Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
12 tactics from Asya Paloni
Why Duolingo's App Engagement Strategy Won't Work For Every App — Asya Paloni, Welltory
Watch the full episode“The trigger that's most important for us 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.”
Health apps have no natural daily trigger — so boredom is your only viable hook
Paloni identified that most health and wellness apps lack a real-life event that compels users to open them daily — unlike Uber (need a ride) or RoboKiller (spam call arriving). Athletes and sick users are exceptions because something happens every day prompting app use; everyone else has no trigger. Welltory's solution: treat boredom-induced phone-opening as the primary trigger, and design the app to compete with TikTok in that idle moment rather than expecting users to show up with a wellness goal.
“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. You can't get a better night's sleep in five minutes in the grocery store line.”
Duolingo's shame-then-reward loop works because the task is completable inside the app in 3 minutes — yours may not be
Paloni explains why copying Duolingo's engagement mechanics fails for most health and wellness apps: Duolingo's loop works because the entire beneficial action — closing a language lesson — happens inside the app in 3-5 minutes. The notification shames you into opening, and then fast in-app completion delivers immediate reward. Health outcomes like sleeping more, exercising, or reducing stress cannot be accomplished in-app. Building Duolingo-style streak pressure around actions that require multi-hour offline behavior creates shame with no attainable reward.
“Magic at its core is the refusal of work in action. When we think about things that are magical, these are things that give people something for doing absolutely nothing — and preferably something that's very pretty and sparkly and makes them feel good.”
Make it magical: give users something beautiful for doing absolutely nothing
Paloni's 'make it magical' principle draws from feminist theory: the ideal consumer app delivers delight passively, requiring zero user effort. Welltory translates complex heart rate variability data into an animated liquid that changes color — green for energized, red for stressed, blue for calm focus — pulled automatically from Apple Watch without any user action. The visual gives people something beautiful to glance at while standing in line, competing with social media on the pleasure of opening the app.
“The principle of novelty — 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.”
Novelty drives return visits more reliably than goals — show users something new every single open
Paloni built a pre-generative-AI content system at Welltory that produced effectively infinite variations of health insights — 45 message types each with near-infinite content permutations covering four Lord of the Rings volumes worth of text. The engineering effort was immense but solved the novelty problem: users never saw the same insight twice. With generative AI this is now tractable for any app. The core principle holds regardless of implementation: if opening your app feels like pulling the same lever every time, users stop pulling it.
“If they know they're going to see bad metrics, 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.”
Shaming users for bad health metrics guarantees churn — redirect attention rather than confronting failure
Paloni argues that health apps built around goal completion and metric tracking systematically churn their users: someone who had a terrible night's sleep or skipped the gym will avoid opening an app that will surface those failures as the first experience. Welltory's design principle is to shift user attention toward other data points alongside the bad metrics. The framing is not about hiding truth but about sequencing: a tired user at the end of a hard day cannot be recovered by confrontation, but can be retained by offering something useful alongside the bad news.
“When you're telling people something that is very personalized, you're not telling them okay if you're super stressed today eventually your risk of a heart attack might increase 10 years down the line. If it impacts something more immediate like my relationships, my work, my ability to pay my bills — people are a bit more likely to care.”
Personalization beats generic health advice — tie wellness data to what users actually care about right now
Welltory connects over 1,000 data sources and runs continuous correlation analysis to surface personalized insights tying health metrics to outcomes users value. A developer learns that evening runs increase GitHub commits the next day. A parent sees stress level mapped to family interactions. The insight is designed to be immediately actionable within the user's own context — not a generic population statistic. Paloni's principle: the more personal and near-term the relevance, the more likely a user is to act and return.
“Our biggest segment we personify as the dude from The Big Lebowski. I call this segment The Dude abides. If we're making a feature I try to think about how the dude is going to respond to it. I just like to always visualize our main segment.”
Innovation framework step one: visualize your primary segment as a vivid named person — not a demographic
Paloni's innovation framework requires naming and visualizing the primary target segment before building anything. Welltory uses AI-generated images of 'The Dude' in various everyday poses — at the office, on the couch after work — to represent their largest segment: ordinary people who open their phones to escape boredom. Every proposed feature is evaluated through this lens. The specificity of the persona prevents feature decisions that optimize for power users rather than the mainstream audience.
“The retention drivers that help create this for us: magic, novelty — showing people something new every time they open the app, relief, personalization, gamification, bragging rights, and any kind of social features that help you engage with others.”
Seven retention drivers to audit every feature against: magic, novelty, relief, personalization, gamification, bragging rights, social
Paloni presents a systematic checklist for evaluating whether a new feature will improve retention. Magic means passive delivery of something delightful. Novelty means fresh content on every open. Relief means alleviating the boredom trigger rather than amplifying it with shame. Personalization means the content responds to this specific user's data. Gamification creates distraction (as Duolingo deploys). Bragging rights create shareable moments. Social connects users to each other. A feature scoring high on multiple drivers is a strong investment; one scoring on none should be reconsidered.
“In certain categories like weather there are tons of people who actively check two or three different weather apps. Part of my decision making in leaving those out was that people are still going to probably check other weather apps — but if I can create one thing that's so delightful that they're willing to pay for my app, they're still going to come back.”
Must-haves vs delighters: sometimes shipping the delighter first builds enough trust to fill the musts later
Paloni and host David Barnard discuss the strategic choice to ship delighters before fulfilling all category must-haves. Barnard's weather app launched without features users expected but with an extraordinarily delightful interactive widget that no other weather app had. The delight generated enough paying subscribers and word of mouth to fund filling in the musts. Paloni's framework: must-haves keep users from leaving, but delighters bring them in and create advocates. In crowded categories with multi-app behavior, one outrageous delight can justify the subscription even alongside competitor apps.
“Strava gives you a little badge you can put on your social media whenever you do something well. So we make a lot of our content shareable. A friend started sleeping better and posting Welltory's magical fuel tanks on social media to brag to people — that helps people come back to your app for more content to share.”
Bragging rights are an underrated retention driver — make your best moments shareable
Paloni highlights that users sharing app content to social media creates a secondary retention loop: the desire to have more shareable moments brings them back. Welltory makes its animated health visualizations shareable as a deliberate product choice. Strava's route maps and Duolingo's achievement badges serve the same function. The mechanism is self-reinforcing: a user brags, their network sees the brag and downloads the app, and the original user returns to generate more shareable content. This is one of the few organic distribution channels that costs nothing to maintain.
“The first thing we always look out for is does the thing you want to make actually align with the company mission. A lot of people do this but a lot of people also skip this part. If it isn't geared towards that, we're not going to do it.”
Align every feature to the mission statement before anything else — it's the fastest filter for bad ideas
Paloni's innovation framework begins with a mission-alignment gate, and she is explicit that many teams skip this step. Welltory's mission — improve people's well-being with science and technology that serves each individual personally — rules out anything unpersonalized or scientifically unsound before a single line of engineering is written. Host David Barnard adds that RevenueCat now opens every meeting with the mission statement and it took two years to stop feeling performative and start focusing decisions. A mission statement functions as a cheap pre-filter that prevents the team from building features nobody asked for.
“I think there's a tendency in product management to really stick to very strict rules and score everything. But I think there are limitations to how organized you can make your thinking. I use this framework not as a rule book but as something to get your brain going.”
Innovation frameworks are brain-starters, not scorecards — abandon the points system, keep the questions
Paloni warns against turning innovation frameworks into rigid scoring systems. She tried assigning points to each framework dimension — segment coverage, trigger addressed, retention drivers hit — and ranking features by score. It failed: innovation cannot be reduced to a maximization function. The framework's value is in asking the right questions (who is this for, what triggers them, does this provide relief) during ideation and competitor analysis, not in producing a ranked backlog that replaces human judgment about what truly matters.