Metadata
- Author: Jorge Mazal
- Full Title:: How Duolingo Reignited User Growth
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Metrics layer, Metrics layer,
- URL:: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
- Finished date:: 2024-01-14
Highlights
My time at Zynga and MyFitnessPal gave us inspiration on how to segment and model our users by engagement level. Zynga separated their users and measured retention based on the following weekly retention metrics: • Current users retention rate (CURR): The chance a user comes back this week if they came to the product each of the past two weeks • New users retention rate (NURR): The chance a user comes back this week if they were new to the product last week • Reactivated user retention rates (RURR): The chance a user comes back this week if they reactivated last week (View Highlight)
Resurrected user retention rate (SURR): The chance a user comes back this week if they resurrected (from a longer absence) last week (View Highlight)
(New highlights added 2024-01-14
every single user who has ever used the product is in one, and only one, bucket on any given day (View Highlight)
MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) (View Highlight)
The fact that DAU, WAU, and MAU can easily be calculated from these buckets made it easy to model them over time. This is a key feature of the model. Additionally, by manipulating the rates represented by the arrows, we can model the compounding and cumulative impact of moving these rates over time; in other words, the rates are the levers product teams can pull to grow DAU. (View Highlight)
One of the biggest benefits of focusing on CURR was deciding not to work on things that seemed paramount before, especially new-user retention. This was a huge mindset shift for a company that had tremendous success spending years running the bulk of its growth experiments on new users first. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2024-01-22
I hypothesized that we could use these metrics at Duolingo as a starting point to create a more sophisticated model, and use that model to identify a North Star metric. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2024-09-30
Conveniently, the top four buckets of the model add up to DAU. Those buckets are defined as: • New users: first day of engagement ever in the app • Current users: engaged today and at least one other time in the prior 6 days • Reactivated users: first day of engagement after being away for 7-29 days • Resurrected users: first day of engagement after being away for 30 days or longer (View Highlight)