| In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! If you like it, please share it on social networks! Share 💡JC's Newsletter
🔎 Some topics we will cover this week Examples and ideas to create successful “ritual social apps”. Targeting audiences with obsessive behaviors to get your flywheel spinning. Shadowing your customer to create the most useful product. How Duolingo achieves growth without paid marketing. Why giving users what they want is not always the right strategy.
👉 In the Next Era of Social, Build Rituals, Not Habits (Every) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? I think Alan (Daily) should be about creating intentional moments once a day, that are not about consumption but feeling good We should be a ritual: “Alan daily, your daily ritual” What would “give to get” mean for us? How can we feel low commitment? “One minute for you a day”? A lot of good tips on how to build a ritual.
Big social—my moniker for the collective of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube—is emblematic of what I call habitual social. Habitual social apps thrive off of your bad habits—things that you’ve become wired to do. Some things feel different, though—taking a few moments out of my day to play Wordle or post to BeReal. I do these consciously and attentively, as daily rituals, and I’m optimistic that social products can foster rituals, not just habits. Ritual social apps aim to create regular, purposeful moments, even if small ones; they’re at their best as a mindful microdose of meaning and feel-good.
Routines require more commitment to maintain. For many of us, going to the gym or intermittent fasting are routines; we have to make a conscious effort to maintain them, or else we’ll stop. Rituals require the most intention. Rituals have meaning beyond the action itself; they celebrate the purpose, the “why” of a repeated action. A daily meditation practice or even a few moments of quiet while solving the New York Times crossword can be rituals that give us comfort and joy. Definitions aside, a ritual has a few key characteristics: 1. It’s intentional. You consciously engage and are present. 2. It’s participatory. You’re active rather than passive. 3. It’s meaningful. It’s valuable beyond the action itself or any utility. It’s often emotional—e.g. nostalgic, fun, celebratory, identity-forming. 4. It’s consistent. It’s reliable in timing, expectation, quality, etc. 5. It’s finite. There’s a constraint around time, effort, or action itself.
Examples: Dispo: Take retro-style photos that you can’t see until tomorrow. It’s about capturing spontaneous moments, not attaining selfie perfection. You can take pics any time but they’re only “developed” once a day—the epitome of “create whenever but wait to consume.” HQ Trivia: Compete in a quick game of trivia twice a day. HQ Trivia is a ritual social game (and a storied one, now hosted once a week). Simple games are more participatory than passive consumption formats. And the single live, public show per week helps get critical mass, resulting in a collective experience. Sush: Raise virtual pet “sushi” with friends. You pick one friend to share each pet with (and you can raise many). If you don’t care for them regularly (read: daily), they may die or leave you for “new horizons.” Sush is a more intimate, ritual social game. Wordle: Solve a five-letter daily word puzzle. The single-player game is live at midnight every day and requires just a few minutes of focus. It gives you a sense of accomplishment; you can hack ways to do it with friends or family. The sharable yellow-green score grids heighten the collective experience.
Good ideas: Give-to-get: In a give-to-get model, you have to create to be able to consume. Why is this good? The canonical 90/9/1 rule of big social says 90% of users lurk, 9% contribute a little, and 1% a lot. Give-to-get means every active user contributes. It’s a mechanic that encourages presence and participation—something core to ritual apps. Limited supply: limiting supply can help set up a long-lasting ritual. Wordle’s single puzzle a day is refreshing. It feels low commitment, and you get a sense of accomplishment from “completing” a defined task.
Scheduled or timed release: Whether you want a user to create, participate, or consume, you can let them do it any time or make consistent timing a feature. For multiplayer experiences, allowing a user to create at any time but wait to consume is one ritual-building mechanic. Bounded notifications: The ever-powerful notifications, when used correctly and sparingly, can be a great reminder and call to action. And the more consistent and actionable, the better. Streaks: The consistency underlying ritual apps can itself be gamified to create a sense of achievement and joy, something that has intrinsic value and can be amplified extrinsically. Users who maintain long streaks with friends revel in the strength of the relationship. Sush builds streaks into a more game-like format with a pet shared by you and a friend. Streaks can be single-player, too (e.g., Wordle streaks, BeReal memories). What makes a ritual likely to gain adoption? Rituals don’t have to be low commitment, but the less they ask of you, the more likely I believe they catch on. For example, I’m more likely to start a new one-minute ritual than a one-hour ritual. And given the focus on participation, lowering the tangible and psychological barriers to contribution is key.
👉 Thread by Nikita about building product (PingThread) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? How can we better test new products? What sign up flow do we want? How to form habits and rituals, and how to push exposure on other networks. How can we make it a low investment? How can we make Alan the app you open in the toilets? What is our inflection point? Starting a new job, having a kid? Should we target health addicts first? If your product requires a "partnership", run. Trust your instincts.
A reproducible testing process is more valuable than any one idea. Innovate here first. If you need to launch nationwide to test your product, it's not a good test. You will prematurely exhaust your audience's attention and limit future shots. If your product works in one community (like a high school), it should work in all of them. Excessively long sign up flows are fine if it leads to higher activation rates. Most people don't bail after installing something. Habit formation requires recurring organic exposure on other networks. Said another way: after people install your app, they need to see your content elsewhere to remind them that your app exists (e.g., Instagram photos on Facebook, TikTok videos on Instagram).
If you can't use your app from the toilet or while distracted—like driving—your users will have few opportunities to form a habit. There is a graveyard of live video apps that didn't make it because of the attention they require. Great products take off by targeting a specific life inflection point, when the urgency to solve a problem is most acute. Facebook ➝ Starting at a school Linkedin ➝ Getting your 1st job Slack ➝ Starting a company
Audiences that exhibit obsessive behavior tend to be the best beachhead for new products—such as gamers, teens, and hobbyists. You need this obsessive engagement at the beginning to get the flywheel spinning.
Positive feedback loops are necessary to reach "escape velocity." If your product offends someone, it's probably one version away from something special. If your product requires a "partnership", run. All you can do is get to know your user better than anyone else and trust your instincts.
👉 Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit (First Round Review) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? While time-consuming to spend months shadowing social workers when she could have been heads-down building, Curcuru’s effort was well worth it — within eight months of building the new product, Binti had contracts with 21 out of 58 California counties.
👉 Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams (Duolingo) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? How Duolingo avoided paid marketing through building the best product and giving it away for free. We should have also different types of members (reactivated, new , resurrected, current).
Many companies grow through paid marketing, but at Duolingo, our strategy is a little different! As of early 2023, ~80% of our users were acquired *organically*—maybe they followed us on social media or heard about us from a friend—and we maintain this organic growth by building the best product we can, and giving it away for free. Our hope is that eventually, learners will enjoy using Duolingo so much that they pay for a set of premium features—and it’s working! We’ve found that 7% of Monthly Active Users—and growing!
In other words: Our business grows because learners love our product and spread the word to their family and friends, some of whom eventually download the app and subscribe. Rather than investing marketing dollars to drive immediate revenue, we play the long game. The Growth Model is a series of metrics we developed to jump-start our growth strategy with data. It is a Markov Model that breaks down topline metrics (like DAU) into smaller user segments that are still meaningful to our business. To do this, we classify all Duolingo learners (past or present) into an activity state each day, and monitor rates of transition between states. These transition probabilities are monitored as retention rates (e.g., NURR or New User Retention Rate), “deactivation” rates (e.g., Monthly Active User, or MAU, loss rate), and “activation” rates (e.g., reactivation rate).
The model classifies users into 7 mutually-exclusive user states: New users: learners who are experiencing Duolingo for the first time ever Current users: learners active today, who were also active in the past week Reactivated users: learners active today, who were also active in the past month (but not the past week) Resurrected users: learners active today, who were last active >30 days ago At-risk Weekly Active Users: learners who have been active within the past week, but not today At-risk Monthly Active Users: learners who were active within the past month, but not the past week Dormant Users: learners who have been inactive for at least 30 days
As the arrows in the chart indicate, we also monitor the % of users moving between states (although we watch some arrows more closely than others). The goal of these simulations was to identify new metrics that - when optimized - were likely to increase DAU. We did this by systematically pulling each lever in the model to see what the downstream impact on DAU would be. What opportunity are we leaving on the table by reducing a diverse learner base to a simple average?
👉 Disney Expectations, Twitter Expectations, Silicon Valley Expectations (Stratechery) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? One of the things that bothered me about that Chapek interview at the WSJ Tech Live conference that I quoted last week was how he kept returning to how Disney had to give users what they wanted. That is all well and good in many aspects of business, but it’s not always the right strategy when it comes to being a differentiated content maker. Giving users what they want is the provenance of TikTok, Reels, and YouTube, deciphering preference signals from billions of users in order to choose the best content from hundreds of billions of hours of user-generated content acquired for free. Disney’s most essential strategic advantage lies in its ability to create new content that users could never create on their own, but want all the same, and that takes vision.
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