GTM Sauce

Duolingo · B2C · language learning app

Give users one free AI video call from the top tier

Effective lever for getting people to try the feature, per guest

Workedupsell-expansion

What they did

Instead of trialing the whole tier, offer a free taste of one feature in isolation: just one video call (part of the Max tier), then see if users convert.

What happened

Guest says it has also been an effective lever; no numbers.

In their words

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

Play the episode

Anmol Tiwari… 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 if they want to convert. And we've seen that also as an effective lever.

David BarnardWhat are the specific ways you make it really clear that they're getting this, reverse trial is what it's typically called in the industry, where you don't have a credit card and they actually have to subscribe to get back to the subscription state. How do you make that clear? Is there a countdown? What kind of copy is on the buttons? Because this is something, I know I've heard from other folks who've done this. I've done some of this in my own …

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Tags: free-taste, feature-sampling