Albert Cheng
Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product, covering growth systems, measurement and analysis, and product design.
Episode
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)
Summary
Growth leader who has worked across Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com discusses how to find hidden monetization and growth opportunities by deeply understanding user behavior. He shares how at Grammarly, interspersing paid suggestions into the free tier nearly doubled upgrade rates, and explains frameworks for knowing when to explore versus exploit and building AI-powered SQL bots to make companies more data-informed.
Key Takeaways
For freemium products, the free experience should be a representative sample of the full product's power. Showing free users a taste of premium suggestions nearly doubled subscription upgrades at Grammarly.
User retention is the foundation of consumer subscriptions. If D1 retention is below 30-40%, you're fighting an uphill battle — you're forced to convert users on day one before they've built any habit.
When more experiments return statistically insignificant results, that's a signal you've over-exploited an insight and need to brainstorm new hypotheses.
Build an AI-powered Slack bot with text-to-SQL for ad hoc data questions. It dramatically increases question volume because people no longer feel embarrassed to ask 'stupid' questions.
Freemium works best when the free tier serves the mission and growth comes through word of mouth — not paid acquisition, which makes freemium economics brutal.
Notable Quotes
“No, this is great. I hope it was useful for your listeners. I will say over the last few days, as I was prepping for this, I was honestly a little bit anxious about do I have enough deep independent frameworks that I need to come up with? But just being authentic to my actual experience at these companies, a lot of my lessons learned have been off of the backs of other people that have tried similar things and have succeeded or failed.”
“The lived product experience for most of the free users was that Grammarly was just a product to fix your spelling and grammar because those were the free suggestions. What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before.”
“I have a four-year-old and I'm starting to teach him how to bang on the keys a little bit, but a couple things stand out. One is that I think music and growth, they both rely on this just consistent repetition. You're constantly making mistakes. You have this super tight feedback loop. You have to get really resilient to just making mistakes all the time. And you know that the way of learning is through those mistakes. So that's a thing that I learned very early, and the second thing that occurred to me is that they both have this structural underpinning to them.”