GTM Sauce

Duolingo · B2C · language learning app

Give 3 free days of the paid tier, no card needed, even to current subscribers

Effective for free-to-paid and for upgrading subscribers to the top tier, per guest

Workedupsell-expansionpaywall

What they did

'Free taste': a three-day, no-strings trial-like experience of Super or Max, with no auto-convert. User can convert during or after. Also used for paid-to-paid: Apple won't allow another free trial to an existing subscriber, but a Super subscriber can get a Max free taste and then return to Super. Aimed at users hesitant to start a real trial.

What happened

Guest calls it a really effective lever for free-to-paid and paid-to-paid, especially getting people to try Max with video calls.

In their words

How Clarity and Personalization Help Drive Duolingo’s Growth – Anmol Tiwari, Duolingo

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Anmol Tiwari… all of this is that imagine if I asked you from a business standpoint, or even from a user standpoint, you might benefit from having trying a product over multiple periods, but spread across a little bit. And from a business standpoint, it's better because now you as a user have to decide four times, three or four times, whether you want to make this purchase or not. And of course, aggregated across those, we'd see that it's an effective lever.

Anmol TiwariThe second point that I want to make is what we've seen is that of course, not everyone is as comfortable to start a trial. Or for whatever reason, there's a lot of hesitation despite all the things that we try and do to try and increase clarity of when you're going to get a reminder, et cetera. So we have this concept of a free taste where we basically can offer you a trial-like experience, which is three days, but with no strings attached. You get three days of the service. You can try the subscription tier, Super or Max. And at the end of that period, you get to decide whether you want to convert or not, or during the period, you can decide whether you want to convert or not.

Anmol TiwariAnd that's been a really effective lever for not just free to paid, but paid to paid, because to your point about Apple, it's quite difficult for ... We can't offer another free trial one, you're already a paying subscriber. But what we can do is we can offer you a free taste and then still take you back to the original subscription tier that you were on. And that's been a really effective lever for us to get people to try our highest tier, Max, with video calls, especially.

Anmol TiwariOne last point is, when you think about free taste or free trials, it doesn't just extend to the tiers or the whole product. Sometimes you can even extend it to a single individual feature. We have something called a video call, which is part of the Max tier. And what we've seen sometimes is offering just enough free tastes of that video call just in isolation. Just one call is actually not a bad way to try and get people to try a feature and see …

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Tags: reverse-trial, free-taste, no-card, tier-upgrade