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Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are a key indicator of whether your product delivers recurring value, but growing them takes more than tracking a number. This masterclass breaks down how five iconic tech products did it:
Each product found its own growth loop, and you can too.
For Product Managers, Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are more than a vanity metric included in an investor slide deck, they’re a pulse check on whether users find recurring value in your product and whether that value is strong enough to bring them back again and again.
But while most companies track Monthly Active Users, few know how to move the needle and that’s why we studied five iconic tech products (Duolingo, Notion, Slack, Spotify, and Zoom) to uncover how they drove exponential Monthly Active User growth. From gamification loops to creator-powered ecosystems, each product took a distinct approach tailored to its audience and use case.
This isn’t about copying what they did, it’s about understanding the mechanics behind their success so you can find your own path to sustainable, habit-forming growth.
Let’s dive into the five biggest Monthly Active User growth plays and the product strategies that made them work.
📊 Want to learn how to track Monthly Active Users the right way?
Duolingo is a language-learning app with a deceptively simple mission: help people around the world learn new languages for free. But what really sets it apart isn’t just the content, it’s the experience.
Instead of feeling like school, Duolingo feels like a mobile game. And that’s exactly the point.
From the moment a user signs up, they’re pulled into a loop designed to create habitual engagement which is not by accident, but by design. Duolingo has mastered gamification in a way few apps have, using behavioural psychology to make daily learning not just feel rewarding, but compulsively repeatable.
🎯 Streaks: Every day you complete a lesson, your streak increases. Miss a day? You lose it. This visible score taps into loss aversion, a powerful motivator that keeps users coming back.
🏆 Leaderboards: Weekly competition gives users a reason to care about XP points. It transforms isolated learning into a social game, even for solo learners.
💎 In-app Currency: Earn “Lingots” or “Gems” by completing lessons, maintaining streaks, or winning challenges. These aren’t just for show, they can unlock customisations or streak freezes, reinforcing the cycle.
🦉 Push Notifications: The Duolingo owl is famously persistent, reminding, nudging, and even guilt-tripping users back into the app. The tone is playful, but the result is serious: higher daily retention.
What makes this approach so powerful is that it builds identity. You’re not just using Duolingo, you’re a learner with a streak to protect, a rank to climb, and rewards to earn. Each small interaction is tied to a larger sense of progress.
This flywheel of effort, reward, and identity has made Duolingo one of the stickiest apps in the world with its Monthly Active User growth is driven by pure product engagement.
Product Managers can learn from how Duolingo uses gamification to create habit-forming loops. By combining streaks, leaderboards, and in-app rewards with psychological triggers like loss aversion, Duolingo doesn’t just drive engagement, it builds emotional commitment. If your product can turn progress into identity, users will keep coming back not just to learn, but to maintain who they believe they are.
📌 Want the full breakdown?
👉 How Duolingo Gamified Monthly Active Users: Lessons in Habit Formation
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Zoom is a video conferencing platform that went from a B2B tool to a household name almost overnight. But its rise wasn’t just driven by remote work or global necessity, it was also the result of product design focused on eliminating barriers.
From the start, Zoom made it absurdly easy to join a call. No lengthy setup. No complicated permissions. No forced downloads if you didn’t want them. It’s that simplicity which became a growth engine.
🎯 One-Click Join: Whether through calendar invites, Slack integrations, or a browser, users could join meetings with a single tap. This streamlined entry reduced cognitive effort and created a default behaviour: click the link, join the call.
💡 No App Required: Zoom allowed users to join from a browser, making it accessible even for first-time users. In the B2B world, this meant fewer barriers for guests and more invitations driving new user acquisition.
📅 Deep Calendar Integration: Users could schedule or join meetings directly from Google Calendar, Outlook, or even CRM platforms. This embedded Zoom into the workflow, making it feel less like a tool and more like infrastructure.
📱 Cross-Device Continuity: Start on your phone, switch to desktop, join from your tablet; Zoom worked everywhere. That flexibility built familiarity, and familiarity breeds habit.
The brilliance behind Zoom’s Monthly Active User growth wasn’t flashy features, it was the relentless removal of friction. Every reduction in steps led to more frequent usage, more spontaneous communication, and a product that quietly became second nature.
By embedding into tools users already loved and minimising friction at every turn Zoom kept users coming back.
Zoom’s success highlights the power of removing friction from the user journey. One-click joins, no downloads, and seamless calendar integrations made Zoom feel invisible (in the best way). For Product Managers, the lesson is clear: when using your product feels effortless, it becomes habitual. Identify and eliminate small blockers, and usage will grow organically.
📌 Want the full breakdown?
👉 How Zoom Increased Monthly Active Users by Embedding Into Every Workflow
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Spotify isn’t just a place to stream music, it’s a deeply personal soundtrack generator that learns what you love and serves it to you with uncanny accuracy. Its growth in Monthly Active Users has been fuelled by one thing: making every user feel like the product was made just for them.
Rather than overwhelming users with endless options, Spotify listens to your listening. It surfaces what matters, when it matters, which turns passive users into loyal ones.
🎧 Discover Weekly & Release Radar: These personalised playlists are updated automatically, offering a fresh, tailored experience every week. It’s content curation without the effort, and it keeps users coming back to see what’s new.
📈 Algorithmic Playlists: Your 'Daily Mixes' blend your favourites with new suggestions. Over time, Spotify’s recommendations get better, creating a virtuous cycle of play → learn → recommend.
📅 Spotify Wrapped: Once a year, Spotify gives users a glossy highlight reel of their listening habits which is a deeply shareable, feel-good celebration of personal data. Wrapped doesn’t just drive social engagement; it reaffirms identity and builds anticipation.
📌 Save Songs, Build Playlists: Every interaction, from saving a track to making a playlist, reinforces the endowment effect. The more effort users put in, the more emotionally tied they become to the app.
What makes Spotify so powerful is that it anticipates users. This sense of "you get me" transforms casual users into habitual listeners, driving long-term engagement and Monthly Active User growth without the need for constant reminders or paid nudges.
Spotify doesn’t just play your music. It becomes part of your identity.
Spotify shows that deep personalisation is a growth engine. By using listening data to serve up eerily accurate playlists, Spotify creates a sense of “this is made for me.” The more you tailor the experience, the more indispensable your product becomes. Product Managers should focus on building systems that learn and adapt to user behaviour in a way that feels magical.
📌 Want the full breakdown?
👉 How Spotify’s Addictive Personalisation Engine Drives Monthly Active Users
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Notion is a workspace tool for docs, wikis, and product management, but what’s really propelled its Monthly Active User growth is how it made customisation feel effortless.
Unlike traditional productivity tools that impose structure, Notion gives users a blank canvas and then surrounds them with inspiration, templates, and community-driven momentum that transforms first-time dabblers into power users.
📄 Template Gallery: New users don’t start from scratch. Notion’s curated and community-generated templates help users skip the setup and instantly feel productive. These templates lower the barrier to value, making onboarding faster and stickier.
🎨 Infinite Flexibility: Every doc can be turned into a task board, a knowledge base, or a custom dashboard. This flexibility turns Notion into a product that adapts to you, not the other way around.
👥 Creator Economy: Notion empowered users to share and even sell their setups, from dashboards to planners. This gave rise to a passionate community of creators, driving word-of-mouth growth and embedding the product into niche use cases (from solopreneurs to students).
🏗️ Build-Your-Own-System Appeal: The more effort users put into building their workspace, the more invested they become (a textbook case of the IKEA effect). That emotional ownership boosts long-term retention.
Notion doesn’t just give you a tool, it gives you a playground. The deeper users customise it, the more irreplaceable it becomes. This transforms users from consumers to creators, they feed a viral growth loop that fuels Monthly Active Users across cohorts and verticals.
Notion proves that customisation unlocks emotional investment. Its use of templates and build-your-own workflows helps users feel like co-creators, not just consumers. When people pour effort into shaping their setup, they’re far more likely to stick around. Product Managers should embrace flexibility and empower users to shape the product into something uniquely theirs.
📌 Want the full breakdown?
👉 Templates, Creators, and Power Users: Notion’s Monthly Active User Flywheel
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Slack didn’t target individual users, it fought for entire teams. That distinction is what made its Monthly Active User growth skyrocket without relying heavily on traditional marketing.
What started as an internal communication tool quickly evolved into the default platform for modern team collaboration. The secret? Slack made every new user part of a network, not just a product.
📬 Unread Messages: The first time you open Slack and see channels filled with conversation, you're drawn in. Every message you missed is a reason to return, this passive FOMO drives re-engagement.
🔔 Smart Notifications: Slack lets users customise how, when, and where they’re pinged. It respects attention while keeping users connected,maintaining a high DAU:MAU ratio without becoming intrusive.
📈 Real-Time Collaboration: Slack isn’t just chat. It’s where files are shared, decisions are made, and workflows come together. This makes it core to productivity, not just a background tool.
📣 Team-Based Onboarding: When one person joins Slack they are prompted to invite five colleagues. Those five invite more. This exponential growth loop turned workspaces into distribution engines.
Furthermore, because Slack integrates with everything (Jira, Google Drive, Figma, etc) it becomes more useful the more teams use it. That compounding utility cements long-term retention and daily usage.
Slack's Monthly Active User growth wasn’t about individual productivity. It was about group habit formation and embedding itself into the daily rhythm of work.
Slack teaches us that products grow faster when they serve networks, not individuals. By focusing on team-based onboarding, smart notifications, and real-time collaboration, Slack embedded itself into the daily rhythm of work. For Product Managers, the takeaway is to build features that encourage shared use because when one user invites five others, growth compounds.
📌 Want the full breakdown?
👉 Slack’s Monthly Active User Growth Playbook: How Teams Became Channels for Growth
A Monthly Active User is someone who meaningfully interacts with your product at least once during a rolling 30-day period. This could include logging in, completing a task, viewing content, or any action you define as core engagement.
Monthly Active Users isn’t just about counting users, it’s about tracking relevance. It helps you understand how many users are still finding value in your product over time.
🔍 Want the full breakdown?
Check out our full Monthly Active Users explainer here
Monthly Active Users is a cornerstone metric for evaluating long-term product health. It reveals how many users are actively returning, but also why.
For Product Managers, Monthly Active Users help track retention trends, identify engagement drops, and assess the success of key features or releases. Combined with other metrics (like Daily Active Users or churn), Monthly Active Users allows teams to prioritise improvements that drive lasting impact, not just surface-level growth.
🧠 Pro Tip: Use Monthly Active Users alongside cohort analysis to spot where users fall off after sign-up or activation.
There’s no magic number, but direction matters more than absolute volume.
Monthly Active Users should consistently grow over time for a healthy product, but frequency of use matters too. A product with 10,000 Monthly Active Users and a 30% DAU:MAU ratio is typically more “sticky” than one with 50,000 Monthly Active Users and a 5% ratio. A DAU:MAU ratio above 20% is a sign users are forming regular habits.
📊 Need help calculating product stickiness?
What do Duolingo, Notion, Slack, Spotify, and Zoom have in common?
❌ Not their audience.
❌ Not their category.
❌ Not even their frequency of use.
What they do share is this: each one found a core product experience that kept users coming back and then built systems to amplify it.
Whether it’s gamified streaks, personalised playlists, team-based onboarding, or frictionless communication, each product discovered a unique path to sustainable Monthly Active User growth. The lesson isn’t to copy their tactics, it’s to uncover your own.
📈 As a Product Manager, your job is to:
Monthly Active Users isn’t just a metric. It’s a reflection of how essential you are in the lives of your users. And if these five companies prove anything, it’s that the path to growth runs through great product design.
📌 Ready to dive deeper?
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