It’s no secret that these days, retention is king. It isn’t just a nice-to-have metric anymore — it’s the leading indicator of a product’s staying power and long-term growth.

There’s no better example of this than Duolingo.

The language-learning app is often praised for its gamification, but here’s the real headline: over 9 million users maintain a 365+ day streak. That’s 24% of their daily active users. Retention like that isn’t just good for engagement — it’s a revenue engine.

Naturally, other apps have tried to copy this success by launching their own streaks or gamified loops, hoping for the same results. But most fall short. Why?

Because Duolingo didn’t just slap a streak feature on their app and call it a day. They’ve run over 600 experiments just on streaks.

And one of their biggest retention wins came from a simple copy change. They swapped the CTA text “Continue” with “Commit to my goal.” That’s it.

So where should you start if you want to improve retention?

Start with copy.

Product copy is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort levers to test in your product. It’s your front line; the words your users see every single day. It’s how you guide them, motivate them, and build habits.

Duolingo’s copy experimentation may have only changed a few words, but it connected to their users’ motivation, identity, and purpose. It turned a generic button into a micro-commitment. And the best part? It probably took a dev less than five minutes to ship.

Copy is your hidden retention engine.

But too often, we treat it like an afterthought.

That’s where Ditto comes in. Ditto makes it easy to experiment with product copy — just like you'd experiment with any other part of your product.

With Ditto’s Variants feature, your team can:

• Manage multiple versions of copy in one centralized place: Write, edit, review, and save variations right alongside the original product copy, all in one source of truth (no outdated spreadsheets required).
• Review each variation in design context: Review variations on product text right in design mockups, without messy duplicate frames in Figma files. Just “apply” a Ditto variant to a frame, and see the copy update in designs.
• Dynamically manage and swap variants in your codebase: Ditto’s API and CLI can fetch text into variant-specific JSON files, which keep the same text keys across variants. These files can be easily swapped out for different versions.
• Personalize and A/B test copy, without slowing down the team: Write and experiment with copy variations, without creating loads of extra work for your team. Ditto’s variants make it easy to draft, review, finalize, and ship copy variations, so you can personalize and experiment in days, not months.

This isn’t just about changing a headline or tweaking a CTA. This is about systematizing copy experimentation, so you can actually run enough tests to uncover what works. Because when it comes to retention, quantity matters. You can’t A/B test your way to a breakthrough with only one or two ideas.

Most teams look for silver bullets. But the real wins come from repeatable processes — especially in something as foundational as your product’s voice.

So if you’re trying to improve retention, don’t start with a new feature. Start with copy. And start experimenting with it the way you would any other core part of your product.