Duolingo: how they nailed their product and became the #1 education app

Monetizing Duolingo

Of course, to survive, Duolingo had to make money in some place. They chose to do this based on ads, monthly subscriptions that remove the ads, in-app purchases and the Duolingo English Test.

75% are working on product

More than 3/4 of Duolingo’s team works on engineering, design, product or research.

Types of organization

It’s the classic battle: product organization v.s. marketing-sales organization.

5 notable experiments and the concrete impact they had:

1. Delayed signup: The Duolingo team found that by allowing users to sign up later and experience some Duolingo lessons first, it could boost the amount of daily active users by 20% .
2. Streak: Another important product aspect the Duolingo team experimented with a lot, is the concept of the “streak”, which it borrowed from the gaming industry.
3. Notifications: On top of that, the team was able to improve conversions over notifications by around 5% just by changing the copy and by testing different timings
4. Badges A classic gamification aspect the Duolingo team added is badges.

Are experiments worth it?

To prioritize , they have 2 simple cost-benefit prioritization rules: What’s the potential impact of the experiment? The Duolingo team even decided that experiments with an impact of below 1% are not worth it. How long will it take to run the experiments?