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How Messaging Transforms Fintech, CPG, Retail, and Beyond with Josh Wetzel
231 Plays2 years ago
In the latest episode of the Player Engage podcast, Greg is joined by Josh Wetzel from OneSignal. Josh, a seasoned executive, shared invaluable insights on career development, the importance of continuous learning, and leveraging tools like OneSignal for user engagement. He emphasized aligning your career aspirations with your skills, staying updated with industry trends, and how OneSignal can help re-engage your user base. Don't miss this episode if you're interested in upping your game in creating memorable player experiences.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast, where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and HelpShift. Here is your host, Greg Posner.
Meet Josh Wetzel from OneSignal
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Player Engaged podcast. This is Greg, and today we are meeting with Josh Wetzel from One Signal. We dive into the career journey and insights of Josh Wetzel, a seasoned executive who had navigated diverse roles in sales, marketing, and business development. Instead of going to my normal intro, let's just take a look at some of the companies that Josh has worked for and kind of get his insight on. So it starts off as being a history major at Denison University.
00:00:40
Speaker
And from there, just a few of the companies that I immediately connect with since I was growing up and knew these companies, right? Director of Business Development at CNET, still a popular tech website out there. Director of Distribution at eBay, VP of Mobile and Emerging Media at Pubmatic, VP of Marketing Solutions at Bizarre Voice, and now CRO at OneSignal. So first off, Josh, very excited about you being here. We just had a great conversation about football, so maybe some of that will come out. But anything I missed about you, anything specific you'd like to share about yourself?
00:01:09
Speaker
No, Greg, that was awesome. I appreciate
Understanding OneSignal's Role and Growth
00:01:11
Speaker
it. Before we actually really start, we at HelpShift have been partners with OneSignal for a while now, but can you give a quick elevator, maybe a minute pitch to our listeners on what is OneSignal and what are the services you're providing? Yeah, I'm happy to. OneSignal is the world's most used customer engagement platform. Started off actually more than a decade ago as a mobile game studio, went through Y Combinator.
00:01:35
Speaker
had to build kind of mobile messaging, specifically push and app messaging to support their games. And then realized through the industry that there was a big need for that pivoted to just do messaging rebranded. Actually, that's how we became one signal around 2014, 2013.
00:01:51
Speaker
15 and have been providing a free product. So we grow rapidly. We're now in one in every five mobile apps and have expanded over the last seven, eight years to include orchestration across multiple channels to build out a robust email product, support SMS, and support all the other channels through what we call webhooks so you can trigger messages in WhatsApp or
00:02:12
Speaker
sending postcards to users, whatever it may be. And it's been a great ride. I've been here five years. It's an awesome product. We work with companies around the world. We have a customer in over 130 unique countries. I think we have users in almost every country that's not embargoed by the United States. And it's great to work and support businesses of all sizes. Really large businesses use us, but also a lot of small businesses and startups.
00:02:38
Speaker
And it's great to hear all the innovation happening around the world as I as I travel and meet various one single community members. It's a great place to be right because you know, I feel like in my mind mobile had a big push with gaming in the beginning and took gaming to that kind of next level to be able to communicate to be able to push notifications and I think it's
00:02:57
Speaker
taking a longer while, and we're beyond this point now, but you see different sectors also now going into mobile very heavily,
OneSignal's Gaming Industry Connections
00:03:04
Speaker
right? fintechs there, CPG is there, retail is there, right? And looking at your client list, you really touch all those verticals, which are great. And I think more those companies are starting to realize we need to start messaging, we need to start proactively reaching out, we need to get in front of our users. So it really is a good place to be. And George, your CEO, I believe, also got his start in gaming. So do you see or have you seen parallels between gaming and kind of
00:03:27
Speaker
what you guys are doing at one signal yeah i mean very much you know we started off in gaming so that's the core dna of the business i'm in our other co-founder long among bow was that kind of part of the street fighter to reboot kind of founding team founded guy interactive
00:03:44
Speaker
so has a deep history as well in gaming is on the on the art side in fact he has a quite a few fans in fact he'll do i'll do expositions or go to the comic con events and so really really fascinating career for him but yeah i answer question yeah i would say that gaming is very much.
00:04:02
Speaker
Similar and there's certain industries whether it's gaming whether it's some other adult stuff that really help drive innovation because so many people use it it's a it's a core part of entertainment i think it was a couple years ago that gaming as a as an entire industry overtook movies and television terms of revenue.
00:04:19
Speaker
And you see it now on TV, right? There's beer ads, and then there's actual game ads, both for mobile games, also the traditional PC-based games. It's clearly driving us in the AR, VR, next wave as well.
00:04:36
Speaker
But yeah, it's definitely been helpful. I think for me personally, I grew up gaming, but I'm not a huge gamer now. It's more the fact that we've just got this product that's adopted by so many people. We're delivering 12 plus billion messages a day. I personally get to engage with people doing
00:04:55
Speaker
Fresh milk delivery service in india as an example because that's a that's a problem for people and they're using our platform to help keep people informed people connected knowing when stuffs gonna be delivered you know that's just one example but it's you know you talk to these different business models that are solving different problems that you know maybe us in the u.s. have have no clue about so it's been great your.
00:05:17
Speaker
portfolio, your background, right? All the places you've been are really seem to be taking place during peak times of those technologies. And I don't know if that makes any sense, right? But you're at seeing that when technology is becoming popular, people are looking for places online to start reading it. You were at eBay, which we don't need to talk about eBay. Everyone knows about eBay. Pubmatic Bazaar voice sharing your opinions and being able to help but one signal, push messaging like,
00:05:42
Speaker
to take a step back. Hey, I think that's all awesome. But did you picture yourself here or what did you want to be when you were growing up? How do you end up being a history major at Denison to becoming CRO?
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, I think the first time I've ever been introduced in any form or they you mentioned Denison. So look,
Josh Wetzel's Career Reflections
00:05:59
Speaker
first off, it starts off, I was I was very lucky. I was born and raised in Palo Alto, California. I'm a sixth generation only Californian. So that was that was very fortunate. When I went away to college, I either wanted to be a lawyer or a psychologist.
00:06:13
Speaker
and I was a double major and I only ended up minoring in psychology because I think during my junior or senior year I sort of realized that I didn't want to go to the psychology route. Technology was taken off at the time. This was, you know, internet was taken off at the time. Technology had been going on for decades and decades. And I graduated, I went to lurk at a law firm. I actually lived in Los Angeles. Denison is based in Ohio, so a small liberal arts school. Fantastic school. I got a lot of good liberal arts training, learned a lot.
00:06:42
Speaker
But when I got to law firm, I realized this is not a great lifestyle. It's very hierarchical, very have and have not. In fact, some of the most talented people who knew the most were paralegals basically or legal secretaries.
00:06:57
Speaker
they were kind of at the lower end of the totem pole and they were stuck and the lowest level associate attorney who knew nothing was was higher up and it just there's just something about the old experience I realized like this isn't for me and so I eventually left and made back home and got a job in software
00:07:15
Speaker
And I was hooked. I took a job at this company called Go Live Cyber Studio. We were creating, at the time, the industry leading, kind of most well-liked and one of the most well-used, HTML editing software. So they called it WYSIWYG Editor. And about two months into my tenure, we got acquired by Adobe.
00:07:32
Speaker
And i kid you not i remember thinking like whoa this is so easy and so fun this is incredible this was i think i was this fall of ninety eight so i think i think we announced the acquisition at mac world in january of ninety nine and i actually got an offer to stay at adobe
00:07:47
Speaker
And, but it was like some random job. And I remember walking the halls there and thinking, God, this company feels so old. Like there was offices and there was like, it was just very cubicle. And I was very naive. I was young, but I, so I ended up helping start a company, learned a lot. And then I got into a company called MySimon, which was an early product search engine. We got acquired by CNET. And I, you know, a lot of this is just following your heart, having ambition, and then luck.
00:08:17
Speaker
I think you've got to be open about what you're enjoying. You've got to really appreciate and be recognized like where you're having an impact and be aware of that. And I could go specific into jobs where I'm like, Oh, this was great. But then, you know, you learn things along the way. And, and I think for me, it was very fortunate. Look, that fortune wasn't where I grew up. But it was also just taking advantage of opportunities. I
00:08:42
Speaker
got into that startup, we got acquired, that led to me helping start something which didn't work out. By the way, I learned a valuable lesson there about fundraising and then prototyping and actually getting a product to market, which we didn't actually ever get anything to market. And then my assignment was awesome. CNET in those days was incredible. We were a top web site in terms of traffic. We were huge. I think we had
00:09:06
Speaker
At one time, we were like a couple thousand employees. I always worked on the shopping kind of product search side of that. So for me, I was a little bit a little silent. I wasn't quite into the edit side, which was what CNET is kind of mostly known for now. But I stayed passion. One of the things I learned early on was be excited about the product. And when you're not excited about the product, it's time to do something different.
00:09:28
Speaker
That led me from CNET into shopping.com, which then got acquired by eBay. That signed up at eBay. eBay helped build a product there. Actually, I'll tell you one little tidbit of my career, and I think this is why I'm now a CRO, just to cut to the chase, was I got married in 2003.
00:09:47
Speaker
And that important my life, I had a mentor, a guy named Chaz Edwards, awesome guy, went on to start Federated Media. He was previously Sierra at one point at Digg. He was an Execut at CNET back in the day. Just great guy. But he told me one day, he said, he's like, you know, you and I talking to me.
00:10:08
Speaker
Basically, we don't think of ourselves as sellers because we're strategic. That's why we're in BD marketing. It's like, but we're strategic sellers. I remember thinking about that. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly right. I'm strategic. I can't be in sales.
00:10:21
Speaker
And I get married in 2003. He tells me this probably in like 2002, 2003, 2004, 10 minute round then. I helped start a business unit within shopping.com. It was this distributed commerce thing. We were taking all the lists. I think AdSense for commerce basically. We built that and built a pretty big business there.
00:10:39
Speaker
So that's where I got my kind of general management experience, scaled the business and it kind of propelled me in the next thing. But my wife sat me down one day and I think in like 2008, 2009, she said, you know, what are you passionate about and how are you working and what are you doing? I'm like, oh, I'm passionate about these businesses and scaling and you gotta go build these relationships and the relationships ultimately drive success with the product and so on. And I was like, you know, it's like strategic kind of business development. And she's like, well, that sounds like sales to me.
00:11:08
Speaker
And I realized at that moment that I had a block in me that I couldn't, I'm not a seller. Sales is like over here. That's not strategic, that's not interesting. And it was a really unlock for me in the sense that no, sales is critical. And actually everything I'm doing each and every day is about selling, right? I'm just selling in a unique way. I'm building relationships that distribute a product and grow revenue, or I'm selling the business, I'm selling myself, I'm selling the company on a potential,
00:11:38
Speaker
higher. Anyhow, that was an unlock. And I think from that point on, I really recognize that, you know, to build a business, sales was the most critical part, at least of the value add impact I'm going to have, because I'm not an engineer, and I'm not, I'm not going to be driving product decisions. And so that really led me, I think from that point on, I knew that I always wanted to be in roles where I was helping impact touching multiple functions, but, but definitely being focused from a sales standpoint in driving kind of overall revenue.
00:12:05
Speaker
The rest is somewhat history. The rest of the jobs really were just stops where I was passionate about the product and there was a good mutual understanding of what the vision was and where I could have an impact. I've been fortunate to go to some places that have had some success long term. It's interesting. You said a ton there. There's a lot of great stuff in there. The one that sticks out most
00:12:28
Speaker
The last one you said is that everyone at the company is in sales. You may not be in sales, but you're working for that company, you're selling that company. It goes back to the point that you made that you need to love what you do. If you're in an industry that bores you, you're not going to do a good job at selling it and representing the company. It's about finding something you love and something you're passionate about. And then it doesn't feel like selling. I'm a sales engineer and they try to put me as a sales rep for a few accounts and
00:12:52
Speaker
I don't like to go hunt, as they call it. I don't want to go pressure my customers into buying it. I'd rather just organically talk to them about what we have, how I can help them, how anyone can help them. And I think when you just start talking honestly with someone, I think sales become so much easier and so much more impactful from the customer's perspective because then they don't feel like a sales rep. They really feel like it's someone I can trust. And I think it's an important relationship to be able to build is making sure that you can trust the person that you're talking to, even if it's a sales rep. Yep. 100%.
00:13:21
Speaker
You also mentioned earlier in the conversation that you kind of looked at it as in timing is important, what you do is important. I also think sorry, you said luck. I do think timing is also important, right? Each one of those jobs that you mentioned, timing kind of worked out really well for you and knock on wood that you can keep that good timing up and going from there. But when you kind of look back at your career, was technology always something that was something that excite you? Or was there some sort of like,
00:13:46
Speaker
and maybe this pivotal moment that you realized was that, hey, I'm in sales, but was there a pivotal moment that you looked at that actually changed the course of your career outside of that CRO aspect, the sales aspect? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because actually, that's an important component of my story, which is I've always been enamored with what's new.
00:14:05
Speaker
I've always been an early adopter. I signed up to buy a Tesla before I even knew what the car would look like or what it would cost. I was shocked when I saw the initial pricing on the Model S, but I bought it because when I drove it for the first time, it was amazing. Even if I had to mortgage or sell out my kid's college fund, I did it. No, but in all honesty, I'm constantly wearing three or four wearables. I live and breathe what's new.
00:14:33
Speaker
almost to the detriment of my family and friends. So I've always been passionate about technology and what innovation. I think as I've gotten older, I've become more wise about what are the things that are actually accentuating life versus maybe holding us back and not to call out certain products, but whether they're social oriented and they're distracting us or whatnot. But I think that's a big part of what drives me. And going back to the history thing,
00:14:59
Speaker
You know there isn't probably a week that goes by where i don't think about like hey what a wonderful how blessed am i that i'm working in a time in the in history of the world we're going to this fundamental shift this will be like when the wheel was created or the printing press like we're going through a fundamental shift and how we communicate.
00:15:17
Speaker
how
Technology Enthusiasm and Career Impact
00:15:18
Speaker
we connect and how we live our lives. Kids 5, 6, 7, 8,000 years from now, ideally, knock on wood that we're still thriving and evolving, are going to study this era. To be part of that for me from a historical perspective actually is a fascinating driver above and beyond anything else. But yes, I think the net of it is I definitely have always enjoyed and been passionate about technology.
00:15:44
Speaker
I've been an early adopter at consumer electronics, but even like software and things of that nature. And then I really, I do appreciate the historical context that I think we're all in. What is your favorite piece of technology you've purchased within the last year?
00:15:59
Speaker
Um, good question. I would say my favorite like consumer thing, which I it's been longer than a year is my aura ring. I've been wearing this for about two and a half years, but it's been a game changer in terms of helping me think about sleep. Helping me think about just my health in general, getting exercise, movement, you know, where am I at mentally, both in terms of readiness, things like that.
00:16:23
Speaker
On the software side, I think B2B, that's a great question. I was a very earlier adopter of Gong, relatively speaking, and we've gone very deep with that. I think maybe not the most advanced, I don't know.
00:16:39
Speaker
We use it in all sorts of ways, both from product feedback to obviously training, helping really understand and where we are with customers. It's a really cool product and I give them a ton of credit for how much they've evolved in the last
00:16:59
Speaker
You know, especially since we adopted them in, I think it was like late 1990 or 1990, uh, late in 2018. That's been 2019. So I'm stretching a little bit. It's been a little bit more than, than a year, but. Gong's been a big game changer on our end too. I mean, just being able to read a conversation, not having to listen to it, right? If you're on a flight, you won't pull something up easily and quickly. It's just easier to consume the insights as well as find those keywords that are important. So, uh, we used to use Gong and I don't know if we are still using it.
00:17:28
Speaker
but I did really enjoy using that tool. So I guess you talked about mentorship, and I think this is an interesting one because I feel like it's an intimidating thing to ask someone to be your mentor, or it just happens naturally. Maybe I just don't even know the answer to that. But how much of a role does that play in your career? Have you felt like you've mentored people, or do you know you are mentoring people, and do you see that as being important to your growth and success?
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. Mine have been much more organic. As I mentioned Chas earlier, there's been other folks in my life who just by being around them and listening and hearing how they operate or taking in feedback from them, even if they're your manager and they're giving you
00:18:17
Speaker
Give me reviews. I think it's really important. It's quite frankly why I think remote work long term particularly for people under 30 35 even is really bad because it's hard to get that like you're it's hard to see someone operate. It's hard to get those like
00:18:32
Speaker
those informal cues. It's hard to have those like water cooler conversations. So I highly encourage people who are still earlier in their career, you know, it's one thing if you're remote, but but take the time to be in the office whenever you can travel to the home office, get that exposure. There's a couple different components there. The other question I think was, you know, you brought up a great point, which is like, it's hard. There's not a formal way like, do I go ask somebody? I've never been someone who like went and said, Hey, can you be my mentor? But I think that's actually
00:19:02
Speaker
it's a it's a trade that i probably should have adopted earlier on i think if you can advocate for yourself and you know someone may say no that's the worst case i'm one of my models by the way in life i would not always live by to clean this case is you know the only way to guarantee failure or something is to not try.
00:19:20
Speaker
So I can guarantee that you're not going to succeed if you don't even give an effort. So that's an example where if you know somebody and you're like, hey, I really like, they've been successful or I think I can model some of these behaviors, ask them to be a mentor. And I think most times people are going to, they're not completely self-absorbed or just overwhelmed in life, they're going to say yes. Have I mentored people?
00:19:44
Speaker
You know, it's a good question. Like, I don't know if I've ever had, I guess I have had a couple people formally ask me and I tend to, you know, I think of myself a little bit as a coach in some ways, like I tend to, one of my value ads is I bring a lot of energy, I want to be direct and provide people constant, you know, provide them a forum to have open conversations.
00:20:06
Speaker
My perspective in terms of myself but also for other people is, what are you trying to accomplish and what are the skills and necessary experiences you're going to need to get to where you want to be? And then helping guide people there. So even in the interview process, one of my core focuses, anyone we interview at OneSignal is,
00:20:28
Speaker
What are your career aspirations? Where do you see yourself? What are your strengths? My role in that process is trying to suss out where is this person today? Where do they want to be in two to five years so that I can understand are they going to be a good fit today for what we need and what they're good at? Are we going to be able to provide them a necessary trajectory to
00:20:52
Speaker
You can never predict the future even in this world more than three to six months out. But realistically, when I think about where we're evolving to, are we going to be able to help them achieve those experience goals? There's been examples where they might be a great fit for right now, but we're certainly not going to be able to necessarily meet their goals. I don't mean my goal is I want to come in as an individual contributor and I expect to manage in two years.
00:21:19
Speaker
It's more refined than that. I'm really good at enterprise selling, just go back to this, or I'm really good at transactional and I want to evolve into a relationship, consultative sell. I want to learn how to go from commercial inside to enterprise. To me, it's like, okay, that's great. I know in my current job, we're going to have a lot of evolution there. We're going to definitely help you there. We're going to do a lot of training. I personally can lean in for you.
00:21:48
Speaker
If somebody is like, hey, I want to be a transactional seller, and this is really basic, I mean, they're obviously different functions, it could be in marketing, like I want to get this exposure, and then I know that we're not going to be doing a lot of that. It's sort of having that frank conversation being like, this is where we're at. I don't, you know, I think if that's truly your goal, it's probably not going to be a good fit.
00:22:08
Speaker
So I believe strongly that's important. And I think quite frankly, I can't speak for most people, but my sense is that people aren't having enough of those types of conversations. And so it's why you end up in jobs that don't work out long term. I think there's also kind of this unknown of what I want to do when I grow up, right? Do you want to be a sales engineer your whole life? Do you want to be a director of BD your entire life, right?
00:22:34
Speaker
I have a lot of friends that teach, and they don't necessarily love being in that anymore. And they're like, Oh, I have no skills that translate anywhere else. And that's not the case, right? It's understanding how they translate to this other languages or verticals, right? And I think, you know, just because you are a transactional seller today doesn't mean in the next 10 years, that's what you want to be doing. And I don't think people know what they want to be doing. And it's part of the reason why I was excited to actually start doing this podcast is to understand the stories of how you got from one place to the next. So I think I think
00:23:03
Speaker
I think that's a smart question to be asking people, but I'd be surprised if everyone actually had a true answer of where they want to go. I usually give a preamble with people too. I say, look, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up either, but you get a better and better, you can paint a clearer and clearer picture as you evolve. And so I think for me, I kind of have a really good sense of exactly where I'm adding value and where I want to continue to add value going forward. But when you're 25, I certainly didn't know. Like I said earlier,
00:23:32
Speaker
I would never have touched a sales job back then, even though I had a mental block, so I had to grow through that. For you, you're a sales engineer. What do you want to do? When you think about five, 10 years, you see yourself in software still and you want to be in the go-to-market side, you want to be in product. I always liked being a sales engineer. Before I was a sales engineer, I was an account manager.
00:23:59
Speaker
I was on post sales, so I worked for a financial company that would get yelled at when our systems were down because it was interrupting their market hours. Then I went to pre-sales and I realized, hey, people don't yell at you on the pre-sales side of things. That's fantastic. It's a great place to be. I was also an introvert at the time, so I was very shy.
00:24:17
Speaker
I was afraid to approach people and talk to people. What I learned now being a sales engineer is I like telling stories. I like understanding when we became partners, right? I was a pivotal part of that because I kind of built out this whole story of how OneSignal and Helpshift work together and it excited me, like, not for the, hopefully not my company here, but not for the ability for me to start selling.
00:24:38
Speaker
one-signaled help shift, but this is a cool solution that we can start telling people. We have this problem that we've identified in the market and we can start solving and then going to listen to the customer. So I've learned that like storytelling and then when they start understanding that they said, hey, maybe you want to start this podcast. And I love what I'm doing right now. And it's a lot of work and it's a lot of going out there. But this is what I've learned I like to do at the moment, especially in gaming. I've been a gamer my whole life. So it's kind of like I woke up one day and it was like a shit moment. Like I worked for a gaming company all of a sudden. We got acquired by Keyword Studios. That's awesome.
00:25:08
Speaker
And now how can I take advantage of this, right? And then you learn in your next moves, but it's kind of the blind leading the blind sometimes you don't know what you want to do. And maybe that role doesn't exist. But if you can find value there and create value in there, it doesn't make sense.
Freemium Model at OneSignal
00:25:20
Speaker
So yeah, it makes sense. When we talk about one signal, right, there's a very clear comparison to the gaming industry as of today with
00:25:32
Speaker
the freemium model. You guys do have a free tier of access, which is fantastic. It's a great way to get started, a great way to implement the SDK. From your side, it's a great place to be, because you know who's using the tool, and you can start understanding how to build out a pipeline with that, right? But what are the challenges you guys have encountered by offering this freemium model, and kind of how do you maintain a high-level user experience?
00:25:55
Speaker
I don't know if there are any challenges with the free model. I think it's been awesome. Our mission is to democratize customer engagement. We truly want to be able to provide world-class tools to everybody, whether you're starting out a new app or you're in a pizza shop and you want to be able to engage with people through digital channels. So I see it as it's been wonderful in every facet.
00:26:20
Speaker
I would say that in terms of how we think about the commercial side of the business is we want to add incremental value. We want to be able to provide advanced functionality so that businesses that have the wherewithal, they have the resources can truly use powerful features to be able to create
00:26:42
Speaker
ongoing automated customer journeys. Think onboarding, someone comes and downloads the app or comes to the website. How do you drive them through the experience so that they're having the impact that you want them to have and they're having positive interaction with your service? Re-engagement, think about the life cycle of driving someone to pay for a subscription.
00:27:05
Speaker
where to come back to the service. So I think for us, it's always been, we love the free offering, we tout it, we want people to start using the product. And then we differentiated on providing
00:27:20
Speaker
awesome product above and beyond that to meet the needs of legitimate SMB businesses mid-market and even a ton of enterprises. We work with a ton of media companies, large fintech companies, sports leagues, a lot that we are dominant in sports leagues because we deliver really fast notifications and really robust technical tools they can integrate deeply into the CMS and whatnot.
00:27:43
Speaker
or their apps or whatnot. So yeah, for us, I think we've really embraced it and it's been part of the core of our successes. We don't sit there and say, oh, the free product stealing, share or whatnot. For us, it's a tremendous place to source leads from and it's a great place. Anytime we're having a conversation with a large customer, we're like, hey, start off. Just download the SDK, implement it. It's going to take you, I kid you not, 15 minutes I've done it myself.
00:28:10
Speaker
Android app i'm not technical yeah get it going test it out that play around it's easy to start building subscriber base if you're not using a tool or if you're using some basic thing like a firebase.
00:28:23
Speaker
It's going to give you more advanced functionality immediately. Let's talk through the functionality and your use cases and understand where you're trying to get to. It opens up a much broader conversation. Quite frankly, the people we compete with, they don't offer that. Quite frankly, they hate when there's a POC because they know that their products are really difficult to implement. They take a lot more time to set up properly and get going. It's a point of differentiation and strength for us.
00:28:53
Speaker
I'm trying to figure if I want to word this question, but you know, during the pandemic, kind of the whole culture of the world changed for a couple of years there, right? I think from the one single perspective, you kind of prioritize the customer experience rather than truly doing geographic expansion. But I was wondering how you saw your usage change during the COVID era, right? I assume it would probably go up, but I'm curious on how that
00:29:21
Speaker
kind of changed, and if it did at all, the direction the company was going?
Pandemic's Impact on OneSignal
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah. So I would say we did grow substantially both in terms of usage. So number of people signing up for the product and usage expanded pretty rapidly, particularly in second half of 2020 and then early 2021. And for obvious reasons, people were locked at home. If I was a barber shop or I had a pizza joint,
00:29:47
Speaker
You're like okay how do i how do i connect with customers like how do i build you know i've got time i need to use digital cuz everyone's on their phones or their computers so we saw a pretty rapid expansion there we also focused i think in twenty one and twenty two have been big years of actually building out teams in other parts of the world we.
00:30:09
Speaker
We realized by 2020, we knew this already, but we saw that there was a lot of usage and quite frankly, our customer base was going rapidly in Europe as an example. So we started building a team in the UK in late 20, early 21.
00:30:25
Speaker
And then this past year, year and a half in Asia, we started building a team in Singapore. So I think the pandemic definitely grew the base significantly. On an absolute basis, we grew much faster in 2020 and 2021 than we had in the previous year.
00:30:42
Speaker
but also ushered in difficulty, right? For small businesses, there's a lot of small businesses or medium-sized businesses that were using us, and for certain use cases, those businesses collapsed. So, you know, if you're thinking about anything, if you're e-commerce, you were growing like crazy, maybe food delivery grew really fast. Mobile games grew because you were stuck at home and people were using them, although we're now starting to see a little bit of that impact where people are now back to their regular lives. They don't have as much time to play a mobile game on their couch.
00:31:09
Speaker
So, you know, I think they're still growing because the absolute base is growing, but it wasn't like up into the right, you know, rocket ship stuff that they saw in 2122. So, we feel all those impacts, but by and large, we're still, you know, back to my historical comment about technology.
00:31:25
Speaker
I still feel like if you're going to use a baseball analogy or some sports analogy, I would say we're still at the halftime of digitization of our lives. So we still aren't quite there. We've made a huge progress. And some people might say, no, we're in the eighth inning of this or we're in the third or fourth quarter. But I disagree. If you just look at
00:31:46
Speaker
Cars and transportation were still at the very early stages of this transition from maybe even car ownership and then how do you know transportation in general and they got the apps use around all these physical. Utilities they're just pretty rudimentary.
00:32:03
Speaker
Uber and Lyft are further ahead, but I think if you just look at the municipalities, we actually work with a ton of these large municipalities where I look at their apps and I'm just like, this is not a great experience. For example, we work with the school district in the largest US city that's close to you, and I think they use the product for free, actually a pretty large scale.
00:32:28
Speaker
We work with a transportation commission that might have the initials MTA. I look at these apps and they're fine, but it's still very early for them. They're not cutting edge. Apple's not putting them up as editor's choice because they're just not there yet.
00:32:44
Speaker
So I still have a lot of belief that we're still kind of rounding that corner. And I think the younger people, people under 30, they live their lives on their phone, they're really proficient.
Current Digital Transformation Trends
00:32:55
Speaker
But I think you look at people that are over 40, 45, 50, and particularly that aren't in like urban areas where they're born and raised on technology, I think we're still early there. And maybe it's just a time thing. When people that are 30 or 50,
00:33:11
Speaker
At that point, the vast majority of the population is going to be really proficient with it, and so all companies will have adopted it. But I still think we're sort of in that phase. So anyhow, I kind of went off kilter on the question, but it's an important part, I think, of where we are as a society, ultimately.
00:33:27
Speaker
and the adoption. And by the way, I didn't even touch on geographic. You go to Asia, and they're almost over email. A lot of people just don't use email. They use it a little bit for business, but they're not using it for personal at all. Whereas in the US, we're still stuck where a lot of people still use email for personal and definitely use it extensively for business.
00:33:47
Speaker
So it's an interesting economy. In fact, we work with the companies there where they laugh at us. We're like, well, who do you use for email? They're like, we don't use email. Whereas in the US, email is the core workhorse communication channel for your consumer base. So I'm assuming they're ahead. I don't know. Maybe we're stuck here in spam land.
00:34:09
Speaker
It's just all different, right? I mean, when you go overseas, they're using WhatsApp more than their SMS. We're stuck in SMS world here in the States. It's different, right? There's no right or wrong. It's what's being adopted and how it's being adopted. And I agree with you about technology.
00:34:23
Speaker
If you look at the whole generative AI type of things, people might have thought, hey, we're doing as much as we can with the internet right now. All of a sudden, this opens up a new world of possibilities of what am I going to do? How am I going to do my day job? How am I going to make it simpler?
Future of AI and AR/VR in Gaming
00:34:35
Speaker
And I feel like this is a new plateau where we can start to build and develop new products we've never seen before. We have the Metaverse, which I'm questioning in my entire life. What is it? I don't know if you guys are looking at anything like that. I know we've been researching it and kind of doing some stuff with it.
00:34:52
Speaker
whole new frontiers that are opening up. And are they going to be something? Are they not going to be something is going to be an interesting conversation over the next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I think there's innovations and adjustments based on true technology breakthroughs. And then there's like innovation technology that's actually just managing us through the inefficiencies of existing technologies utility. So you touched on WhatsApp, WhatsApp is a great example where
00:35:19
Speaker
WhatsApp doesn't exist if everybody has a American telecom mindset where it's like, text is just free, it's part of your plan, there's no real money there, but you go throughout the world and actually it's a huge money maker, so they overcharge for it. So WhatsApp took off, right? Now there's a security privacy component.
00:35:38
Speaker
But I don't know if most consumers care about that. I think that's a pretty small, and the US is becoming more so, and Europeans obviously skew a little bit more on that, but I think if you're in Asia and South America, I still think it's huge. Maybe I'm wrong. But then you have the technology breakthroughs that are fundamentally shifting stuff, and I think AI falls under that. It's still very early to know exactly what this is going to do, but it's clear that a lot of tactical work is being made more efficient.
00:36:06
Speaker
And I think some jobs will evolve dramatically in the relatively near term, and then, you know, even more so in the long term. And then you've touched on VR, AR, I think, you know, when I look at it, to me, AR is a no brainer. And in fact, we work with a, we work with again, where it's in sports, I've seen some demos of stuff that's either live now,
00:36:28
Speaker
or is coming live, that's amazing. You can be at a game, overlay a player. You can see historically where they hit the ball or it could be in football, how they proceed on certain plays. You can bring out historical data. You can supplement the experience dramatically. I think we're starting to see that again also in the
00:36:50
Speaker
virtual where I might be on my couch watching the game but I can overlay a bunch of stats that are really pertinent to me whether it be a fantasy football context or just a deep fan viewership context. I think all that stuff is the augmented reality stuff is really powerful and Apple gets that and is putting a ton of effort there. I struggle with the truly VR experience because it is so
00:37:14
Speaker
You know, in the IRL world, it's like the opposite. You know, it's actually pushing further into this world where it's just weird. And I think it will be there. I think for certain use cases like games and, you know, even like the ability to actually be courtside at an NBA game or on the sideline in an NFL game, but actually not be there. Like those use cases are amazing. I think where it takes off, though, is when you have this AR-VR combo where you and I could be watching a Jets game together.
00:37:44
Speaker
you're at where you are, I'm where I'm at, but we're actually on the sideline chatting together. And then it becomes a social experience between us being pals, while we're watching the game live, feeling like we're there, but we're not. I think that's where that stuff really takes off. But that's why I'm a big fan of AR, because I think AR takes advantage of the technology, and the innovation is happening and enhances the experience, enhances the real life experience. So
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. I like your example with the game, right? Being at the game, I have a quest. I don't use it that often. But I after watching the Apple Vision Pro thing, I was like, you know, if I'm sitting on a flight, I didn't look like
00:38:25
Speaker
an idiot or whatever, right wearing a giant thing on my face, that would be such a cool experience and a great place to use it. But I agree with you on the AR aspect, I think everything makes much more sense in AR, it just needs to become a form factor that is much more concealed than it is today. And I also have this argument with someone, but if VR didn't take off during the pandemic, when people couldn't leave their house,
00:38:47
Speaker
I think we're entering an era where people are looking to leave the house and I feel like VR was still expensive at 300 bucks for the quest, but it's also not that bad at 300 bucks for the quest. So if it didn't take off yet, still needs some more stuff, but I feel like that was a great opportunity for it and it just missed. But that's my own personal feelings. I agree.
00:39:08
Speaker
I agree. I'm dubious on that. Again, except for maybe gaming and like, entertainment, you know, specific things, but that's not something you're gonna do all the time. Whereas AR, you could see a world where I mean, it might be really weird, but like you might have, you know, like you walk around New York City right now, actually, four years ago, you walk around New York City, it blew my mind how many people had the white AirPods in.
00:39:29
Speaker
like everywhere, everyone had them in and it made sense because everyone's commuting, they're walking, they want to be having conversations, listening to podcasts, music, whatever. I could see a world in five, six years where a significant portion of the population in places like New York City, you're walking around with the, you know, the
00:39:46
Speaker
the vision pro you know that point i'll be like the vision se or something to be a cheaper version but i think that i think i make sense it might feel weird at first but you get used to it and it's not like you're on engaging cuz i walk around the city of new york city it's not like i'm saying hi to everybody okay after day after day just look good yesterday that doesn't happen so.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a better four packer. The quests are funny. I mean, right? Like, you can't see through them. You're not engaging. So but who knows? I mean, I could be completely wrong. I'm pretty enamored with the
00:40:19
Speaker
with the Vision Pro. I think the use case, the connection to Disney and all the content and to be able to have this immersive experience, I think they're going right at the AR and when they do VR, it's pretty cool, high value content. I think that's quite frankly where Meta has missed a little bit is going after really high end content, like bringing in
00:40:44
Speaker
the big IP holders to create some interesting content. It's just a heck of a price tag to stomach for a technology you're not sure if you're actually going to use it, but I get it. It's V1. It's what it's going to be. I'm an early adopter and I'm not clear I will buy V1.
00:41:04
Speaker
At this point, I would not buy it, but I think it's not coming out for another six, seven months. But I definitely want to demo it, and I could see it being like the car where I'm just like, oh, this is amazing. I have to have it. Did you have those Snapchat glasses back in the day? I never did. I'm a little bit older, so I was all about the social, and I definitely was using Snapchat early, but I was never a big Snapchat user. For me, it was just like checking it out.
00:41:34
Speaker
I bought them to sell them because it was a good idea. But that was a great form factor. I did nothing as near as Vision Pro will do or Quest does, but they were just sunglasses. So if we can start to get down to form factors like that, that you don't look like you're a robot walking around, I feel like that's where AR starts to take off. But I'm excited about the future of AR.
00:41:55
Speaker
There's probably some form factor where it's not even connected, but it's a virtual battery with all the computer and everything in the battery pack. And then you're wearing some cool looking glasses slash goggles. If you start dating in school, just throw some contacts in, contacts are hooked up to something back there. That was my dream when I was younger.
00:42:14
Speaker
That's definitely coming, and I think that's, I feel bad for, you know, teachers are going through a massive shift right now.
Staying Updated with Industry Trends
00:42:21
Speaker
I don't know that many teachers in my life, but the ones I do, they're, you know, everything's going to in-person, test papers, everything's gotta be done, because it's just so easy to cheat now. Yeah, it is. It's part of life, though, is learning how to adapt and how to overcome, and I remember taking exchange tests back in the day that gets exchange certified, and they're like, oh, you can't use the internet.
00:42:43
Speaker
my exchange server goes down, I'm Googling, how do I fix this? I'm not going to be the expert that just knows exactly what to be doing, but you got to learn. I know we're almost at time. I have one last question really for you. You said you're an early adopter. That's awesome. Love it. How do you stay current with today's industry and trends? You have particular resources that you trust, that you read every day. What are your strategies you find that work?
00:43:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I've always I'm consuming either through audio or reading nonstop. And I try to mix it between fiction, keep my brain from being jumbled and then like business leadership technology, you know, like things like I like recently, I've read chip wars, invisible women is a fascinating book talking about how the world has been designed, basically around the male form factor. And it's not a it's, it's, it's kind of a bias that maybe we knew hundreds of years ago, but we just have a
00:43:37
Speaker
revisited. But specifically, I look at things like tech meme every day because it aggregates and like highlights the most interesting stories. And it's looking at it's got a basic algorithm and some manual overlay, you know, I use Apple News enough subscription to that. So I'm reading Wall Street Journal subscription, New York Times, I'm reading that every day.
00:43:54
Speaker
information is interesting, although it's very inside baseball, inside Silicon Valley. It's a little bit almost too inside the big tech companies. But yeah, I'm just consuming. I'm a fan of the industry.
00:44:11
Speaker
I kind of want to be what's going on, how are things going on, how's the evolution. It's interesting. In 2000, it was a pretty small industry and I don't think I fully appreciated that. By 2010, it was like, oh, I'm kind of an experienced hack at this and know everybody, but I really didn't. And now it's become mainstream and so many people work in quote-unquote tech around the world as I traveled other
00:44:39
Speaker
major cities for work and get exposed to tech meetups and whatnot. It boggles my mind how many people are in.
00:44:47
Speaker
quote unquote in tech and how big some of these companies that I saw early, I mean, Apple's obviously been a long term Titan and they have a lot of employees. But even just like the Googles and the Facebooks where I was, you know, I sort of knew some of the earliest people and was there when they were small, you know, it's blows my mind how big these companies are. And dare I say, maybe a little bloated. But there's just a lot of people now. And so I think I just, you know, keeping up with it and understanding that and being aware
00:45:15
Speaker
Yeah, all set. I mean, I remember those early days of Silicon Valley and all the startups. It was a, everyone got rich very quickly if you're in on it, and then everyone wanted to be a part of it. So then you got the sprawl now. Josh, I really appreciated this conversation. I think it was awesome. I had fun with it. I really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else you just want to share or plug while you while you're here? No, Greg, I appreciate it as well. Thank you for the conversation. You know, love working with you guys and appreciate being part of the podcast.
00:45:44
Speaker
Yeah, and Josh, OneSignal is an awesome tool for anyone listening. It's a great way to get notifications out to your users that are using it or maybe have disengaged for a while. You can reach out to them and get to know them again. We'll have tons of information about OneSignal on our site, so you can check it out. We'll link to it. And Josh, again, thank you for coming on today, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. You too. Thank you, Greg.