OneSignal CEO and Co-founder George Deglin discusses how OneSignal came to be, pivoting from a mobile games studio, Hiptic Games, to building the world’s most used push notification software. The story is a classic build vs. buy product decision.
As a mobile games studio, George and team found in 2014 that they needed a great push notification solution, however the available solutions were rudimentary, inefficient, unreliable and/or too expensive. As a boot strapped, pre-seed funding stage business, Hiptic, couldn’t afford to spend on every need. They were forced to build their own, and eventually they being forced to build push notification software, and ultimately open it up torealize there wasn’t a good solution at a fair value, and this led to OneSignal.
The core consideration, all businesses need to be thoughtful about cost and time. Businesses must focus on the problem they are solving, spending too much time building a feature or solution that isn’t core to their product isn’t a good use of resources. If notifications and messaging specifically are a core part of your business proposition, e.g. a social network, then building makes sense. However utilizing a vendor for a solution such as push notifications for most is a far more cost efficient approach.
George finishes the podcast up discussing how rapidly evolving the messaging, and how OneSignal is working to stay agile, to remain ahead of the trends to support the nearly one million users and help enable All these key changes have been documented in OneSignal’s blog, such as Android Q Notifications; iOS 13; Chrome & Firefox changes coming in ’20; Apple Deprecating Binary APN's among others. You can also read a more detailed overview of the Build vs. Buy decision making process.
