OneSignal Podcast

The 13th OneSignal podcast welcomes OneSignal VP of Engineering, Matt Pillar.  Matt joined OneSignal in March after spending the past 2 years as Facebook's real-time infrastructure and core data engineering manager. Previously Matt was CTO at a messaging task management software startup called Redbooth. 

Matt joins to talk about his experience building engagement tools for Redbooth, supporting real-time communications at Facebook, and his thoughts on the journey ahead for OneSignal.  His experience building messaging at a startup, supporting the world's most robust messaging solution in the world, and how he views developing a similar scale for the rest of the world at OneSignal. 

Matt provides anecdotes about managing technology systems, culture, and scale.  He says Facebook's culture was strong, built on a "blameless" mindset and he tells an intern story that reinforced that culture.  He discusses how developing scaled systems will contribute to OneSignal's expectation of growing capacity more than 10x the next few years.  Hear more of Matt's perspective on this podcast episode. 

Please subscribe to the OneSignal Podcast at your preferred podcast directory, Spotify, Apple, Google, TuneIn, among many others. 

OneSignal is the global market-leading push notification & in-app software provider used by 900,000+ to send more than 6 billion messages every day with a mission to be the intelligent communication layer that enables businesses to exceed their goals.

Sign up for free to use OneSignal to engage & grow your audience today!

The 12th OneSignal podcast, hosted by Josh Wetzel, welcomes Reid Genauer, formerly CMO of Smule & Magisto, and business builder at eMusic & BitBop Mobile TV (Fox Acquisition).  He’s had an awesome, diverse career.  Starting a successful touring band, Strangefolk, then Assembly of Dust, before getting into digital marketing in the early 2000’s with eMusic. 

Reid talks about how the old way of marketing brings the customers in and the product takes them from there is outdated.  Functions must partner across the user journey, tools and processes need to be consistent.  He elaborates on the importance of compelling content, how organizations need to build a credibility touchpoint with a consumer before they can successfully ask them to purchase.  

Reid is a unicorn of sorts, a highly creative person who understands that the melding of brand & performance marketing is the intersection of sustained success.  He is a champion for positivity and posits "Less malaise and more praise” as a theme for social collaboration & marketing in general. 

You can find Reid @ LinkedIn; Twitter; Instagram and his personal website. 

Please subscribe to the OneSignal Podcast at your preferred podcast directory, Spotify, Apple, Google, TuneIn, among many others. 

OneSignal is the global market-leading push notification & in-app software provider used by 900,000+ to send more than 6 billion messages every day with a mission to be the intelligent communication layer that enables businesses to exceed their goals.

Sign up for free to use OneSignal to engage & grow your audience today!

The 11th OneSignal podcast, hosted by Josh Wetzel, welcomes Dogpatch Advisors Kyle Williams. Kyle has been at the cutting edge of outbound campaign development work for some of the most successful software startups in the world (Google Cloud, Segment, Envoy, Drift & OneSignal). Kyle joins us to talk about the components of great messaging, addressing Gartner's (80% of marketers will abandon by 2025) personalization prediction, and what's important as marketers strive to improve the quality bar.

Please subscribe to the OneSignal Podcast at your preferred podcast directory, Spotify, Apple, Google, TuneIn, among many others.

OneSignal is the global market-leading push notification & in-app software provider used by 900,000+ to send more than 6 billion messages every day with a mission to be the intelligent communication layer that enables businesses to exceed their goals.

Sign up for free to use OneSignal to engage & grow your audience today!

The OneSignal podcast episode 10, hosted by Josh Wetzel, welcomes grocery senior mobile product manager, Lina Mamut, to the podcast.  Previously a founder of a food eCommerce company, Lina presently works for a top 3 global grocery company building mobile products to glue the physical & digital worlds.  The discussion starts with the impact of COVID-19, how Innovation happens in a big grocery environment, and how push notifications/messaging support their customer journey.  

Lina has founded a company, led product at another startup, and now works for a major corporation.  They have operated across the spectrum of a company's evolution.  Lina says “Innovation is the acceptance that we live in an ever-changing world” and "...isn’t something we practice, it is something we live”.   In discussing the importance of mobile,  “everybody is carrying around their device”,  it's the channel that enables online delivery, in-store pickup, promotional delivery, and ongoing engagement.  They use messaging to drive engagement because “Notifications are what they’re seeing”

Hear Lina talk about the excitement of improving an essential service and the importance of essential workers and more. 

Please subscribe to the OneSignal Podcast at your preferred podcast directory, Spotify, Apple, Google, TuneIn, among many others.

OneSignal is the global market-leading push notification & in-app software provider used by 900,000+ to send more than 6 billion messages every day with a mission to be the intelligent communication layer that enables businesses to exceed their goals.

Sign up for free to use OneSignal to engage & grow your audience today!

Welcome to the OneSignal Podcast where we aim to educate ourselves on product, industry and best practices as it relates to building and growing a customer messaging practice, hosted by Josh Wetzel.

In this episode, we're joined by OneSignal CEO & Co-founder, George Deglin who interviews Google Chrome Product Manager, PJ McLachlan to discuss Google Chrome web push browser changes, the future of notifications, and the importance of PWA's (progressive web apps).

PJ speaks at length about what trends the Chrome team was seeing, how they are tackling the challenges, the importance of notifications and how they want to improve the quality and utility of notifications. 

Connect with PJ to provide product feedback or pose questions @ his twitter.   

The OneSignal podcast aims to educate listeners on product, industry and best practices as it relates to building and growing a customer messaging practice.  This episode is hosted by Josh Wetzel with a veteran sales engineer, Brian Starr, discussing how to properly define proof of concept test to demonstrate the value of a digital service, software as a solution (SaaS). 

Brian has worked at an impressive set of companies, AirBnB, GitHub, Leanplum and now OneSignal in sales engineering type roles.   At OneSignal he’s focused on helping enterprise organizations implement best of breed messaging into their technical stack.

Brian talks about how it is important to define whether you're testing new technology or validating a vendor selection, setting a list of requirements and one core metric you are attempting to move with any test or proof of concept.   

Please subscribe to the OneSignal Podcast at your preferred podcast directory, Spotify, Apple, Google, TuneIn, among many others. 

Welcome to the OneSignal Podcast where we aim to educate ourselves on product, industry and best practices as it relates to building and growing a customer messaging practice, hosted by Josh Wetzel

In this episode, we're joined by OneSignal CEO & Co-founder, George Deglin to discuss web push browser changes, and then we’ll have a customer success manager, Karima Wagner, on to discuss best practices for web push notifications.  

Web Push Changes - George Deglin - OneSignal Co-Founder & CEO

Chrome is introducing a new “quiet” permission prompt that is much more subtle and more likely to not be seen by users. This permission prompt is shown if either of these two cases is true:

1. If a website has a high rate of users denying permission on the normal permission prompt, the quiet prompt is shown instead.
2. If a user has denied push permission on the normal permission prompt on many websites, the quiet prompt is shown instead.

These changes will negatively impact spammy and those sites that aren't thoughtful about how they ask for permission.  Sites that have a value proposition consumers are interested in and are transparent about their intent, will benefit from these changes.  

How about retaining & growing your existing audience?

The best strategy is not how do we gain more traffic that lands on our site one time but rather, how do we build more engaged relationships with the users who are already enjoying your site. Increasing the repeat visitation of your existing users is far more cost effective and easier than acquiring new ones.  The economic models overwhelmingly favor retaining a customer over acquiring a new one, one study found it is 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer, so why don’t web publishers spend more time retaining their audience? Push notifications are the most effective and affordable way to build a more engaged relationship with your users.  Pulling web push notification data from across many publishers, on average we see approximately 4% opt-in across a publisher’s unique visitors over a period of a year.  That means if you have 1 million uniques that would equate to 40k subscribers.  If you have 10 million uniques, it would be approximately 400,000 subscribers.  A web push subscriber is opting in to your service, they are the most loyal and important members of your audience.  With a consistent strategy, you can bring those top users back to the service more frequently, driving significant incremental daily traffic. 

Customers That Are Using Web Push Notifications to Drive User Re-Engagement:

• Clutchpoints - A trusted source for news on sports, implemented this to build a relationship with visitors coming from paid or organic traffic sources, and expand the depth of that relationship using Push Notifications.  
• ProductHunt - Product Hunt is a website that lets users share and discover new products. Users submit products, which are listed in a linear format by day.  Product Hunt uses push notifications as a way for them to bring the community together to support new launches and interesting innovations.  This grows their engagement from their highest-valued and consistent contributors.  
• YouNow - a live streaming service used by 15,000+ broadcasters every day increased retention by 19% and they saw a 5% increase in time spent on the platform with users who came through web push.  

Web Push Notification Best Practices for Setup & Usage  - Karima Wagner

Setup: 

• Typical/wordpress: Leverage the out of the box pre-prompt options (Slide prompt, subscription bell, custom link)
• Custom Setup: give the users power to pick their own topics or frequency at which they prefer to get messages. Respect their choice by not sending irrelevant messages
• General: prompt at relevant times (user browsed a certain number of pages, certain products..), Make sure to explain the value that the users will get out from subscribing. Add your logo with the slide prompt

Web Push Best Practices:

• Content, always send relevant content, think of your push content the same way as SEO, use the right keywords, keep it short so you’re taking into consideration different screen sizes
• Personalize (Segment, tags), users are more likely to click on your message if it’s tailored to them vs mass automated messages targeting everyone
• Emojis, use relevant, clear meaning emojis, but don’t overdo it
• Media, include relevant product images, anything visual that conveys the reason they need to check out your message
• Time, consider time zones, user active time on your platform, general user trends on your platform,
• Localize by device language, it drives higher clicks
• A/B test, the best way to understand what works for each campaign
• Analyze to measure and identify what works and what doesn’t, you can do so by integrating with your Analytics platform, or leveraging outcomes

Read more on 6 Best Practices for Push Notifications in 2020, and Best Practices for Web Push Notifications - The ULTIMATE 2020 Guide!

Please subscribe to the OneSignal Podcast at your preferred podcast directory, Spotify, Apple, Google, TuneIn, among many others. 

Welcome to the OneSignal podcast where we aim to educate ourselves on product, industry and best practices as it relates to building and growing a customer messaging practice, hosted by Josh Wetzel. 

We're excited to be joined this episode by Tracy Chang, Squaw Valley Holdings Vice President of Digital Marketing.  Tracy has been working at Squaw Valley Holdings for more than 8 years, and in the winter resort business marketing industry for the past 14 years.   She joins us to discuss how Squaw Alpine has leveraged digital to iterate and improve the resort experience.   

“OneSignal’s push notifications have been instrumental in helping us to reach our goals. We use (them) throughout our user’s journey...It is these micro-moments that help us build a deep relationship with our users.”  

Show Notes:
(0:20) Intro - Tracy Chang - VP Digital Marketing, Squaw Valley Holdings

(6:30) General Innovation - Tracy discusses how they are working to improve the customer experience to reach new customers and improve their experience. Using new technology such as the Apple Watch.  

(10:30) Experimenting with New Technology - Tracy discusses how SquawAlpine has jumped on new technology, such as Apple’s ARKit, to build new visitor functionality, however in the case of ARKit, they didn’t release the innovation.  

(12:30) Digital Deals Drive Engagement - Tracy talks about how their digital engagement goal is to be hyper-relevant.  

• “OneSignal’s push notifications have been instrumental in helping us to reach our goals.  They are quick to implement and use. We use push notifications throughout our user’s journey."  Tracy mentions how from signup to village arrival, visitors are provided weather and terrain updates.  They even use it for crowd management.  "On weekends there is a mass exodus at 4, if traffic is backed up, we can send a push about an apres-ski special to wait out the traffic.”
• “We know each user can easily turn off notifications or even uninstall our app so it’s important to us that we allow our users to signup for what’s relevant to them.”
• “We will utilize more OneSignal’s In-App messaging to educate users on the importance of providing a location, not to stalk them but to alert them of offers and experience while visiting”
• “It is these micro-moments that help us build a deep relationship with our users.”  

(16:45) App Exceeds Web Traffic - SquawAlpine saw app engagement exceed the web and other channels, it’s becoming the primary channel to interact with its visitors.  

Welcome to the OneSignal podcast where we aim to educate ourselves on product, industry and best practices as it relates to building and growing a customer messaging practice, hosted by Josh Wetzel. 

We're excited to be joined by Pasha Sadri, who has been behind some of the biggest digital innovations over the past 20 years; Maps, Y! Pipes, Polyvore and WhatsApp.  He joins us to discuss his journey, the technical decisions required to scale, what makes magic in small teams and much more. 

He also dispenses the following sage advice “No matter where you are or what you're doing, always do a great job, it will pop up, decades into the future" on how he ended up at WhatsApp.

 
Show Notes:

Intro (0:40) - Pasha Sadri - He discusses his background, how he started at Y! in 2000.  How he felt privileged to build and launch great products.

(3:35) Google Maps launch blew everybody's mind. He joined Google Maps team for a year, then returned to Y! to be a leader on the innovation team.  This spawned Pipes.  During Pipes building, Pasha gained an interest in building a visual business software tool for companies to pull images together.  This was realized as a consumer product called Polyvore which found success with women collaging, specifically around clothing and art.  After a few months of success his two co-founders, Guangwei Yuan and Jianing Hu, left their roles at Y! to focus on building Polyvore.  Pasha followed a few months later.   

(8:30) There was a couple of month period when Pasha was working ten-hour days on pipes, then come home to eat dinner and worked several more hours every evening on Polyvore. 

(12:35) Leaving Polyvore, Pasha had spent 8 years in total working on the product and business.  How did he end up at WhatsApp?  He considered another startup, venture, then starting to discuss opportunities.  WhatsApp cofounders Brian Acton had previously worked with Pasha at Y!.  He heard Pasha was a free agent and recruited him.  WhatsApp was supporting 400 million unique monthly users.  

(14:55) Pasha stresses how it is important to do a great job at all times.  You are making an impression on your colleagues, contributing to everybody’s success.  “I recommend people should always do a great job, it will come back to you decades later in unique and important ways” Pasha.  

(17:20) How do make scale, technical inflection point decisions?  Polyvore team re-wrote parts of the platform several times. 

(18:40) What is your take on scaling culture to maintain growth and consistency?  It’s important to build a culture of experimentation.  As humans, we need positive feedback for our actions.  By doing a lot of experiments, there is a chance many of them won’t work.  At Polyvore, we realized we needed to frame every experiment, even failures, as a success. Even in failure, we viewed them as positive because we learned something.  

When you have a culture of experimentation, you get a tighter cycle of feedback to gain insight and keep the team engaged. 

(21:00) How do you say no, to prioritize the most important projects?  WhatsApp was the place Pasha saw this best demonstrated.  He relays a story about his interview with Jan Koum (co-founder & CEO) where he brought ideas to the conversation and Jan was firm in saying “No”, which was an example of a laser focus on their core values and goals - “Fast, Simple and Secure”.  Having a framework in place and sticking to it was important.  

The OneSignal Podcast welcomes our CTO Joe Wilm, who joins to discuss the usage of RUST and how the company evaluates, tests and deploys new programming languages & technologies.

OneSignal announced nearly 3 years ago OnePush, the delivery system for notifications, which was written in Rust.  Original delivery system built in Ruby.  This decision was made to usher in the next wave of growth.  At that time OneSignal was handling 2 billion messages a week, today the solution has grown to 35 billion a week, a 16x growth. 

Joe through this OneSignal experience has become a known RUST community member and he discusses the advantages of this language.  In addition, he discusses how the company looks at new technologies, how they evaluate and test, and then deploy for new efficiency or functionality.