Why Duolingo’s Engagement Strategy Won’t Work For Every App — Asya Paloni, Welltory

On the podcast: What to do when there are no jobs to be done, how to build innovative features, and why copying Duolingo’s engagement strategy probably won’t work for your app.

Key Takeaways:

🏆 To win over a mass market, you need to discover your app’s trigger. Apps serving niche audiences often have a well-defined job-to-be-done. Apps aiming for broad appeal, however, need to identify the triggers in a user’s daily life they will optimize for, in the absence of a specific user goal.

🪄 A framework for user retention. Apps that serve a mass audience need to work extra hard to engage and retain users. While niche apps might be inherently more retentive, they too would benefit from making the app: magical, relevant, intuitive in real-time, novel, and pleasurable.

🥅 Why you might not want to make “the Duolingo” of your niche. Apps like Duolingo try hard to shame you for not using them but make completing the day’s goal quick and easy. This approach may not be suitable for all long-term goals and doesn't work well when your aim is to retain as many users as possible.

🧑🏼‍🎨 Innovation isn’t accidental, it’s designed - here’s a framework to help:

1. Always align with your mission.
2. Visualize the specific user you’re building this feature for.
3. Specify the triggers you’re addressing.
4. Know the job to be done for the user.

Think through all of these areas when prioritizing your backlog.

👍🏼 Some features should be considered must-haves. Features that all your competitors have, fulfill a promise you sell users on, or whose absence will drive users to a competitor, or cause high levels of frustration if missing, should be prioritized. Deciding whether to prioritize these over innovative additions is up to you.

🦄 The other feature category to build for is “delighters.” While it’s difficult to know whether a feature will delight users, they typically drive retention, complete a known job in a delightful or magical way, and create “aha” or “wow” moments for the user.

About Guest

👨‍💻 VP of Strategy and creator of core features at Welltory.

💡Asya leads her team to build thoughtful, mission-aligned features that delight 8+ million active users.

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Episode Highlights

[0:44] The Welltory story: How (and why) Jane Smorodnikova founded Welltory.

[6:55] Trigger happy: Some apps don’t have an obvious “job to be done.” When this happens, finding and nurturing the trigger for users to open your app is crucial.

[10:18] Making magic: Welltory’s framework for building a delightful, sticky app: Make it magical, make it relevant, make sense in real time, make it novel, make it pleasurable.

[21:14] The Duolingo of wellness apps?: Why Duolingo’s retention strategy wouldn’t work for Welltory.

[26:16] An innovation framework: When deciding what new features to build, align with your mission, know your personas, identify their triggers, and figure out what immediate and high-level problems you’re solving for them.

[37:11] Driving retention: The secret sauce for retaining users for the long term? Make your app experience magical and novel, provide relief, personalize and gamify the experience, and give users bragging rights and social sharing features.

[40:32] Feature deal-breakers: Make sure you build both must-have and nice-to-have features to avoid frustrating users and prevent them from switching to a competitor app.