The Secret to Duolingo’s Growth

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.

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

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