Joe Experiences 30% Revenue Growth Within the First Month of Using OneSignal

Joe is a mobile application that gives coffee shops a simple and powerful way to accept mobile orders and payments at no additional cost. The app allows merchants to launch mobile ordering at their coffee shop in as little as 24 hours, and gives them access to the largest indie coffee community in the United States.

The Joe mobile app gives merchants the ability to set up online menus, web ordering, as well as automated loyalty and rewards programs for free. As the company does not charge per transaction, the Joe app costs merchants less than other Point of Sale (POS) solutions.

Lenny Urbanowski, the CTO and Co-Founder of Joe, understood the challenges of integrating push notifications into a company’s marketing technology stack without the right tools.

With the responsibility of making the day to day decisions around technology at the young startup, Urbanowski was acutely aware of the need for software solutions that minimized resource demands on his growing team while maximizing the desired outcomes for the business.

Prior to OneSignal, Urbanowski utilized Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) service and Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (SNS) for push notification delivery in the early days of the Joe app. However, he was unsatisfied by the poor usability and complexity that came with these services. “Push is a big pain to be honest,” Urbanowski said, “Push notifications in general without OneSignal is a real headache.”

However, since implementing OneSignal, even non-technical members of Urbanowski’s team are able to effectively leverage push notifications to communicate with their customers. OneSignal now helps to power the Joe app’s online ordering and rewards system via mobile push and in-app messages.

“[OneSignal] has made it super easy. It’s like we can send push notifications whenever we need without really worrying about it,” Urbanowski explained, “Our CEO is able to manage everything in OneSignal without any assistance from me or anybody else, which is really great because he doesn’t have a hugely technical background.”

The team at Joe use OneSignal to deliver two main categories of notifications - transactional and marketing messages. They rely heavily on OneSignal’s segments and data tags to ensure users receive only the most pertinent information, whether it be order updates or special promotions.

Through research, Urbanowski and his team were able to pinpoint major retention indicators. They observed that when users made orders at least twice a week through the Joe app, they were significantly less likely to churn. This retention rate increased further when users preloaded money on their Joe account for future purchases.

With these observations, the team at Joe formed segments of users who were close to meeting these retention milestones, and targeted them with automated marketing messages that would incentivize these users to make another purchase or preload money to their account.

The team at Joe use OneSignal to track all major steps along their user journey. Whether a user is adding an item to their cart, redeeming a coupon, or checking out, Urbanowski and team are able to define the user actions most important to them, and have the ability to monitor these activities easily from the OneSignal Outcomes dashboard.

This gives Urbanowski’s team the ability to collect data, iterate rapidly, and perfect each step to bring their customers a brilliant user experience.

When it comes to ease-of-use, Urbanowski knows that there is no push provider better than OneSignal.

“I swear I’m not paid to say this, but I would tell [other CTOs] to just use OneSignal,” Urbanowski said, “Honestly, thinking of the number of hours we spent setting up SNS only to remove it, it wasn’t worthwhile. If you’re not using a platform like OneSignal, then you’re building it yourself, and that takes a long time.”

“Push is deceptively hard. I would tell anyone not to mess around with other push notification solutions and just go straight to OneSignal. OneSignal was a tenth of the engineering effort as the SNS set up,” Urbanowski added.

As part of their paid plan benefits, the team at Joe received prioritized support, with most of their questions being addressed in a matter of minutes.

“It's been great. [OneSignal] has been stellar. They've been really responsive when we need them. We haven't too much, honestly. Everything's really user friendly and we haven't really had any major issues,” said Urbanowski.

When it comes to simplifying customer engagement, Urbanowski and his team know that they can count on OneSignal to deliver.