true if using an organic growth model like at Duolingo.
- The Duolingo model relies on word-of-mouth and retention metrics, which create the kind of compound growth effect that has driven its success.
- One strategic advantage for Duolingo is that its users want to build a habit, which means that if they receive useful notifications, these tend to be well-received.
- Sean Colombo explains that when it comes to copying, not innovation, the approach should be to use a system that closely resembles an existing successful one, adapted to your app.
- Colombo emphasizes that making incremental changes to established notifications, rather than killing the channel or sending additional emails that may compromise the user experience, is key to maintaining user engagement.
- The use of notifications has been a source of continued growth at Duolingo, delivering consistent small-to-medium gains year after year.
- Duolingo sets a very high bar for criteria to justify the need for additional notifications to avoid spamming users.
- The article concludes that these growth lessons can be applied to other apps and platforms to achieve long-term product success.
- Other lessons include staying focused on your strategic advantage and identifying one specific strength that aligns well with current opportunities. The most innovative approaches can be taken when your product is already at the cutting edge.
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