Duolingo's streaks feature is one of the best designed, most clever, and also most impactful growth features ever created. It's the single biggest driver of Duolingo's growth to a $14 billion business, and is endlessly copied by other startups. This one feature has created billions of dollars in value, and continues to pay dividends. In a new series, I go behind the product to understand how the most important products and product features came to be—the origin story, how it evolved, how the team and processes are set up, the biggest lessons and wrong turns along the way, and more. In today's episode, I sit down with, Jackson Shuttleworth, Group PM at Duolingo, who leads the retention team and the powerful streak feature. In our conversation, we dive deep into: 🔸 The evolution of the streak feature 🔸 Biggest wins and misses from 600+ experiments 🔸 Keys to building a streaks mechanic in your product 🔸 Tips for building engaging notification systems 🔸 How to build a high-velocity product team 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g-xnQ38Z • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/g9xDqBrm • Apple: https://lnkd.in/g9Zxy4X6 Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Pendo.io — The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application: https://www.pendo.io/lenny 🏆 Vanta — Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny 🏆Coda — The all-in-one collaborative workspace: https://coda.io/lenny Some key takeaways: 1. Streaks are an engaging tool, but they can’t make up for a weak product. If users don’t find inherent value in your product, streaks won’t change that. Build something that users actually want to come back to regularly, then layer in engagement mechanics like streaks to amplify retention. 2. Test copy relentlessly: A small copy change can dramatically affect user behavior. Duolingo’s simple switch from “continue” to “commit to my goal” helped users feel more invested and significantly increased retention. Don’t assume you’ve found the best wording—run tests and keep refining. Copy testing is cheap and can lead to massive improvements in user engagement. 3. Duolingo initially overcomplicated streaks by tying them to XP points, which confused users. Simplifying the system to just completing one lesson a day made the streaks more effective. 4. For Duolingo, retention is most fragile in the first seven days. They found that if they could get users to stick around for that critical week, their chances of long-term retention went way up. 5. Duolingo’s “opt-out” feature, where users could choose their streak duration, gave users a sense of ownership and significantly increased retention. When users make an intentional choice to commit to a goal, they’re more likely to follow through.
Transcript
Duolingo is a $14 billion company that's hitting all time highs too, just keeps going up. I think it doubled in value in the past six months. Streaks is the most impactful feature we have right now. Over 9 million users with a year plus streak. If you look at the numbers, I think has been our biggest growth lever. What Duolingo really focuses on is, you know, how do we help users build habits around language learning. Getting user come back the next day is the biggest problem to solve. Let's get into the mother lode of learnings from the journey of streaks. Talk about the key lessons, insights and also wrong. Turns along the way I'd say like test everything we've run in the last four years over 600 experiments on the street. So every other day we've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing. We used to say continue our like standard Ctas continue and we changed that to commit to my goal and it was like a massive win. There's so much human psychology that you all learn through all these experiments of just like how to motivate people would motivates would demotivate say that you played a mobile game that you've done it for 3000 days in a row. I don't know. Maybe that hits a little bit different than you've learned Spanish for 3000 days in a row.