How do side projects impact a designer's career? What are the incremental growth tools that can turn a side project into something bigger? In this episode, I sit down with Lee Munroe (Director of Design at OneSignal) to talk about his numerous side projects, the various growth tools that he's used, and why personal growth (not revenue) was always his goal. We also discuss his role at OneSignal, where he's growing a product and a team simultaneously. I've discussed OneSignal (and their unique revenue model) several times in the past, and Lee brings some new insights on that topic throughout our discussion - including how they decided to pivot their revenue model recently. Plus, we dive into a space that OneSignal and Chrome share responsibility for: notifications on the web.

"I started a company called Lookaly, which was like the Yelp of Ireland. I thought what we needed to do was create a really good user experience and we didn't focus at all on customer development. We got to a point where the website was doing really well from a consumer point of view. It got lots of traffic. But when we tried to monetize it and make money, we didn't know who the customer was. We didn't know what persona was going to pay for the product. I definitely learned a lot from that experience. You have to try and find product-market fit and be more focused on that side of things, rather than just creating something beautiful." — Lee at 14:47

Learn more about OneSignal: https://onesignal.com/
Join Lee's team: https://onesignal.com/careers

Learn about Google's Digital Wellbeing efforts: https://wellbeing.google/

Lee's website: https://www.leemunroe.com/
Lee on Twitter: https://twitter.com/leemunroe
HTML Email: https://htmlemail.io/
Codeshare: https://codeshare.io/

Austin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ustinknight
More about me and the show: https://austinknight.com/