“When you growth hack with incentives, you erode authenticity” 🗯 Laura Nestler, Duolingo & Yelp
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Community is not transactional by nature. Humans seek to connect on a deeper level. They’re looking for validation or for support or for something bigger than themselves.
Now that community is such a buzzword. Everyone wants it and they want it quickly. We have more levers than ever, and they work. But when you growth hack with incentives, what you gain in volume, you erode in authenticity. The standard you walk by is the standard you accept. Culture breeds culture.
Show Notes
In 2007, Laura Nestler responded to a Craigslist ad that “was either as sketchy as it sounded or her dream job.” Fortunately, it was her dream job with a little startup called Yelp.
She started as the community manager in Portland, Oregon, and would go on to spend a decade with the company refining their community playbook and living in cities all around the world, launching Yelp communities in new markets.
Now Laura is the Global Head of Community at Duolingo, a platform that hundreds of millions of people around the world turn to learn a language. Before COVID, Duolingo users were hosting thousands of in-person language circles around the world each month. Laura shared how she did over forty iterative tests before scaling this community investment with the Duolingo community’s help.
While you’re listening, keep an ear out for three of our favorite insights from Laura:
A community’s kindling — the earliest members — are consequential.
Without the folks writing Yelp reviews in a city, the site was just a lifeless software skeleton. Laura and the Yelp team knew this, and made community building the central focus at Yelp in the early days, often repeating a mantra about the community internally: “Protect the source.”
Laura and her team’s job was to find the right early reviewers in each city to join who would build the Yelp community with them from the ground up. To get the flywheel of reviews going on the upstart site, Laura and her team had laser-like focus on who they approached. Only 5–10 of early, passionate reviewers could unlock an entire city for Yelp.
Photos of Laura hosting Yelp events and meetups.
A community won’t emerge through growth hacking.
Laura tells the story of one of Yelp’s competitors that would set up booths at events and encourage people to submit a number of reviews on the spot for reward. With time, this approach took away from the credibility of the site’s review, and it also became too expensive to keep incentivizing people to write reviews on the platform.
Yelp took a different approach, believing that community was not transactional. Growth hacking may accumulate a volume of users but it erodes the authenticity of their contributions.“‘You get this for doing that’ is really normal in the business world,” Laura points out. “But social incentives are different from business incentives. You give a barista $5 to make you a coffee, that is expected. But, if someone holds the door for you, you don’t reach for your wallet and hand them $5,” Laura says. “That feels icky.”
Duolingo, languages is for all.
Community building investments are iterative. Test, then test again.
Laura tested 40 events before Duolingo landed on the format for their language circles, which now number in the thousands per month. That allowed her to ensure this shared activity was one the community actually valued as a product, not just something her personal bias assumed was valuable. As her tests picked up traction, she dedicated time and resources to scaling out these proven shared activities to more hosts. Before COVID-19 hit, more than 2,000 language groups were meeting every month.
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