How Canva & Duolingo Drive Product-Led Retention: The Science Behind Their Success

Learn how these two industry giants cracked the code on building sticky products—and how you can do the same for your products

When it comes to crafting products that stand the test of time in the market, the aim isn’t just to make them engaging—it’s to make them essential. Hence, building habit-forming features is critical to achieving Product Market Fit (aka Retention). Through consistent immersion in products like Canva and Duolingo, I’ve studied how these industry leaders have perfected this approach—creating sticky products that become progressively more valuable the more they’re used. This article breaks down the steps to follow to replicate their success for your products.

1. The Power of Accruing Benefits

A product demonstrates accruing benefits when users experience increased value through continued engagement.

Canva exemplifies this perfectly: as users create more designs, the platform learns their preferences, suggesting increasingly relevant templates, colors, and elements. Each new design project improves future recommendations and streamlines the creative process. The platform becomes not just a tool, but a personalized design partner that grows more intuitive with each use.

Every time you use Canva, it learns a little more about you. Create a few social media posts, and suddenly it’s suggesting the perfect templates for your style. Design a few presentations, and it starts recommending color schemes you love. It’s like having a design assistant who gets better at their job daily.

The magic isn’t just in remembering your preferences. Canva observes how long you spend tweaking certain elements, which templates you pass over, and which ones you return to repeatedly. It’s building a sophisticated understanding of your design taste without you even realizing it.

2. The “Can’t Leave Now” Factor (aka mounting loss)

Mounting loss occurs when a product becomes so deeply integrated into a user’s routine, that leaving would mean sacrificing significant accumulated value. Some people in B2B call this switching costs.

Duolingo has mastered this concept through its gamified learning approach. The app creates mounting loss through carefully designed features like streak counts, league rankings, and personalized learning paths.

I remember trying to learn Spanish on Duolingo sometime last year. I maintained a 100-day streak, reached Emerald League status, unlocked special characters, and racked up hundreds of gems along the way. At which point, the thought of switching to another language app felt almost painful. Not just because of the badges and streaks, but because Duolingo already knew exactly how I learned best. I would not just lose my achievement history, but also the finely tuned personalized learning algorithm that understood my strengths and weaknesses.

To build a successful product, you need to ensure you create a virtuous cycle between accruing benefits and mounting loss. Canva demonstrates this through its brand kit feature. As users create more branded content, the platform learns their style preferences and brand elements, making future designs faster and more consistent. Simultaneously, the accumulated library of designs and brand assets becomes an invaluable resource that would be painful to leave behind.

Similarly, Duolingo’s strength lies in how it combines personalized learning paths with social and gamification elements. The more lessons completed, the better the app understands the user’s learning pace and style. This improved learning experience is then reinforced by social features like leagues and followers, creating both functional and emotional barriers to switching.

This is not something you can easily replicate elsewhere.

3. When Both Forces Combine

The success of both platforms stems from their ability to create value that compounds over time. Canva users find that each design becomes easier as the platform learns their preferences and workflow. Duolingo users experience more efficient language acquisition as the app adapts to their learning patterns.

This approach differs significantly from products that fail to create these dynamics. A simple design tool might offer the same experience whether you’ve used it once or a hundred times. A basic language learning app might present the same lessons to all users regardless of their history with the platform.

The real magic happens when products combine both these elements.

Canva does this brilliantly with its brand kit feature, which allows users to create customized assets and designs. This not only eliminates the hassle of starting from scratch each time but also reduces the likelihood of users switching to another platform to rebuild their designs.

Duolingo takes it a step further. Each lesson you complete makes the app smarter about your learning style. But they have also woven in social elements – leagues, followers, and even classroom features. You are not just leaving behind a smart learning algorithm; you will be missing out on a community and a reputation you have (painstakingly) built.

4. Applying this to your product

For product leaders, the lessons from Canva and Duolingo’s successes are clear. Creating sticky products requires the following:

• Clear value that increases with usage.

• Features that make this value improvement obvious to users.

• Accumulated benefits that would be difficult to recreate elsewhere.

• A social or personal investment that creates an emotional attachment.

This strategy transforms products from useful tools into essential platforms that users rely on and return to consistently. The result is not just user retention, but the creation of products that become increasingly valuable parts of users’ personal or professional lives.

Where this gets difficult for product teams is the ability to identify, bet on, and implement these elements in ways that align with their specific value proposition. Success comes from understanding how your product can create both immediate value and long-term investment from users, following the examples set by leaders like Duolingo and Canva.

Bottom Line

If you’re building or managing a product, here is what matters:

• Think about how your product can honestly say to users: “The more you use me, the better I'll serve you.” Not just in marketing speak, but in genuine, tangible ways.

• Consider what makes users pause when they think about alternatives. It is rarely just about features – but more about the accumulated value they would have to leave behind.

• Create immediate value that compounds over time and build features that make users’ investment both valuable and visible. That’s how you transform a useful tool into an irreplaceable part of someone’s life.

If you think you should be evaluating your product’s retention potential, start by asking your users one simple question: “Does this product get notably better the more you use it?” Their answers will guide your path forward.

Folks, the future belongs to products that don’t just serve their users , but also grows with them.