MatthewB

You should put a video on the homepage, front and center, of the product in action.

Very nice. Very useful.

Sonar | Software Engineer and Sr. Software Engineer (Rails) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite

Sonar is helping businesses build personal relationships with customers through mobile messaging. Most B2C companies are still using antiquated communication channels like email and voice calls to chat with their customers. Those customers are now living in mobile messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Messenger, and SMS. Sonar's platform enables a company to have two-way conversations on channels customers want to actually use, driving engagement and revenue, and vastly improving the experience for the end user.

You'll be joining a small team of smart, collaborative people on a mission to make business communication better. You'll have the opportunity to learn a ton about building a company from the ground up while making products that drive real revenue for real customers. You will get to touch every piece of our stack, including helping us scale, improving our artificial intelligence, and optimizing our eng processes.

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, React, Redis, AWS

Contact matt (at) sendsonar (dot) com

Come join our fun, diverse team to help build a much better customer experience.

Sonar | San Francisco, CA | Multiple roles | Onsite | https://www.sendsonar.com/

Sonar helps companies communicate with their customers on mobile messaging channels such as SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and WeChat. By using text messaging channels rather than legacy channels such as email and phone calls, companies are able to be more efficient and effective while providing a superior customer experience. Imagine you could text Comcast/AT&T to ask questions to a real person instead of being on hold for 45 minutes or sending a support email into a black whole.

Sonar is a seed stage company (plenty of runway), growing quickly, with awesome paying customers ranging from startups to public companies. We have an engineering culture and a very collaborative environment. We work hard and have a lot of fun along the way. We're a mature, diverse group of people who are all passionate about what we're building.

Our stack is RoR, ReactJS, Heroku/AWS, CircleCi, and Sidekiq (standard rails stack). Some of the interesting problems we're solving are scaling our infrastructure, using AI/Machine Learning to make human agents more powerful, and parsing large amounts of data.

We've raised $1.4m and our investors include 500 Startups, QuestVP, TwilioFund, and some amazing angels.

You can check out our current team and values here: https://www.sendsonar.com/about Our interview process is: phone screen, in-person coffee to get to know each other, technical interview (2+ hours), and then lunch with the team.

Roles we're hiring for: Lead Engineer, Sr. Engineer

Email matt@sendsonar.com

Sonar | San Francisco, CA | Multiple roles | Onsite | https://www.sendsonar.com/

Sonar helps companies communicate with their customers on mobile messaging channels such as SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and WeChat. By using text messaging channels rather than legacy channels such as email and phone calls, companies are able to be more efficient and effective while providing a superior customer experience. Imagine you could text Comcast/AT&T to ask questions to a real person instead of being on hold for 45 minutes or sending a support email into a black whole.

Sonar is a seed stage company (plenty of runway), growing quickly, with awesome paying customers ranging from startups to public companies. We have an engineering culture and a very collaborative environment. We work hard and have a lot of fun along the way. We're a mature, diverse group of people who are all passionate about what we're building.

Our stack is RoR, ReactJS, Heroku/AWS, CircleCi, and Sidekiq (standard rails stack). Some of the interesting problems we're solving are scaling our infrastructure, using AI/Machine Learning to make human agents more powerful, and parsing large amounts of data.

We've raised $1.4m and our investors include 500 Startups, QuestVP, TwilioFund, and some amazing angels.

You can check out our current team and values here: https://www.sendsonar.com/about

Our interview process is: phone screen, in-person coffee to get to know each other, technical interview (2+ hours), and then lunch with the team.

Roles we're hiring for: Lead Engineer, Sr. Engineer

Email matt@sendsonar.com

Sonar (http://www.sendsonar.com) - San Francisco, CA - Onsite

Sonar allows customers to communicate with companies on more effective channels. From SMS to WeChat, our vision is to allow customers to reach companies on the channels they are use to, not forced to use old-school channels like email and phone calls. We're growing very quickly and our customers love us. Come change customer communication with us.

Multiple Roles ---

- Customer Success Lead (Content writing, onboarding, account management, SEO, email marketing etc)

- Sales Lead (Help us define our sales process and close the many inbound leads we have)

- Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails, Heroku, PG, Sidekiq, Elastic Search)

We're a small team with good funding, lots of runway, meaningful revenue (growing very quickly), amazing customers, and a highly technical team. We work very hard and have fun along the way.

Come join us:)

matt@sendsonar.com

Thanks for the comment. We believe the potential for abuse on SMS is the same as any channel.

If a crook spoofed a phone number (pretending to be a company), the customer would still need to initiate the order. Meaning, if they received a text out of the blue from a company saying "thanks for ordering pizza now put your credit card in" without having actually asked for pizza, it would be quite weird for them to put their CC info in.

If a user's phone was lost/stolen, there's a chance someone could text in an order and at that point it is up to the company to do things like verifying information for orders over a certain price point (along with other security hurdles).

As for unsolicited messages, it is illegal for a company to do that (it still happens, I get spam phone calls on a daily basis) and we give an easy way to opt-out (simply reply back any of our unsubscribe keywords like "stop") and they wont' be able to message you anymore through Sonar.

Hope that helps! Would love to hear your thoughts.

Great case study by nbhartiya on how Mayvenn used SMS to really drive home the personal touch for a huge community of stylists.

Exactly...unnecessary statement and makes the writer look amateur. There are plenty of great accelerators out there that aren't YC. Sure, YC is the "Harvard of Accelerators" but there are plenty of other great colleges out there with successful alumni.

For more applications, a couple back and forths is all it will take. Then, you can have your preferences saved for next time.

For me, I'd rather send a few text messages back and forth than sit synchronously on a voice call for 15 minutes.

Companies are able to handle a much larger volume of text messages than they could via voice (sync vs async).

At least for me, I send thousands of text messages per month but only do a few voice calls.

Thanks for the kind words:)

Luckily, there weren't too many negative comments but I was happy to address their concerns. Can't make everyone happy (especially on the internet).

thanks, updated.

Agreed about the FCC. For the $500/month short codes, were those unique or shared? Shared short codes don't work with 2-way communication (when someone replies, which business does it go to?).

We use long codes.

There's a distinct difference between marketing/spam and customer service/support. When a customer initiates the conversation via text, it is generally seen as an assumed opt-in.

Our issue with short codes are that they are very expensive ($3000 setup fee and cost per text after that) and a 12 week approval process. That just doesn't work for our use case.

The laws definitely need to be updated though.

I don't know how they're doing payments exactly but if I had to guess they are recording a customer's credit card info to stripe and associate to a phone number somewhere.

Since Magic says you need to send them your credit card and address info the first time you use their service, my guess is that they would have to record that info so next time you text message, they just look up your credit card by your phone number (probably not in stripe, most likely in a separate database they keep). They can associate your stripe customer id with your phone number so they don't have to store raw credit card numbers (let stripe handle that!).

Yep. Sorry didn't mean to come off as defensive, just trying to respond to everyone quickly:)

Exactly our purpose. We want to show other businesses how to do what Magic did (at least the texting piece).

Execution is everything though.

We loved their implementation of SMS and so did a lot of other people. We aren't saying "here's how to build a better version" as own main point but rather, if you want to add this type of service to your own business, you can easily. You can definitely use our service to clone the functionality of Magic as well.

Opportunistic? Maybe. But we love SMS and we love Magic so why not show other companies how to apply that awesomeness to their own business?

I believe a lot of the value is the simplicity of SMS. No logins, save the number in your phone and just text them like you would your friend with a request...done!

You're right though, the aggregation is definitely a big part of it.

great question. the main reason to use Sonar over twilio is that you'd have to essentially build our platform to be able to offer service like Magic. You need to be able to quickly send and receive text-messages through a web-UI (otherwise it becomes cumbersome to do it on a phone). we built that entire product already and it handle large volumes of messages from 10-digit numbers very well. with twilio, you just get the API.

also, we're built on (and love) twilio:)

do you mean webchat? that's a good option as well but to build something as simple and awesome as Magic, text messaging is the way to go

hey all - matt from Sonar here. happy to answer any questions. you can offer Magic-like service to your customers within minutes with Sonar.

Co-founder here, happy to answer any questions.

Took me about a week to find 2 of them on newegg. If you check newegg daily, you can probably find a couple here and there. You can possibly even find a name brand one.

Good job Finbar+crew. :)

Great use of hexagonal gameplay ==> weewar.com

Looks great. I love when people learn to code to meet their own needs. Congrats.

EDIT: Great design. Are you a designer or did you use a template?

This is amazing.

By the way, great URL. I'm sure you paid a pretty penny for it:)