Keep pulling the thread on Albert Cheng.
After discovering users prefer reviewing wins, Chess.com changed its post-loss experience to highlight brilliant moves and encouraging messages, which increased game reviews by 25% and subscriptions by 20%.
A key monetization win at Grammarly involved changing the freemium experience to show a limited sample of paid suggestions to free users, which nearly doubled upgrade rates.
Viral marketing campaigns on platforms like TikTok, featuring the Duo the Owl mascot, sometimes drove 20-30% of Duolingo's new user acquisition on a given day.
Chess.com aims to run 1,000 experiments next year, a significant increase from practically zero before 2023, 50 in 2023, and a pace of 250 in the current year.
Albert Chang believes that for building teams, hiring for high agency, clock speed, and energy is often more important than deep domain experience.
In the fast-changing AI landscape, Albert Chang asserts that deep prior experience can be a hindrance, and established habits may need to be intentionally discarded.
Data at Chess.com revealed that 80% of users who review their games do so after a win, contrary to the initial belief that they would review losses to learn from mistakes.
Albert Chang states that the typical win rate for growth experiments in consumer products is between 30% and 50%.
Chess.com is developing an AI-powered Slack bot with text-to-SQL capabilities to automatically answer ad-hoc data requests from employees.
The technology stack for AI-assisted work at Chess.com includes V0 for product managers, Figma Make for designers, and a combination of Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot for engineers.
Grammarly operates on a freemium business model where over 90% of its users are on the free service.
Albert Chang considers a Day 1 (D1) user retention rate of 30% to 40% to be a solid benchmark for a consumer subscription app.