-
Guide to make your product addictive : Duolingo Business Case Study
My best friend Mayur is by far the most insincere guy I have ever met other than myself!! He and I never completed assignments on time, we were always late to college and we barely passed our engineering!! But surprisingly, last week I discovered that Mayur is learning a new language using an app and he has been doing the exercises for 180 consecutive days without missing a single day! And this is not because Mayur is a changed person but because the app by design makes him complete the exercise! And when I checked the stats, I found a goldmine of product design which every edtech company must use to scale their business! This company that I am talking about is called Duolingo! If you’ve ever learnt a foreign language, there’s a high chance you’ve used it, or perhaps you’ve used it for foreign language testing (DET), or at least you’ve seen its popular green owl mascot – Duo. Duolingo was started in 2011 by a computer science professor and his student with a mission to make education free and accessible to people worldwide. Today, with over 800M downloads and 2 million DET test takers all over the world, it is safe to say that its the company that changed the face of language learning and testing forever. They made this possible by hacking its learning design to such a level that, while the top language learning apps in the world had total app downloads of 26.7 million (26,728,041) in January of 2024, duolingo alone stood at 16.2 Million downloads in January alone! So duolingo has more downloads than its 10 competitors combined! And its retention rate is so high that its more than best performing games like Candy Crush and Royal match!! And now they are using this model to solve even bigger educational problems from English proficiency testing to teaching math and even music! And this extraordinary difference is the result of an insane product design strategy that have been used by legendary products like Instagram, facebook and Snapchat! So if you want to similarly design legendary products and crack the code to customer retention please take notes from this episode! So let’s dive into this case study and understand, How on earth did the designers of Duolingo crack the code to learners engagement? How are they using this model to solve other challenges in the language ecosystem today? And most importantly, what are the lessons that we need to learn from the incredible product design of Duolingo?