My azolla is now thriving and here are the things I wish I knew sooner

I learned is that if the tips of the leaves are pink that's a sign of stress, meaning reduced growth rate and stagnation. So if you see pink tips that's not a good sign and something needs to change. I think in my case it was phosphorous deficiency because I didn't initially add any fertilizer to the water, which leads to the next thing.

The need for nutrients and pH balance. Phosphate, Potash, Iron Chelate are all necessary. Tap water alone will not allow the plants to grow very much. This is the reason people use animal poop, because it contains all this, along with helping with acidity. The pH I was able to manage at about a 6.5 (about neutral) because of my hydroponics setup I already had a test kit which made it much easier.

The duckweed and any other "contaminants". You don't want the azolla unnecessarily competing for nutrients. When I ordered it the azolla came with duckweed mixed in, and it was a really annoying tedious process to separated. I had to actually use tweezers to be careful to only extract the azolla. Because you're creating a great environment for many other algae/aquatic plants, you don't want the azolla to be competing. I made the mistake of adding typical maxigro hydroponic fertilizer which contains a lot of nitrogen. If you avoid nitrogen completely, then you can starve out a lot of other unwanted organisms which require nitrogen (azolla requires no nitrogen).

The tub with less green in it is the azolla separated out, the tub with most green is the mix of azolla and duckweed which has grown considerably since I first received it over two weeks ago.