Breakout Companies MEMO #6- OneSignal
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Breakout Jobs
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In this sixth edition of
Breakout Jobs
, we are profiling
OneSignal
, the market leader Push Notification Solutions for mobile applications and websites.
What is a Breakout Job?
A Breakout Job is that one role that helps you get discovered. The best examples which hit my mind are
Andrew Chen at Uber
and
Erik Torenberg at Product Hunt.
What is OneSignal?
OneSignal makes it easy for developers to add personalized mobile push notifications or web push notifications to their apps.
Motivation
The company started out as a
Y Combinator-backed
mobile developer called
Hiptic Games
. It was as a game developer that they first became frustrated with existing push notification tools — so
Hiptic
built its own system, which eventually became the company’s main focus.
Hiptic Games Launches Its GameThrive Push Notification Service
The company started with a plan where developers won’t have to pay anything until they’re delivering notifications to 8 million devices.
Funding
OneSignal has raised a total of $34M in funding over 3 rounds.
The company previously started as a startup building games and graduated out of YC 2011 batch.
OneSignal then made a pivot to Push Notifications and raised $7M in Series A led by SignalFire.
Last month, the company raised its most recent round of $25M to further boost its growth.
Further Funding Risk
The company has grown strength to strength since its Pivot and given the momentum it carries right now especially in the growth period the company is going through right now.
Taking these factors into consideration, getting further funding doesn’t seem to be an issue.
The Team
Leadership
George Deglin
:
Co-founder and CEO at
OneSignal
. Previously co-founder and CTO at
Uversity
. Studied at
UC Berkeley.
Long Vo
:
Co-Founder and COO. Previously founder of
Gaia Interactive
; Studied at
UC Berkeley
.
Joe Wilm
:
CTO at
OneSignal
. Previously Senior Software Engineer at
Weeby.co
, Software Engineer at
Lockheed Martin
.
Josh Wetzel
:
CRO at
OneSignal
, Previously, Sr. Director of Sales and Marketing at
eBay
, EVP at
Bazaarvoice
; Director of BD at
CBSi
.
Zack Hendlin
:
Leads Product at
OneSignal
. Previously PM at
Facebook
; Senior PM at
LinkedIn
. Graduate of
UC Berkeley
&
MIT
.
Lydia Fayal:
Leads Business Development & Marketing. Previously founder and CEO at
AdmitSee
, CMO at
Schoold.
Graduate of
Johns Hopkins
&
UPenn
.
Jonathan Tillingston
:
Leads Finance. Previously VP of Finance at
Kahuna
; Founder and President of
Executive Outcome
.
Lee Munroe:
Leads Design at
OneSignal
. First Design Hire at
Mailgun
; Product Design Manager at
Mesosphere
.
Matt Foley
: Leads Field Sales at
OneSignal
. Previously VP of Sales at
Origami Logic (now Intuit)
; Senior seller at
Gigya
&
Sprinklr
.
The company is very highly rated by its employees as an excellent place to work at.
Strengths
Growth:
OneSignal has grown rapidly after its launch as an intelligent push notification company and is currently used by over
700k
Developers around the world. In fact, the company recently crossed a milestone by delivering more than
5 Billion Push Notifications
in a day -- a
67% increase
from
3 Billion
in a day in September 2018.
2.
Market Dominance
OneSignal truly dominates the market for push notifications with
more SDK integrations than all other push platforms combined.
The product is used by 71% of all websites on the internet with web push notifications.
(
SOURCE:
Builtwith
)
One other remarkable stat:
The product reaches 40% of all smartphone users in the world.
The company recently partnered with Microsoft to make it easy to get SQL-like analytics on notification performance, comprehensive views of customer paths through your app, and much more. This will allow Microsoft Visual Studio App developers to easily use OneSignal as a messaging solution across their digital consumer experiences.
Expanding the Visual Studio App Center Network with OneSignal | App Center Blog
Now with $25M in the bank and an exclusive partnership with Microsoft as their app store push provider, OneSignal will likely further increase its dominance.
Marquee Clients
The company hosts a number of marquee companies ranging from
Product Hunt
to
Zynga
to
The Princeton Review
who use its services.
You can read all the Case Studies here:
Weaknesses
If we take company’s dominance into consideration, there’s nothing to worry about. However, one thing which we are seeing of late is how many people are getting tired of push notifications. OneSignal’s focus of sending “relevant” and “timely” notifications should help app developers overcome the noise, but at the end of the day, it’s up to app developers to implement these features.
Email platforms have had several notable exits, including the recent acquisition of Sendgrid by Twilio, which is valued at nearly $3B. As for push? It’s yet to be seen what the ultimate market value of OneSignal could be… We’re guessing big, but how big is the question?
Competitors
Braze:
Launched in 2011; raised $175M in funding; private
Leanplum:
Launched 2012; raised $98M in funding; private
Airship:
Launched 2009; raised $100M in funding; private
Notable Points
Scale
: One thing that is astounding is how so many people still don’t know about the OneSignal brand. The company serves more than 125M users daily - that is unheard of outside companies like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. We believe that OneSignal is an underrated company for this reason, which has strong potential to grow its public awareness.
Focus on Developers:
Similar to Stripe, OneSignal puts developers first. The company has focused on Developers from Day 1. This bottoms-up approach works very well in new markets.
Product Releases:
The rate at which OneSignal ships products is astounding - almost every month their newsletter features multiple product launches. They recently launched email and in-app messaging, to establish an omni-channel marketing platform.
Jobs at OneSignal
Distributed Systems Architect at OneSignal-
Senior Full-Stack Developer at OneSignal-
Senior Android Developer at OneSignal-
Front-End Developer at OneSignal-
Android Developer at OneSignal-
Full-Stack Developer at OneSignal-
Sr DevOps Engineer at OneSignal-
Senior Back-End Engineer at OneSignal-
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