Growth Danny Denhard Growth Danny Denhard

The Business Of Duolingo

Duolingo is that app that is given as case studies, its seen as the leading light in Growth, app growth and AB testing.

Duolingo did incredibly well on TikTok and is often the go-to example of how to leverage brand in the Marketing landscape.

They were deliberately random and arguably smart, however, don’t expect it this to be your copy-paste winning formula for your brand.

Many do not realise the business model and the economics behind the language app, with over 80% of users not or never paying for any features of the app and an ad model that only contributes to -10% of its revenues.

Here is a quick video with the Duolingo team talking about their app, their smart approach to push notifications (think mum guilt), its economics and how AI is going to be powering many tests and many more to come.

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Growth Danny Denhard Growth Danny Denhard

Chat Apps New Fight Your Love & Attention

For the last couple of decades I have been working with brands to think about the customer and potential customers more than just transactions, I have pushed for brands to become community led businesses (I have embedded my recent keynote deck below).

WeChat (1.35 billion MAUs) and Telegram (+900m MAU’s) have led the way for chat apps (instant messengers) to create community and enable brands, KOLs and influencers to engage with their audience/community.

Discord, Slack and Teams have become professional alternatives to community with some boasting thousands of paid subscribers.

WhatsApp has slowly but surely become an option for brands to cut through the algorithmic filtering of social networks and email and engage with broadcast and polling options.

What has struck me is the reach off the channels within WhatsApp, here is an example from my team Arsenal (football club) official channel with over 5m subscribers.

  • What - Arsenal’s official channel with a poll

  • Why - Brand new kit launch with adidas

  • How - Offering a poll to then post an update with their favourite player

Arsenal then shared the most popular player Bukayo Saka as voted by fans.

With over 4700 reactions (as time of writing this) and counting it shows how engaged football fans and communities could be.

The bigger question for brands to answer is could WhatsApp be a way to stand out for free until they flip the monetisation switch and turn it into another pay to play platform?

My take: If I was in a growth or marketing leadership role (again) with a company today and our brand was consumed weekly and a loved brand I would be pushing my team to test the channel and offer audio, behind the scenes looks and push for engagement from my most loved customers and superfans.

Maybe worth the extra few minutes every few days for your social team to dive into…

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Growth Danny Denhard Growth Danny Denhard

Growth Is: Always Be Auditing, Always Be Marketing

I have a motto, Its “always be auditing, always be Marketing”, it is simple, for me it is this what modern day growth is -

  • Auditing what is working, what isn’t working and what can be optimised (aka keep, kill, cure)

  • Marketing is an always-on strategic department, that needs to learn from its auditing and market accordingly.

These core components allow you to be smarter at Growth and roll out the best Growth work streams, in and outside of Product feature improvements, optimisations and tests.

It was my birthday recently and I received a great personalised card from my better half.

Moonpig has a smart way of using its packaging to market to the receiver to send a thank you card, you scan the QR code and it takes you to the thank you card section. Why is this smart Growth? It’s

  • Quick

  • Easy

  • Low cost

  • Trackable

  • Scaleable

One tweak I would have made (if possible would be) would be to match it to the sender and provide a chance to say thanks in one or two clicks.

QR Code taking you to the Thank You cards on site

I implemented QR codes (here’s my QR code case study) to track the impact of offline to online - it was personal to every user, it enabled us to track the impact of offline promos and every user sharing the code and provided a scalable way to grow our brand foorprint by our users.

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Growth Danny Denhard Growth Danny Denhard

My Favourite Growth Video How To Start A Movement

I have a Google slides deck I share with all of my clients, it’s a long playlist of videos on Growth, not just business growth but includes categories that are:

  • Life

  • Product

  • Marketing

  • The Future

The deck is to how frame growth differently, it’s how to see growth and business as many different parts, many different biases and many different disciplines coming together. To understand behaviour, we must open up, see how movements are made, appreciate different perspectives, and evolve.

The (below) video is from a classic TED talk called “How To Start A Movement”, in 5 minutes this video demonstrates how human behaviour and human (cognitive) biases can be made or broken in a few moments, it shows you how to stand out, be different, embrace change and go with the energy.

Next time you worry about doing something different or wanting to stand out, remember it takes one small step/dance to be a leader!

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