Why Duolingo’s App Engagement Strategy Won’t Work For Every App — Asya Paloni, Welltory

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Asia palone VP of strategy at wel Tre the most popular all-in-one Wellness app on the app store on the podcast I talk with Asia about what to do when there are no jobs to be done how to build Innovative features and why copying dualingo engagement strategy probably won't work for your app hi AIA thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today hi David thanks for having me so I want to get started with the story of Welter and you just told me right before we started recording that Welter is actually a combination of

0:38wellness and laboratory which I think is really cool and maybe is kind of a hint at what the app does but yeah why don't you tell us a story of the founding of the app and then how you ended up joining the team yeah sure so I think Welter being Wellness laboratory isn't just a hint about what the app does it's also a hint about how it was founded so basically my lovely founder Jane she was and is a Serial entrepreneur and aside from being a Serial entrepreneur she also had mentored a bunch of startups and at some point she noticed a that she was suffering from burnout and B that a

1:14lot of the startups she was mentoring were failing not because the idea was bad or that the people were incompetent or that nobody needed the product it's because like as a Founder once you hit too many bumps in the road you just burn out you're just done and then you just you can't rise up up to the next challenge and she became very interested in the mechanics of how it works cuz you know like a lot of people who work really hard they neglect their bodies and it comes back to haunt them the original idea was to solve this problem was to create a health app basically

1:47that could help people prevent burnout so they could live their lives do whatever they want and keep going in spite of all the challenges that we face and the original idea was literally to have like a person service run by humans who would collect people's data from all their Fitness gadgets and trackers and stuff like this and then try to analyze it so you would pay for a service where you have like a personal analyst who goes through your data and is like okay when you sleep less your productivity goes down or when you go for a run like it helps you I don't know increase your

2:21heart rate variability just stuff like that but of course stuff like this is difficult to scale but it was originally like a wellness laboratory literally there were people analyzing people's data and telling them what they need to feel better Jane realized that the metric that most accurately reflected people's well-being and health was a metric called heart rate variability I think everyone now knows that this metric exists it's in your Apple watch it's in the Garment stuff like that but back in 2016 it was not in any gadgets yet and originally Welter was just an app that measures heart rate variability and analyzes it and ass super scientific

3:00cool and personalized way and kind of tells you how your body is doing I'm super Innovative we have actually a bunch of scientific Publications and journals about how our algorithm is the best it adapts the camera really well and the app still does this actually and then it turned so we pivoted to an app and then I think there were a couple of other pivots like at some point we tried even having your own wearable and then we pivoted towards a kind of a Google analytics for health so there's like this one metric that people use to measure their overall well-being and then they connect a whole bunch of other

3:36data and basically look on a really complicated dashboard to see which of their lifestyle factors like how they slept how much they walked and stuff like this all impacted this one important metric and this worked beautifully for a very very Niche audience yeah it's kind of the sometimes a Founder trap right it's like you build something for yourself and then you realize like oh wait I'm the only person and like 10 other people like me are the only target market oh wait a minute we need a bigger Tam for this to be successful yeah so how did you expand beyond that like really narrow niche of

4:13people so this niche of people is like it's not that narrow it's pretty big it's like all the guys who listen to Andrew hman you know people uh people who want the kind of like Google analytics for health are very specific they're either like athletes or they're internal optimizers there's big cohorts of them but we kind of realized that it's not going to work for the mass audience because most of us have no time during the day to do absolutely anything for our health and we're not going to look at complicated dashboards and be like okay I need to add 20 minutes to my sleep in order to

4:48boost my productivity by I don't know 15% or something the next day so we kind of started to try to figure out what it is that people actually want want from health and wellness apps and what jobs they're trying to complete when they're downloading and using these apps and we came to a very interesting conclusion which is that there are actually no jobs to be done in health and wellness apps and what I mean by that so if you look at the overall health and wellness Market you'll see that there's a lot of Niche offers so there's things for athletes because these are the people who are already going on some kind of

5:29run or doing a workout or something like this and they just need an app to help them like track their pacing and stuff like this and then there's apps for people who are really sick so people who have blood pressure issues for example they need a blood pressure Journal because they have to measure their blood pressure every day so for both of these segments like people who are athletes or optimizers and people who are sick something happens to them every single day that prompts them to open the app or use the product and it kind of like gives those those apps fairly High retention rate but for most people

6:03they're not going on runs every day they're not taking care of their health every day and there's no like real life event you know when you have to call an Uber something is happening to you in real life you need to get to a place and then you open this app to get the job done that's a really interesting Framing and as you were talking I was even realizing some of the bigger apps in health and wellness like one that stands out very specifically is drava and kind of in your framing it actually makes a ton of sense that that app grew as big as it did because there's a very

6:37specific job to be done tracking your cycling or there's kind of a main job to be done and then there's all sorts of sub jobs to be done as far as like sharing it with friends and like capturing the leaderboards and things like that but there's that like trigger and I think not enough apps go this deep in understanding that so like if you're struggling with retention if you're struggling with growth it's probably time to take a step back and like do this kind of analysis but then once you realize okay there's not these natural triggers there's not these jobs to be done in this kind of more broad Wellness

7:11app how did you fix that where did you go from there well I'll go on a side note it's not necessarily something that needs to be fixed for everyone sometimes it's okay to just work for our niche market and work for that niche market so well that you completely win them over and I think that's cool and really great like I use a lot of products I keep trying different like weightlifting apps cuz I'm looking for the ideal one and if someone makes me the ideal weightlifting app I will be super happy so I don't mean to say that everyone necessarily needs to look at how do we win this

7:44complicated like Mass Market game but with weltering specifically we have a more broad Mission which is to improve people's well-being with science and technology that serves each individual personally and so when you put it that way you kind kind of have to win over the mass market so all of those people who actually don't have any jobs that need to be done in health and wellness Tech so where we started thinking about it we started looking for a trigger okay there are no natural triggers that are occurring people's lives that would prompt them to open a health and wellness app and be like okay tell me

8:20what I need to do to take care of my health right now but if you walk down the street or if you just like watch people go about their day you'll notice there does a very odd trigger in people's lives like you know when you see someone standing in line and they're kind of bored and to alleviate this boredom they open their phone and they start flipping through like Tik Tok or Instagram or something like this I call this trigger existential horror you don't want to deal with living so you kind of like you start opening stuff and you start reading stuff and you're like okay I'll just distract myself from the

8:53horrifying thoughts that are like going on in my brain so we thought okay the only way that we can make make a health and wellness app for the mass Market is if we use this trigger and somehow convince people that instead of opening like Instagram or Tik Tok they can open a health and wellness app and it would be just as fun and just as entertaining but also good for them so that was our I guess final big pivot where we decided that a wellness app must be extremely entertaining it has to show people something new every time they open the app and it has to really avoid shaming

9:31people because a lot of times people who think about their ideal Health they're like okay I will just give people very specific metrics very specific goals that they have to meet every day but then of course what happens is people open this app they haven't met any of their goals their metrics look bad and that's the last thing you want to see if you're standing in line and you're opening an app to distract yourself you don't want the existential horror to get worse right you you want the existential horror to get better so we embarked on this odd journey of making a wellness app that moves away from the goal setting and the

10:11shaming and more towards the tick tock and Instagram type of entertainment so you've kind of hinted at it but I wanted to actually read off this list because you and I first met an MA in Vegas I was actually in your session and then came up to you after the session because I just thought it was so great so in that session and I went back to the slides and took notes you listed five things I actually wanted to go through each five of these individually you kind of gave the overview but your list that you gave on stage is make it magical make it relevant make sense in real time make it

10:46novel make it pleasurable I just thought that was such a great framework a great list a great series of things to think about and again kind of like you said about if you're not a mass market app you can serve a niche and not have to think about all these sorts of things but I think this is a fun list for anybody to think through so let's think through each of these individually like what do you mean make it magical and then how did that play out in Welter so I came across the concept of magical apps in a very odd way I was reading a

11:17book about the witch trials by this wonderful feminist scholar Sylvia federici and she was talking about why it was so important during the rise of capitalism to break the power of Mag and to eliminate witchcraft because in essence magic at its core is the refusal of work in action so when we think about things that are magical there are things that give people something for doing absolutely nothing and preferably something that's like very pretty and sparkly and like looks nice and makes us feel good so when we think about the ideal health and wellness app I wanted to have that Vibe you have to do nothing

11:58and then you get things that make you feel better and are also good for your health that's kind of the vibe that we're going for so what we do is for example like we have a very intense extremely scientific analysis of people's heart rate variability and we could present this analysis in any way that we like I guess we could give people charts like cool metrics and stuff like that but instead of doing all of this what we did as we packed it into a really cool visualization of like this liquid that changes color and behavior depending on how your body is feeling right now so say if someone is super

12:36stressed it turns red and kind of starts bubbling over almost like over the top or if you have a lot of energy you just woke up and you slept well and like you and I today it'll probably it'll probably be green and then if you're really calm and ready to focus this is my favorite color to get it turns into like an ocean blue so this kind of thing gives people something cool and pretty to look at and they don't have to do anything to get it because we pull their heart rate variability data directly from their Apple watch and we just turn it into this magical thing it's our core

13:09feature and people really love it and I think the reason people love it is that they're doing nothing and they're getting this like magical surprising new thing every time they open the app that is so cool all right make it relevant what do you mean we let our users connect over a thousand different data sources because people care about different things and the idea here was to try to tie people's Wellness Matrix to things that they actually care about so for example if you're a developer you can like connect your number of GitHub commits to Welter we have this algorithm that scans people's data all the time

13:49for scientific data correlations and then to try to like motivate this person in a very personalized way we'll send them a correlation that says hey when you run in the evenings your GitHub commits the next day go up so when you're telling people something that is very personalized you're not telling them okay if you're like super stressed today eventually if you're stressed over and over for long periods of time your risk of a heart attack might increase 10 years down the line they'll be like okay I'll worry about that 10 years down the line but if it impacts something more immediate like my relationships with people my work my ability to pay my bill

14:29people are a bit more likely to care so the more personalized you can get with your segments the better and you Curr of already delved into it but the next one is make sense in real time anything to add there or is that kind of the gist of it is like you need those relevant moments in real time not just kind of relevant to the Future so we recently released a new feature at Welter it's like a more static home screen that shows people how well they're dealing with the world's top killer set and AR stress what I noticed when I was researching a lot of home screens in

15:04these health and wellness apps is that they kind of give you a lot of data to track your day so they'll be like okay this is how your heart rate change this is how many steps you walk this is how many calories you burned but I don't know what that really means for me like what does it mean that my stress level is 48% like I don't know what that means so the idea here was to not just create a home screen that visualizes people's data for them but to create something that makes sense of all of this data so it's actually a home screen that reacts

15:39to absolutely every single step you take and every single heartbeat your watch tracks and make sense of this date and real time instead of just like visualizing it in a raw format and then how do you make all of that data novel The principle of novelty I guess when I talked about our final pivot this is what we ended up doing with the app we created something that showed people something new every time they open the app because it's like a basic mechanism that exists in every single one of these apps that help people cope with existential horror like every time you open Facebook or Tik Tok or Instagram

16:19you see something new like it's a little bit unexpected and that creates a feeling of reward for people and that's why they keep coming back to it so the way we did it and please for the love of God do not do this is before the existence of generative AI we created our very own janky generative AI it was basically an infinite content generation system that would change the text and visuals that people saw depending on how their data changed so we have I think maybe like 45 different message types and then every message types has like nearly infinite amounts of content I think if you took all of Welter content

17:00together that we've been able to generate it would cover like four volumes of Lord of the Rings over this was really difficult it aged me like 10 years I swear um so your stress scores on Welter were terrible during that time exactly but really that's what helped us get that initial retention boost is that people kept coming back to us because they were seeing something new every time they open the app people don't have to do this now like we have a lot of generative AI that can kind of help developers do this without going through the horror that we had to go through at Walter I love that you're also by

17:38thinking through these things kind of taking the tools of the Tik toks and Facebooks and Twitter's and turning them on their head instead of being the negative Doom scrolling you're kind of feeding that dopamine and Novelty seeking with actually like good for you things it's taking the tools of these negative feedback loops in our lives and instead creating a positive feedback loop which I think is really cool and again like not all of these are going to apply to every app but if there's opportunity to use some of these techniques in an app it does it increases retention people enjoy and actually that's the next one we're going

18:16to get to but you want people to enjoy opening your app they're going to open it more so the last one is make it pleasurable what does that mean so what I mean by this is people like things that make them feel good and they don't like things that make them feel bad so if your user is tired at the end of the day and they just had like a whole bunch of meetings they were stuck in traffic for 5 hours they just got home they are not they're absolutely not going to go to the gym they're not going to eat a healthy meal it's not going to happen

18:46for them tonight and in this state if they're opening your app and all that they're seeing is that they didn't meet their wellness and health goals like they didn't make time to meditate they weren't able to go to the gym their calorie count or whatever is super low if they know they're going to see this they're not going to open your app and I know that people have all sorts of feelings about this they're like well but they have to know the truth people have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and like get to the gym even if they had a really hard day but

19:16they're not going to they're not going to open your app and they're going to churn right it doesn't mean that we shouldn't give people accurate information I'm just saying don't make that the only thing your users see if your goal is to retain them if somebody just has a terrible night's sleep or had a terribly stressful day how do you turn that on its head and make it a pleasurable experience and not as shaming like oh you need to sleep better you need you know stop stressing out so much how do you flip those on their head I don't know honesty no seriously we don't have

19:54quite the correct formula for it we made a lot of mistakes along the way I'll tell you the funniest thing we've ever done as an app is you know the Rings in people's Apple watch so we were like okay these Rings great idea but like not scientific enough they're not actually adapting to users personally they're not like scientifically tracking their cardio they don't do cardio zones correctly we'll make more scientific rings and set smarter move goals for people works really well for like a small segment of the population but as like retention driving cool feature you know not that great because it has this shaming effect so I don't quite know how

20:36to solve this problem the way we solve it right now is that we just try to shift people's Focus to other things along with like the bad metrics and stuff that they see and we try to avoid telling people what to do but this is a big problem to solve and I don't want to tell people that we know how to solve it perfectly yet because to be honest I don't I'm still still struggling with it yeah but a good thing to be struggling with I mean this whole conversation so I started using Welter after meeting you at Ma but I've been so busy and so

21:08stressed and I'm like that typical user but even this conversation is making me want to dig in more so I wanted to shift to something that you brought up when we were talking about these kind of Loops is that I compared this novelty and make it pleasurable and stuff to do a lingo and when I did that you were like no no no like we've taken a very different approach to Du lingo and I thought that was really fascinating so I wanted to like go a little bit more in depth about what did you mean by that I kind of put dualingo and I think people correctly

21:42put language learning into the same kind of category as apps that help you take care of your health and wellness because both of them have this really tough job where they're trying to get people to accomplish a long-term goal under conditions where the shortterm task that you have to do every day to get to the long-term thing you're just like really unlikely to do it it's hard we don't have time we don't have energy and in this sense like Welter and dual lingual solving similar problems but we've taken an entirely different approach and there's a couple reasons for this one is that with dual lingual and with language

22:23learning in order to do a good job all you have to do is open the app and spend like 3 to 5 minutes in it just like close your lesson get rewarded for it immediately and there you go you're done your language program for the day you did a good job you didn't break your streak and every time you do this you get dual lingo just is really really good at trying to shame you into opening their app like for the entirety of the day you know my favorite feature that they have is I think they have this either a gen Z or Millennial girl that

22:53yells at you but like in a very sarcastic way um and then I also have the widget that like shames you in different creative ways like throughout the day so they're really good at like trying to get you to just open the up just open the up and then once you're there all you have to do is spend like a couple minutes closing something you get rewarded for it infinitely and they're coming up with new ways to reward their users every time like I think they recently added this really Pleasant like buzzing sensation when you do a really hard question so even before you're done your

23:27entire lesson you're already like feeling those like pleasure dopamine hits so they shame you and then they just like reward you excessively for every single move but they can do this because with language learning you can complete the task inside the app and you can complete it quickly it's like you can't get a better night's sleep in five minutes in the grocery store line yeah exactly so I think that's where a lot of people that I talk to they kind of think that someone is eventually going to make the ideal like dualingo for health it's going to give you like a little plan that you can just do every day and that

24:05it'll gradually get you to where you need to be but that's much harder with health because you can't do it in 3 minutes inside the app it has to be done outside the app and it involves things like sleeping for eight hours instead of four and it doesn't make much sense yeah so that's what I mean by that I think that was one of the pivots that we did we tried to give people these personalized programs where they kind of like do things during the day and then they check off what they've done for the reasons I already mentioned we chose not to go that route and with language

24:35learning you kind of have more flexibility you can afford actually if you make a really great product to have tons of people just like churning and like falling off the wagon because what matters is you're still getting more people than before to learn a new language and that's really cool with our app we really don't want people leaving even if they're not doing anything even if they can't stick to a plan we still want them to be able to use our app and to get value out of it even on days when they're not able to do anything yeah that's super cool and then I've heard

25:10from tons of folks in the industry over the last few years like as dual lingo has risen to the level of success it has so many people it's kind of like you said want to create the dualingo of Health and Wellness or create the dualingo of productivity or whatever and so hopefully thinking through these things and thinking through that contrast will help people better contextualize what does and doesn't work and maybe save them a few iterations on their kind of reward cycle to not fall into the Trap of thinking duelingo is going to work in every scenario and then those are some really key takeaways of

25:47why duelingo works the way it does and and understanding those things it's like you see the loop in dualingo and I hadn't done it before so this was super insightful for me too of like having a deeper understanding of why it works then helps you apply it to your app in a way that might actually work instead of just copying and then falling flat and wondering why it didn't work and then go iterating through a bunch of Cycles to figure it out so hopefully that helps people I thought it was super fascinating so next up I did want to move to Innovation you y'all have done a

26:20lot of innovative things in the app and then you I know as VP of strategy it's something you think a ton about day in day out and working closely with the product teams and kind of influencing the product so how do you think about innovation in the app and then lessons that others can learn from to think about innovation in their own apps I really think that a lot of people have the misconception of innovation being spontaneous but in my experience innovation has been basically a very organized way of researching and thinking about products and after a few years I mean I've been at Welter for I

26:59think seven years maybe even eight years at this point and over the years I've kind of developed an innovation framework that our team uses to really think through new features and I'm not talking about monetization mechanics or kind of small improvements but really innovating new core features that radically change your product and we've used this framework successfully I will say it's not perfect and I change it every month or something like that but I guess I can kind of explain how it works and how to use it and maybe it can help some people think through the new features they're thinking about making I think it will and another misconception

27:38that I see a lot and we probably perpetuate in some ways on the podcast is that oh we'll just AB test our way to Innovation we'll let the users decide what's Innovative or not and and I think that's kind of a trap too and again to use du lingo as an example we had somebody from dingo on the podcast I think the title was something like why to test everything or AB test all the things but again it's like well you can understand at dualingo why that works they have a ton of resources and they are doing Innovative things but they're also a more mature company but I think

28:10the trap a lot of folks fall into is like oh we'll just test this oh we'll just test this oh we'll just test this without really truly innovating and thinking through these things and then what you're doing is you're just spending a ton of resources on low impact tests versus like building these truly Innovative features that are going to drive more attention more retention and so yeah I think it's going to be super helpful so yeah let's dig in and the bigger problem with the AB testing is not so much like I don't mind the test everything approach of course you have to test everything but um then

28:43something works and because you hadn't thought through it you don't know why it worked or why it didn't work and that's where the real problem actually is it's it's not the testing everything it's why did it work uh we don't know or though especially for smaller more research constrainted companies it's more the opportunity costs of testing too many low impact things instead of coming up with things that could truly be more impactful and then testing those potentially more impactful things versus just testing a million low impact things I can talk you through some of the pillars in our framework the first thing that we always look out for is does the

29:20thing that you want to make actually align with the company Mission I think a lot of people do this but a lot of people also skip this part so ours is to improve people's well-being with science and technology that serve each individual personally so if you're making something that isn't geared towards that we're not going to do it like if it's things that are bad for People's Health or aren't personalized and don't adapt to each individual user it probably doesn't make much sense for us very simple but people skip this step I've been thinking a ton about this lately and at Revenue cat our mission is

29:57to help Developers make more money and it it's just been sinking in more and more how much having a good mission statement and then aligning everything you do within the company to that mission statement can impact the trajectory of the business it was cheesy at first to me but now it's like sinking in more and more how important it is that every single company meeting we kick it off with whoever's leading the meeting talking about our mission statement and then talking through how we're going to go about achieving that mission and again it's like when we first started doing it's like oh come on like we all know the mission statement

30:34whatever and then now like over like two years it's finally sunk through my thick head that when you start a meeting with the mission statement we're going to help developers make more money it focuses the meeting it focuses the products you build it's so important to have some kind of aligning State even if it's not a mission statement if you think mission statements are cheesy or whatever like just find something to align to otherwise you're just going to go a million different directions and not have that Focus so 100% agree and I think it's really cool this is like the first step in your framework for

31:06Innovation is like align with something like have an idea of where you're going and align with it so what's number two number two is it's really a good idea to visualize this person that you're trying to make the feature for just know your segments and know which one you're making this particular feature for so there are different types of people that download health and wellness apps for different reasons and like I said before there's the athletes and the optimizers there's a really funny segment that I call Forever Young which is like these people who just like want to look super young and be super fit and like never

31:40age they have a ton of money and a ton of time but they're a very small percentage of the population and then there are people who are already sick or people who have health anxiety like I'm probably not dying but what if I am but our biggest segment we personify him as the dude from the big Labowski uh I call this segment The Duda bides we actually have ai generated images of the dude and all sorts of like poses like the dude at the office the dude after work on the couch and basically if we're making a feature I try to think about how the dude is going to respond to it it's

32:20pretty funny but I just like to always visualize our main segment you can make things for other segments but just know that most people like at most times in the evening when they're opening apps they're the dude all of us are the dude at that point in time that's such a great framing the third thing we think about is what triggers your covering so okay you have your mission you have your key segment that key segment what is happening in their life that they've just opened your app and are seeing your feature what is the trigger that prompted them to be like okay I'll open like dualingo or

32:59I'll open Welter dualingo has an artificial trigger they just have an owl that chames you great trigger but you know like when you open Uber it's because you need to get somewhere and like I said before with Wellness apps the trigger is the main problem because there's sometimes people want to just you know like they just woke up they think they had a really good night's sleep and they want like a confirmation of that in their sleep report or they just downloaded your app and they're really interested in exploring everything in it and they want to see how the data changes but you know a year

33:33down the line that's not going to be a trigger for them anymore and the trigger that's most important for us like I said is just boredom and existential horror we want people to be seeing stuff in our app when they're just bored in line at the store or at home on the couch and they're about to open Netflix but they open us first instead that's kind of the main trigger we try to work with I really like thinking through that too because if you build this awesome feature in the app and there's no trigger to go explore it nobody's going to explore it so it's like you got to

34:07think okay we've got this great idea it's going to be this super Innovative feature kind of like the Rings you were talking about before and then you find out oh well actually there's no like trigger there so yeah that's a really great step to Think Through in this ideation and Innovation steps yeah what's the next one the next one is what job you're doing for the user and I know that I said that there are no jobs to be done in health and wellness Tech before but what I meant by that is that there are no jobs to be done because there are no triggers and the only thing

34:40you can do is like alleviate boredom really on a day-to-day basis but if you think more broadly like why people download health and wellness apps to begin with there are like high level jobs there they're just not like day-to-day jobs but people do have certain expectations of things that they want their Health app to do yeah like I have a massive job to be done is have more energy to play with my kids and there's all sorts of those kind of things that are those jobs to be done but like you said it's like they're not the jobs with Associated triggers I'm not opening Welter because I'm thinking

35:15oh I don't have much energy and then the app's going to give me energy it's like this yeah much more meta job to be done yeah so we still think through jobs to be done but with our app it's usually meta jobs because the immediate jobs is always just alleviate my boredom and existential horror but they're also highlevel jobs like people want this ideal app that monitors and tracks their health it gives them personalized insights and recommendations it facilitates Behavior change and helps them feel better like you said it educates them and then a lot of times people want some kind of community or social support I think that that is

35:52important so you can think through highlevel jobs like that like what do people expect this app to do just generally or you can go through and use the classic jobs to be done framework okay like you open the app for this reason and what is the thing you need to get from it right now both are important the high level and the kind of like a media level yeah so then how does that start to play out in what features you actually build and how you think about Innovation we tried different ways to kind of work with this framework one of the dumbest things I tried to have

36:27people do is for each of these like completed triggers or segments covered or stuff like that give like 10 points and then if you're making a feature that through the framework collects the most points kind of like make that one first you know eventually you need like a system you want to try to quantify everything but that's not the way Innovation Works you can't just like score every project with a framework and expect to have the perfect backlog you just have to think through the feature and then use all of these standards to try to figure out is it worth making and if it is worth making like these are the

37:06questions you need to ask yourself to figure out what needs to be inside that feature all right so you've aligned with the mission you've figured out your personas and Target segments you've thought through what's going to trigger folks to actually use this feature and then you've thought through the meta and individual jobs to be done for for that feature what's the next step in analyzing what to build and how to innovate well for us like I said before retention is super super important we want people to never fall off the wagon and to just keep coming back to us and learning about the ways their bodies

37:43work as a caveat retention is not always important for all products I was using an app to quit smoking and if you have a high retention in an app that's helping people quit smoking you're not doing your job so maybe retention is not so important for all apps but for us it's really important so the next thing I try to think through okay what is going to be in this feature that helps it be a driver of retention to our app and there are I think seven retention drivers that help create this for us so I think we've gone through magic our wonderful anti-c capitalist feminist concept we talked

38:21about novelty so showing people something new every time they open the app another thing is relief so again when people open your app are you helping them alleviate that feeling of boredom and existential horror are you providing them with relief or are you providing them with like shaming and move goals or something like that another retention driver is personalization when people see something that they know is relevant to them personally and in the moment right now they really love that obviously this is something that folks know a lot about but gamification if you can distract people with a fun game when they open your app like dualingo does great

38:59retention driver it works a less obvious one that I found to be very important is bragging rights so duala actually does this really well it gives you like a little badge that you can put on your social media whenever you do something well so we make a lot of our content sharable I have this really close friend who really started sleeping better and eating right and he was using wel tre's magical fuel tanks and posting them on his social media to kind of brag to people like look my tank is blue today because I'm super calm and that helps people come back to your app more so

39:35they can have more content from your app to brag to their friends about and then of course one that everyone knows about is any kind of like social features that help you engage with others straa does this super well even on days where you personally haven't gone for a run you can go and spy like I don't know on your like ex's run and laugh laugh about how their pace is worse than it used to be or something like that so social stuff is a good retention driver so those are the retention drivers and having these written down to Think Through I think will be really helpful for the audience

40:11so we'll put a list in the show notes of magic novelty relief personalization gamification bragging rights social it's a great L probably not exhaustive you can probably come up with your own five that maybe are more directly applicable to your own app but again like just great kind of structured thinking to think through all these different aspects as you're working on stuff so then what's the next thing you think about the next thing we think about this probably should be the first thing I think about but I'm not practical so the other thing we like to think about okay there are certain things that you must

40:46do in your app people expect them and if you don't have them they think it's weird for example for a long time Welter was an app where all of your sites and guidance and Analysis is presented in a feed format so you never know what's going to like come up at the top and you kind of have to scroll a lot of the time to get to if you want to see your sleep analysis you have to find it in your feed it's not just like somewhere you can recall it instantly and it works super well but also people expect like a home screen from a health and wellness

41:21app that presents all of your stuff in like different categories in an organized way and if you are a health and wellness app eventually you must do this so features that are musts are features that all of your competitors have for example or say they fulfill a promise that you sell people on like in your ads or stuff like that if they help fulfill that they're actually a must feature and then features that if you don't have them people will eventually leave you for competitors and I think the last one is users experience an extreme level of frustration if this is something that's not done yeah and like fixing bugs and making the

42:02app launch quickly and like there's definitely some mus haves that do still need to be prioritized and again even if they're not Innovative you do have to just get them done yeah exactly must are weird sometimes you can complete Del lighters before musts in order to like win some users over you were saying that you did this in your weather app recently yeah yeah so the last category on the list is delighters and we were just talking about that how in my weather app we have some musts we have not done yet you know there's expectations and we see it in the reviews unfortunately we've gotten some

42:36negative reviews of like how are you charging $40 a year and you don't even have this basic feature every other weather app has but what we do have and what we shipped and decided to prioritize was a really delightful widget experience and it was to the point of this conversation it was a very Innovative feature you know we packed the better part of a weather app into an interactive widget and so that widget itself was super delightful and drove a ton of acquisition and has driven retention and people love it but now we do need to kind of get back to some of the musts that you know people are

43:09justifiably pointing out that our app doesn't have and this another I mean just to side tangent for a little bit is that in certain categories like weather there's tons of people who actively check two or three different weather apps and so part of my decision making in leaving those out was that people are still going to probably check other weather apps and so if I can create one thing that's like so delightful that they're willing to pay for my app even if they have to go check those other apps for other stuff they're still going to come back to my app because that one feature is so delightful and in my case

43:43going to be right on their home screen so yeah in my case I did prioritize that delight and that Innovation over some of the must haves but the cool thing for us is like now that's kind of bought us enough active users and enough active subscribers and enough kind of Runway as a side project to now go back and fill in some of those must to complete some of that experience especially as competitors might eventually launch these delightful widgets similar to what we've done but yeah how else do you think about delighters and then since we've already done it contrasting like how to prioritize Delight over musts

44:17over retention drivers and then as you said previously some features can be all three the last category I try to think about is this a delighter feature and delighter feature I mean I know that everyone talks about this and there's really no way to know for sure if a feature is going to Delight users like you can guess and you can do your research but basically the framework I use is okay I think that every retention driver is typically a delighter and that delighters complete known jobs in a particularly delightful way or they create like some kind of like AA moment or wow effect for users these are really

44:54abstract Concepts I think my favorite Delight lighter feature it's weird because a lot of online a lot of people complain about this but Netflix was the first one to do an autoplay thing you know you're sitting on the couch and you've watched an episode and it immediately starts playing the next episode without you having to do anything so that is both a retention driver right because like you're going to keep watching the TV show even if you're like drifting off and it's also like completing a known job in a very particularly delightful it's also magical cuz you do nothing and get something for it one of my favorite

45:31features of all time sometimes Del lighters are like really dumb yeah well funny enough I don't know if this was a bug or if this was intentional or if they fixed it but for a long time Netflix would start the new episode but do it in super low bandwidth and you would actually have to stop and then go out and go back in to get the high bandwidth and my guess at the time was that this was like the bean counters looking at okay this is a really delightful feature it's driving retention but it's really expensive because we autoplay in Full Resolution every next episode I hadn't thought

46:12about how delightful that autoplay was I thought about how frustrating it was when it broke and I hadn't thought of it as a delightful feature until you brought this up and then realizing that like a ban counter took away that delightful feature because it was probably costing too much money so I'll have to recheck I haven't been watching as much Netflix lately and so I'll have to recheck and see if that was maybe a bug and they fixed it or if it really was like them saying ah people are asleep anyways we're gonna like break this delightful feature just to save money but that gets to like the tension

46:45of all these things right it's like you do have to balance like how delightful it is versus how much does it cost you to deliver and those kind of things it's all in so much tension there's also a trap with delighters so they made this delightful feature but sometimes if you make a really good delighter that's it it's a must now for the industry right and it stops being like your thing it stops being a delighter for you everyone's going to just copy it and have it so yeah and then you break it and it's like a frustration any more thoughts on delighters or the rest of this framework

47:16as we wrap up yeah my last pillar of the framework don't listen to anything I say because I think that there's a tendency in product management to really stick to very strict rules and like score everything and like try to really reduce it down to a science but I think that there's limitations to how organized you can make your thinking and I use this framework not as a rule book but as kind of like start to get your brain going and when you're analyzing competitors like doing competitor analysis to do it not in like a loot but in a very organized way that helps you reach conclusions faster it's not a

48:02scorecard that's not how it works so yeah basically add to it create your own things don't listen to anything I say probably two years from now I'll throw out this whole thing anyway so yeah well it's been so fun chatting with you this is a hoot is so much fun but also I feel like incredibly valuable to our listeners but is there anything you wanted to share as we wrapped up yeah I guess I could just say that we just released some new features to help people manage sedentary stress it's a really Innovative cool thing it's available for Apple watch users we're still doing it for you know other

48:37fitness trackers it takes a bit of time because the data is in different formats but if you want to go check it out it's really great our users seem to really love it awesome yeah and I don't typically think of the podcast as a distribution channel that anybody will get any additional downloads because of a podcast episode you know this podcast is way more about the lessons that folks have learned from building the apps that they work on or or working on the apps but I would say this is an exception I think a lot of our audience probably is like Jane the founder of Welter have

49:10maybe struggled with burnout I know I've struggled with burnout off and on for 16 years since I started my company and had four kids along the way go download the app so many of you listening or product Builders yourself some marketers and other stuff so definitely share feedback because I I think that can be super valuable so definitely check out the app I'm going to subscribe and start taking it more seriously sedentary stress is probably the biggest like limiting factor in my health and productivity so that new feature y'all just launched I think is really going to hit home and help me so yeah download the app thank

49:47you it was super nice talking to you thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community [Music]