The secret to Duolingo’s exponential growth

Maintain a sense of urgency to drive compound growth

One of the core things we’ve learned is that a sense of urgency leads to compounding growth .

To get the best long-term gains, you should always have a sense of urgency. The quicker you launch winning experiments, the quicker those changes impact your growth. Not only that, but these improvements ... See more

Consider return on investment when determining the order of experiments. There are many factors that team leads consider when prioritizing projects, but I’d argue that doing the most efficient, high-ROI projects first is the right path, because they will have a longer period of paying compound interest. When teams do quarterly planning, they often ... See more

Identify a unique strength that your company/product has that aligns well with the current opportunities in your environment. Then leverage that strength in a way that others cannot easily replicate. Focus on what sets you apart and use it to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Say you have 100,000 DAUs and a retention rate of 80%, and for every five users, one of them tells a friend each day to download your app (and they do it). You get 20k new users per day just from word of mouth. In this equation, Xn is the number of DAUs today and Xn+1 is the number of DAUs tomorrow:

X n+1 = (X n * 80%) + (X n * (1⁄5))

If you start w... See more