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Duolingo · B2C · language learning app

Add new subjects inside the main app instead of launching new apps

Separate apps were 'hard mode'; in-app works better, but many users still don't know

Mixedportfoliofeature-development

What they did

Launched math as a separate app, planning one app per subject, then moved math, music and chess into the main app's course switcher with light promos. Picked subjects that are fun to teach on mobile, have existing demand, fit bite-sized skills and have a senior internal champion (skipped coding and running). Each took 6-12 months of prototyping and dogfooding.

What happened

Many users learn multiple subjects, and cross-selling inside the app is far cheaper than growing separate apps; but discovery is unsolved: many users don't know the subjects exist.

In their words

Why Your Free Users Are Your Real Growth Engine – Cem Kansu, Duolingo CPO

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Cem Kansu"It is less relevant exactly what that topic is that might change over time, as long as I'm improving myself in something." That led us towards, "Well, let's make it easy for these folks to do that." So that was one.

Cem KansuThe other one is just the business realities of growing a separate app is extremely expensive. While we were like, "Why are we playing hard mode when we can play easy mode? Because in the same app, you have a user base, it's way easier to get a user that is in the main-app to try something new than get them to download an entirely new app."

David BarnardIt's so crazy to hear that from you. I mean, of all the companies with tens of millions of users and beloved and everything else, that the separate app was hard mode.

Cem KansuWe integrated there and honestly, it's worked fairly well because we do already have a lot of users that learn multiple languages per day and they started discovering it. We also did some light promos just to raise awareness on the topics.

Cem KansuThat said, this remains a bit of an unsolved problem, if I'm being honest, which is a lot of our users have no idea that we also teach math, music and chess.

Cem KansuSo next year, we're still going to try to figure out how to make sure that at least our user base that's coming to the app every day is aware that these topics exist.

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Tags: multi-product, new-subjects, cross-sell, separate-apps