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

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at RevenueCat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and my guest today is Asya Paloni, VP of strategy at Welltory, the most popular all-in-one wellness app on the App Store. On the podcast, I talk with Asya about what to do when there are no jobs to be done, how to build innovative features, and why copying Duolingo's engagement strategy probably won't work for your app. Hi, Asya, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Asya Paloni:

Hi, David. Thanks for having me.

David Barnard:

So I want to get started with the story of Welltory, and you just told me right before we started recording that Welltory is actually a combination of wellness 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 the story of the founding of the app and then how you ended up joining the team.

Asya Paloni:

Yeah, sure. So I think Welltory 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 lot 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 as a founder, once you hit too many bumps in the road, you just burn out. You're just done, and then you can't rise up to the next challenge.

And she became very interested in the mechanics of how it works. Because 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 that 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 a personal 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 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, it helps you, I don't know, increase your heart 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 Garmin, stuff like that. But back in 2016, it was not in any gadgets yet.

And originally Welltory was just an app that measures heart rate variability and analyzes it in a super scientific cool and personalized way and kind of tells you how your body is doing. We're super innovative. We have actually a bunch of scientific publications and journals about how our algorithm is the best, that it adapts the camera really well, and the app still does this actually. 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 kind of a Google Analytics for health. So there's this one metric that people use to measure their overall well-being, and then they connect a whole bunch of other data 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.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it's kind of sometimes the founder trap, right? It's like you build something for yourself and then you realize like, oh wait, I'm the only person and 10 other people like me are the only target market. Oh, wait a minute, we need a bigger TAM for this to be successful. So how did you expand beyond that really narrow niche of people?

Asya Paloni:

So this niche of people, it's not that narrow. It's pretty big. It's like all the guys who listen to Andrew Huberman, people who want the Google Analytics for health, very specific. They're either athletes or they're eternal optimizers. There's big cohorts of them. But we 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 boost my productivity by, I don't know, 15% or something the next day. So we started to try to figure out what it is that people actually 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 run or doing a workout or something like this, and they just need an app to help them 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, 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 gives those apps fairly high retention rate. But for most people, they're not going on runs every day. They're not taking care of their health every day, and there's no real life event. 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.

David Barnard:

That's a really interesting framing. And as you were talking, I was even realizing some of the bigger apps in health and wellness, one that stands out very specifically is Strava. And in your framing, it actually makes a ton of sense that that app grew as big as it did because there's a very specific job to be done tracking your cycling. There's a main job to be done, and there's all sorts of sub jobs to be done as far as sharing it with friends and capturing the leaderboards and things like that.

But there's that trigger. And I think not enough apps go this deep in understanding that. So if you're struggling with retention, if you're struggling with growth, it's probably time to take a step back and do this analysis. But then once you realize, okay, there's not these natural triggers, there's not these jobs to be done in this more broad wellness app, how did you fix that? Where did you go from there?

Asya Paloni:

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 a 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. I use a lot of products. I keep trying different weightlifting apps because 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 complicated mass market game.

But with Welltory specifically, we have a more broad mission, which is to improve with science and technology that serves each individual personally. And so when you put it that way, you 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 in people's lives that would prompt them to open a health and wellness app and be like, okay, tell me what I need to do to take care of my health right now. But if you walk down the street or if you just watch people go about their day, you'll notice there does exist a very odd trigger in people's lives, like when you see someone standing in line and they're bored. And to alleviate this boredom, they open their phone and they start flipping through TikTok or Instagram or something like this.

I call this trigger existential horror. You don't want to deal with living. So you start opening stuff and you start reading stuff and you're like, okay, I'll just distract myself from the horrifying thoughts that are going on in my brain. So we thought, okay, the only way that we can make a health and wellness app for the mass market is if we use this trigger and somehow convince people that instead of opening Instagram or TikTok, 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 people, because a lot of times people who think about their ideal health app, 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. 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 shaming and more towards the TikTok and Instagram type of entertainment.

David Barnard:

So you've hinted at it, but I wanted to actually read off this list, because you and I first met at MAU 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 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 novel, make it pleasurable.

And I 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, you should 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. What do you mean, make it magical, and then how did that play out in Welltory?

Asya Paloni:

So I came across the concept of magical apps in a very odd way. I was reading a book about the witch trials by this wonderful feminist scholar, Silvia Federici, and she was talking about why it was so important during the rise of capitalism to break the power of magic 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 very pretty and sparkly and looks nice and makes us feel good.

So when we think about the ideal health and wellness app, I want it to have that vibe. You have to do nothing, and 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, 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, cool metrics and stuff like that.

But instead of doing all of this, what we did is we packed it into a really cool visualization of this liquid that changes color and behavior depending on how your body is feeling right now. So say if someone is super stressed, it turns red and starts bubbling over, almost like over the top. Or if you have a lot of energy, you just woke up and you slept well, unlike you and I today, 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 an ocean blue.

So this 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 feature and people really love it. And I think the reason people love it is that they're doing nothing and they're getting this magical, surprising new thing every time they open the app.

David Barnard:

That is so cool. All right, make it relevant, what do you mean?

Asya Paloni:

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 connect your number of GitHub commits to Welltory. We have this algorithm that scans people's data all the time for scientific data correlations. And then to try to motivate this person on 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 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 just pay my bills, people are a bit more likely to care. So the more personalized you can get with your segments, the better.

David Barnard:

And you already delved into it, but the next one is make sense in real time. Anything to add there or is that the gist of it is you need those relevant moments in real time, not just relevant to the future?

Asya Paloni:

So we recently released a new feature at Welltory. It's like a more static home screen that shows people how well they're dealing with the world's top killer, sedentary stress. What I noticed when I was researching a lot of home screens in these 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 changed. This is how many steps you walked. This is how many calories you burned, but I don't know what that really means for me.

What does it mean that my stress level is 48%? 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 to absolutely every single step you take and every single heartbeat your watch tracks and make sense of this data in real time instead of just visualizing it in a raw format.

David Barnard:

And then how do you make all of that data novel?

Asya Paloni:

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 opened 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. Every time you open Facebook or TikTok or Instagram, you see something new.

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 nearly infinite amounts of content. I think if you took all of Welltory's content together that we've been able to generate, it would cover four volumes of Lord of the Rings over. This was really difficult. It aged me like 10 years, I swear.

David Barnard:

Your stress scores on Welltory were terrible during that time.

Asya Paloni:

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 opened the app. People don't have to do this now. We have a lot of generative AI that can help developers do this without going through the horror that we had to go through at Welltory.

David Barnard:

I love that you're also by thinking through these things, taking the tools of the TikToks and Facebooks and Twitters and turning them on their head. Instead of being the negative doom scrolling, you're feeding that dopamine and novelty seeking with actually 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, 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 to 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?

Asya Paloni:

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 a whole bunch of meetings, they were stuck in traffic for five 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 for 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, they have to know the truth. People have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and get to the gym even if they had a really hard day, but they're not going to. They're not going to open your app and they're going to churn. 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.

David Barnard:

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 shaming like, "Oh, you need to sleep better. Stop stressing out so much." How do you flip those on their head?

Asya Paloni:

I don't know.

David Barnard:

Love the honestly.

Asya Paloni:

No, seriously, we don't have quite 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 and people's Apple Watch? So we were like, okay, these rings, great idea, but not scientific enough. They're not actually adapting to users personally. They're not 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 a small segment of the population. But as a retention driving cool feature, not that great because it has this shaming effect. So I don't quite know how to 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 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 struggling with it.

David Barnard:

But a good thing to be struggling with. So I started using Welltory after meeting you at MAU, but I've been so busy and so stressed 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 loops is that I compared this novelty and make it pleasurable and stuff to Duolingo.

And when I did that, you were like, no, no, no. We've taken a very different approach to Duolingo, and I thought that was really fascinating. So I wanted to go a little bit more in depth about what did you mean by that?

Asya Paloni:

I kind of put Duolingo and I think people correctly put 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 short-term task that you have to do every day to get to the long-term thing, you're just really unlikely to do it. It's hard. We don't have time. We don't have energy.

And in this sense, Welltory and Duolingo are solving similar problems. But we've taken an entirely different approach, and there's a couple of reasons for this. One is that with Duolingo and with language learning, in order to do a good job, all you have to do is open the app and spend three to five minutes in it. Just 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... Duolingo just is really, really good at trying to shame you into opening their app for the entirety of the day. My favorite feature that they have is I think they have this either a Gen Z or a millennial girl that yells at you, but in a very sarcastic way.

And then I also have the widget that shames you in different creative ways throughout the day. So they're really good at trying to get you to just open the app, just open the app. And then once you're there, all you have to do is spend 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.

I think they recently added this really pleasant buzzing sensation when you do a really hard question. So even before you're done your entire lesson, you're already feeling those pleasure dopamine hits. So they shame you and then they just reward you excessively for every single move. But they can do this because with language learning, you can complete the task inside the app.

David Barnard:

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.

Asya Paloni:

Yeah, exactly. So I think that's where a lot of people that I talk to, they think that someone is eventually going to make the ideal Duolingo for health. It's going to give you a little plan that you can just do every day, and that it'll gradually get you to where you need to be. But that's much harder with health because you can't do it in three minutes inside the app. It has to be done outside the app, and it involves things like sleeping for eight hours instead of four. 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 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 learning, you have more flexibility. You can afford actually if you make a really great product to have tons of people just churning and falling off the wagon.

Because what matters is you're still getting more people than before to learn a new language. 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.

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's super cool. I've heard from tons of folks in the industry over the last few years, as Duolingo has risen to the level of success it has, so many people, kind of like you said, want to create the Duolingo of health and wellness or create the Duolingo 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 reward cycle to not fall into the trap of thinking Duolingo is going to work in every scenario.

And then those are some really key takeaways of why Duolingo works the way it does and understanding those things. It's like you see the loop in Duolingo, and I hadn't done it before, so this was super insightful for me too of 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. Y'all have done a lot of innovative things in the app. And then 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 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?

Asya Paloni:

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've been at Welltory for I think seven years, maybe even eight years at this point, and over the years I've developed an innovation framework that our team uses to really think through new features.

And I'm not talking about monetization mechanics or 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 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.

David Barnard:

I think it will. And another misconception that I see a lot, and we probably perpetuate in some ways on the podcast, is that, oh, we'll just A/B test our way to innovation. We'll let the users decide what's innovative or not. And I think that's kind of a trap too. And again, to use Duolingo as an example, we had somebody from Duolingo on the podcast, and I think the title was something like Why to test everything or A/B test all the things. But again, it's like, well, you can understand at Duolingo 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 the 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 building these truly innovative features that are going to drive more attention, more retention. I think it's going to be super helpful. So yeah, let's dig in.

Asya Paloni:

And the bigger problem with the A/B testing is not so much... I don't mind the test everything approach. Of course, you have to test everything. But then something 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 not the testing everything. It's the, why did it work? We don't know.

David Barnard:

Or though, especially for smaller, more research constrained 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.

Asya Paloni:

I can talk you through some of the pillars in our framework. The first thing that we always look out for is, does the thing 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. 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.

David Barnard:

I've been thinking a ton about this lately. And at RevenueCat, our mission is to help developers make more money. 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 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 was like when we first started doing it's like, oh, come on. We all know the mission statement, whatever.

And then now over 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 statement, even if it's not a mission statement. If you think mission statements are cheesy or whatever, 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 that this is the first step in your framework for innovation is align with something, have an idea of where you're going and align with it. So what's number two?

Asya Paloni:

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. Like I said before, there's the athletes and the optimizers. There's a really funny segment that I call forever young. It's just these people who just want to look super young and be super fit and never age.

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. I'm probably not dying, but what if I am? But our biggest segment, we personify him as the dude from The Big Lebowski, I call this segment the Dude abides. We actually have AI generated images of the Dude in all sorts of 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 pretty funny, but I just like to always visualize our main segment. You can make things for other segments, but just know that most people at most times in the evening when they're opening apps, they're the Dude. All of us are the Dude in that point in time.

David Barnard:

That's such a great framing.

Asya Paloni:

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 Duolingo, or I'll open Welltory. Duolingo has an artificial trigger. They just have an owl that shames you. Great trigger. But 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... They just woke up. They think they had a really good night's sleep and they want 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 a year down 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 the main trigger we try to work with.

David Barnard:

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 think, 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 trigger there. So yeah, that's a really great step to think through in this ideation and innovation steps. What's the next one?

Asya Paloni:

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 you can do is alleviate boredom really on a day-to-day basis. But if you think more broadly why people download health and wellness apps to begin with, there are high level jobs there. They're just not day-to-day jobs, but people do have certain expectations of things that they want their health app to do.

David Barnard:

I have a massive job to be done is have more energy to play with my kids, and there's all those 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 Welltory because I'm thinking, oh, I don't have much energy and then the app's going to give me energy. It's like this much more meta job to be done.

Asya Paloni:

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 there are also a high level 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 important. So you can think through high level 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. 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 immediate level.

David Barnard:

So then how does that start to play out in what features you actually build and how you think about innovation?

Asya Paloni:

We tried different ways to work with this framework. One of the dumbest things I tried to have people do is for each of these completed triggers or segments covered or stuff like that, give 10 points. And then if you're making a feature that through the framework collects the most points, make that one first. Eventually you need a system. You want to try to quantify everything, but that's not the way innovation works.

You can't just score every project with a framework and expect to have the perfect backlog. You just have to think through the future and then use all of these standards to try to figure out, is it worth making? And if it is worth making, these are the questions you need to ask yourself to figure out what needs to be inside that feature.

David Barnard:

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 that feature. What's the next step in analyzing what to build and how to innovate?

Asya Paloni:

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 work. As a caveat, retention is not always important for all the 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-capitalist feminist concept. We talked about 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 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 Duolingo does, great retention driver. It works. A less obvious one that I found to be very important is bragging rights. So Duolingo actually does this really well. It gives you a little badge that you can put on your social media whenever you do something well.

So we make a lot of our content shareable. I have this really close friend who really started sleeping better and eating and he was using Welltory's magical fuel tanks and posting them on his social media to brag to people like, "Look, my tank is blue today because I'm super calm." That helps people come back to your app more so they 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 social features that help you engage with others. Strava does this super well. Even on days where you personally haven't gone for a run, you can go and spy, I don't know, on your ex's run and laugh about how their pace is worse than it used to be or something like that. So social stuff is a good retention driver.

David Barnard:

So this is the retention drivers, and having these written down to think through I think will be really helpful for the audience. So we'll put a list in the show notes of magic, novelty, relief, personalization, gamification, bragging rights, social. It's a great list and probably not exhaustive. You can probably come up with your own five that maybe are more directly applicable to your own app. But again, just great 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?

Asya Paloni:

The next thing we think about, this probably should be the first thing I think about, but I'm not practical. The other thing we like to think about, okay, there are certain things that you must do in your app. People expect them. And if you don't have them, they think it's weird. For example, for a long time, Welltory was an app where all of your insights and guidance and analysis is presented in a feed format. So you never know what's going to come up at the top and you 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 somewhere where you can recall it instantly. And it works super well. But also people expect a home screen from a health and wellness app that presents all of your stuff in 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 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.

David Barnard:

Yeah, and like fixing bugs and making the app launch quickly. There's definitely some must haves that do still need to be prioritized. And again, even if they're not innovative, you do have to just get them done.

Asya Paloni:

Yeah, exactly. Musts are weird. Sometimes you can complete delighters before musts in order to win some users over. You were saying that you did this in your weather app recently.

David Barnard:

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. There's expectations, and we see it in the reviews. Unfortunately, we've gotten some negative reviews of 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.

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 get back to some of the musts that people are justifiably pointing out that our app doesn't have. This is another, I mean, just a 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 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, going to be right on their home screen. In my case, I did prioritize that delight and that innovation over some of the must haves.

But cool thing for us is now that's bought us enough active users and enough active subscribers and enough runway as a side project to now go back and fill in some of those musts to complete some of that experience, especially as competitors might eventually launch these delightful widgets similar to what we've done. How else do you think about delighters? And then since we've already done it, contrasting how to prioritize delight over musts, over retention drivers, and then as you said previously, some features can be all three.

Asya Paloni:

The last category I try to think about is this 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. 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 some kind of aha moment or wow effect for users.

These are really abstract concepts. I think my favorite delighter feature, it's weird because online a lot of people complain about this, but Netflix was the first one to do an autoplay thing. 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 because you're going to keep watching the TV show even if you're drifting off, and it's also completing a known job in a very particularly delightful way.

It's also magical because you do nothing and get something for it. One of my favorite features of all time. Sometimes delighters are really dumb.

David Barnard:

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 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 about 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 a bean 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 there was maybe a bug and they fixed it, or if it really was them saying, "Ah, people are asleep anyways. We're going to break this delightful feature just to save money." But that gets to the tension of all these things. It's like you do have to balance how delightful it is versus how much does it cost you to deliver and those kinds of things. It's all in so much tension.

Asya Paloni:

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. And it stops being like your thing. It stops being a delighter for you. Everyone's going to just copy it and have it.

David Barnard:

And then you break it and it's a frustration. Any more thoughts on delighters or the rest of this framework as we wrap up?

Asya Paloni:

Yeah, my last pillar of the framework, don't listen to anything I say, because I think that a tendency in product management to really stick to very strict rules and score everything and 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 start to get your brain going.

And when you're analyzing competitors, like doing a competitor analysis, to do it in a very organized way that helps you reach conclusions faster. It's not a scorecard. 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.

David Barnard:

Well, it's been so fun chatting with you. This was hoot. It's so much fun, but also I feel like incredibly valuable to our listeners. But is there anything you wanted to share as we wrap up?

Asya Paloni:

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 other fitness trackers. It takes a bit of time because the data's in different formats. But if you want to go check it out, it's really great. Our users seem to really love it.

David Barnard:

Awesome. I don't typically think of the podcast as a distribution channel that anybody will get any additional downloads because of a podcast episode. This podcast is way more about the lessons that folks have learned from building the apps that they work on 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 Welltory, maybe 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 are product builders yourself, some marketers and other stuff, so definitely share feedback because 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 limiting factor in my health and productivity. So that new feature that y'all just launched I think is really going to hit home and help me. So yeah, download the app.

Asya Paloni:

Thank you. It was super nice talking to you.

David Barnard:

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.subclub.com to join our private community.