Retention: Incentivize opening the app

[duogenesis]

Context/motivation:

• Bumble and Hinge have 30-day user retention around 11% according to Similarweb. Duolicious' is closer to 5%.
• Some Duolicious users lament that the matching system pigeonholes them into a set of matches which don't get frequently changed.
• Some users mention that they don't get notifications.

What we're roughly trying to do is increase retention. Of course, there's good and bad churn. So, more specifically, we want to increase retention as a result of users having a good experience, rather than as a result of not finding a partner.

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Potential ways to incentivize opening the app:

• Highlight new profiles - There needs to be a way to prevent new users getting unwanted messages. Though wanted messages might boost engagement.
• Highlight profile updates - Again, care should be taken to prevent users getting unwanted messages
• Show profile visits

It's instructive to see how other apps incentivize retention. Outside the dating app market:

• Facebook as a "feed"
• Reddit has "hot" and "top" posts
• Twitter is a stream of recent tweets
• Discord servers are a stream of recent messages
• Even 4chan shows posts in bump order by default

Within the dating app market:

• Tinder shows you new profiles whenever you open the app
• If I recall, Hinge and Bumble show (supposedly) curated profiles daily
• Boo - I can't remember, though they've got social media features similar to Facebook. They probably have a feed or something

The first implementation of this should be something quick to write. If it really does improve retention, we can develop the implementation further.

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Related:

• Add a way to order/filter search results to show online users (Make search orderable by last online duolicious-backend#541, Search filter for last online time duolicious-backend#507)
• Add a way to order/filter search results to show new users

[duogenesis]

If a "person has added a new photo" update event, then it might be worthwhile combining it with #726 so that users can reply to the updated photo.

If there's a "person has updated their profile" event, then it might be worthwhile combining it with #727.

[duogenesis]

Possible events to put into feed:

• Joined a club
• Created a club
• Was recently active
• Answered a question
• Got verified
• Added a pic
• Added to their profile's text
• Added an audio bio
• Signed up

[duogenesis]

Okay, the feed's been merged. It's kind of mid. What it's lacking is:

1. An ordering of content from most to least engaging - I've already mentally filtered bio updates. Then again, this'd cause some others to get inundated with messages.
2. A way to interact with content - I guess Make it possible to reply to profile text #727 and Make it possible to reply to profile photos #726 will solve it
3. More social proof - Maybe adding a way to like posts will help. But right now the feed is missing the vibe that people are engaged with content that appears in it

There's also the problem that triggering a feed update will cause you to get many messages. It's still too early to say if that helps or hinders user retention. I'm keeping an eye on it. Maybe the number of messages users receive can be tuned by randomly sampling feed updates with a probably that decreases with an increase in the number of messages received (in the recent past). Edit: This was mostly solved by duolicious/duolicious-backend#720

Another thing: Even if the feed contains very recently active users, it doesn't feel like they were very recently active unless they're online right this moment. I think there needs to an extra online status which shows if users were online in the past day.

[duogenesis]

Once #750 is merged, notifications can be sent to users to nudge them to use the app (duolicious/duolicious-backend#694). Notifications should be timed when users are most active. This is around 7PM to 10PM, their time. Weekends are busier. Though I think it'd be better to use a notification schedule whose frequency decreases with account age. So a user whose account is 1 day old might get a nudge every day. A user whose account is 2 days old might get a nudge every second day or so. The rationale is that new users are still getting into the habit of using the app, but we also don't want to annoy them by nudging them every day continuously. The nudge frequency should probably max-out (min-out?) at some point. We probably don't want to nudge them less frequently than every 7 days, but some experimentation is needed. I imagine 3 days could be the sweet spot.

[teolemon]

It would be good to filter the feed by criteria. As a user, I might be interested by a sunset of users, and might not like seeing updated from users I don't want to match with.

[duogenesis]

@teolemon agree, but only once Duolicious has about 10x more users, otherwise the feel will be very quiet