Social Features: Turning Apps into Communities (Part 01)
How Duolingo and Strava made daily activities shared experiences
In today’s competitive app marketplace, keeping users engaged and coming back is a significant challenge. While solid functionality is essential, true organic growth often comes from going beyond basic utility and building a sense of identity and community. Platforms that overlook user identity and social features miss out on solid and connected communities that drive sustained engagement and growth. Integrating these elements can elevate an application from simply useful to indispensable—becoming a daily staple in users' lives. This approach has powered the success of apps like Duolingo, Strava, and more.
Read on for an exploration of how leading platforms, Duolingo and Strava, transformed their user bases into thriving communities through identity features, and the measurable impact on their growth and retention metrics.
How Duolingo Changed Language Learning Through Gamification and Community-Building
Duolingo made language learning addictive. From 2012 to 2023, the platform grew to over 500 million registered users, largely due to its focus on gamification and social features.
Each user has a profile that displays their courses, progress, achievements, and activity history, allowing them to track their development and celebrate milestones. Duolingo awards badges for specific accomplishments, like maintaining a streak or reaching a new level, which appear on profiles to showcase achievements. Users can also connect with friends, view each other's progress, and engage in friendly competition through leaderboards and leagues—boosting motivation and community involvement. With public profiles as the default, learners can easily share their language journey with the broader Duolingo community, encouraging social interaction and a sense of belonging.
By mid-2018, daily active users were growing at a single-digit rate year-over-year - a troubling figure given the explosive growth the company had seen in the past. From 2019 to 2021, Duolingo rolled out a highly successful engagement strategy that boosted DAU by 4.5x over four years.
When the head of Product, Jorge Mazal, started working at Duolingo, CURR (Current user return rate) was troubling but grew exponentially up to July 22, as shown in the graph below.
The Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU) ratio, which measures the frequency of user engagement by showing how often monthly users return daily and reflects a product's stickiness, increased by approximately 17.4%.
Duolingo’s engagement strategy focused on enhancing user retention, motivation, and community building through:
Gamification and Streaks
Social Competition and Community
Personalized Learning Experience
Achievement Badges and Rewards
The combination made language learning social, competitive, and endlessly motivating. Compared to rivals like Babbel, Busuu, and Mondly, Duolingos ability to build loyalty becomes even more evident. More than 40% of users from competing apps such as Pimsleur, Busuu, Babbel, and Rosetta Stone also engage with Duolingo, and the reverse trend is less prevalent, with less than 2.5% of Duolingo users using these competitors.
By 2022 Duoligno achieved remarkable revenue growth. The company’s mobile revenue surged by 55 percent year-over-year, exceeding $300 million. Duolingos mobile revenue now stands over four times that of Babbel, underscoring significant progress in the mobile language learning domain. This success reflects its ability to attract and retain paying users.
Duolingo has transformed language learning into an engaging and community-driven experience. Instead of just providing a tool for learning, the organization created a platform where learning is woven into daily life, drawing users back for more.
Strava: Building Community Through Fitness
Strava's success hinged significantly on its community. By transforming every run, ride, and workout into a shared experience, Strava created a powerful network effect that has drawn over 125 million athletes into its global community, where personal achievements become shared celebrations.
Takeaways:
Strava’s success comes from engaging users beyond workout sessions through social features.
Strava users engage with the app more than 35 times a month, fueled by community-driven motivation.
While most outdoor fitness apps help users track workouts and explore new routes, Strava has added a social dimension. Unlike Komoot and AllTrails, which see peak usage during exercise hours, Strava experiences a surge in the evening, when users open the app to check in on friends' progress, celebrate achievements, and participate in challenges. This unique pattern of usage highlights Strava’s role as not only a fitness tool but also a lively community hub for fitness enthusiasts.
In 2023, Strava reported that there were 40 million activities uploaded per week, 10 billion kudos given, and over 10 million photos and videos shared per week, which is a reflection of user engagement and social activity within the app.
Strava's growth shows how well-crafted user identity and social features can generate network effects and fuel growth. By combining activity tracking with social proof and achievement incentives, Strava has created a leading and highly engaging athletic social network.
Unlocking Value with User Profile Data
A cleverly crafted bio is more than text—it is a core part of a user’s digital identity, offering them a unique, relatable digital presence that others can interact with and understand. It displays a user's interests, personalities, and affiliations, creating points of connection that help users find like-minded individuals or groups. These small details transform an app from a tool into a place for natural connections.
Profiles also enhance personalization. An app can deliver targeted recommendations by capturing details like hobbies, professions, connections, or favorite activities, such as connecting users to relevant content, communities, or experiences. On platforms like LinkedIn, for instance, detailed bios and professional highlights help users establish their credibility, form professional connections, and discover opportunities through mutual contacts and shared industries.
Personalization leads to: Higher satisfaction, increased feature adoption, and more relevant content and interactions
For Strava, user profile data enabled them to recommend tailored activities, routes, and challenges based on past behavior and preferences. Duolingo leverages data to create a personalized learning experience by adapting lessons to individual strengths and weaknesses, adjusting difficulty levels, and providing targeted review sessions. Most applications leverage user data, but users need a reason to share it. Designing incentives that encourage users to craft their digital identities and preferences continuously enhances the relevance and value of your app.
Why Social Comes Later—and How to Simplify It
Many companies adopt social features later in their lifecycle, focusing on core offerings before expanding into social integration. Early-stage startups often lack the resources and bandwidth to balance both. Incorporating social features early on can transform your application and set you apart in the market. Instead of users merely consuming content or performing tasks, a profile that showcases personality turns an app into a platform for authentic self-expression and connection, encouraging users to spend more time interacting within the app ecosystem.
With platforms like Tapestry, companies can integrate core user identities and social features seamlessly in under 20 minutes without sacrificing product focus or dev time.
Stay tuned for Part 02, where we'll explore Revolut and Clubhouse.
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