sonarme-blog-blog

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Bing Fund Invests in Sonar!

Big news aboard the sub! We’re excited to tell you about a new relationship we’re kicking off with some fantastic new crewmembers: the folks at Bing Fund! Today we’re announcing that the Microsoft-backed angel fund is making a strategic investment in Sonar.

For the occasion, we’ve created what we believe to be the world’s first ever “Vine-nouncement.” Enjoy! http://vine.co/v/bXZa5BQj7e2

Sonar & Microsoft have done some fantastic events together in the past, including PSFK’s Need to Know at last year’s SXSW, and Social Media Week, Xconomy Mobile Madness and the For Humankind gallery all in New York, so we’re particularly excited to be hooking up with the team at Bing Fund. We’ve found we share quite a lot in common; they too recognize the value of understanding location and social--the intersection of time and place--in providing customers with great experiences. They’ll be great friends to have along on our adventures in helping customers connect with the most relevant people, places and things nearby.

Onward!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Team Sonar had a little fun with today's Amazon Web Services outage!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

What We're Reading*: Jack Dorsey on Users and Customers, along with a Sonar spin from Intergalactic HQ

Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame wrote a little post on how his new startup, Square, thinks about the distinction between "users" and customers." We've always felt a little awkward calling our Sonar community "users," something it seems Jack and others in the startup community are also sensitive to. 

Here's what Jack says:

"The entire technology industry uses the word 'user' to describe its customers. While it might be convenient, 'users' is a rather passive and abstract word. No one wants to be thought of as a 'user' (or 'consumer' for that matter). I certainly don’t. And I wouldn’t consider my mom a “user” either, she’s my mom. The word 'user' abstracts the actual individual. This may seem like a small and insignificant detail that doesn’t matter, but the vernacular and words we use here at Square set a very strong and subtle tone for everything we do. So let’s now part ways with our industry and rethink this.

The word 'customer' is a much more active and bolder word. It’s honest and direct. It immediately suggests a relationship we must deliver on. And our customers think of their customers in the same way."

(Full blog post here.)

Jack's conclusion differs from ours - "customer" feels a bit too transactional for the way we feel (and gush!) about you - in large part because we are building a very different product, for a very different set of people. But his point that "users" isn't quite accurate - that it's abstract, and therefore a little meaningless - that holds true to Sonar, too. We're much more interested in calling you, dear Sonar friends, our friends, or fans, (if we may be so bold!), members of our community.

Ultimately, Sonar is all about building connections, keeping in touch, and hanging out with friends. When we think about the folks that have downloaded Sonar, we think about the types of people that make up the Sonar community, the histories they carry, and the stories they share. (And you can read about them in our Sonar spotlight series.) We think of you as members of a community that we hold near and dear to our hearts, because that's the kind of product we're building.

Of course, if there's a nickname you, dear Sonar friends, are coveting, let us know! We'd be happy to oblige. Just as long as it's not "user."

*What We're Reading is a new series of posts brought to you by Team Sonar about the links circulating in our office. This week's note brought to you by our Product Marketing & Community Lovebug, Ximena. Stay tuned for more reads next week!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Well, That Was Fun: We Launched Sonar for Android, and Lived to Tell the Tale

Hey, hey Substers!

It’s been a couple weeks since our big Android release and now that our champagne hangover has subsided, we thought we’d share highlights. The excitement was contagious--we loved seeing so much love from you all on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Seems there was a lot of anticipation, too... For the entire week of launch we saw an average of a new download every second. Talk about opening the floodgates! So, we’d like to take this opportunity to welcome all the new Android users aboard the sub! We’re so excited to have you join the Sonar fam.

We’d also like to give a huge thanks to Google, who caught wind of our exciting launch and featured us in Google Play as a Staff Pick, where we were also Trending and Featured in tons of international countries and here in the US.

A special shout out to our international friends and users! Your presence on our social media platforms skyrocketed during launch, with Brazil, Mexico, Italy, France and Germany in particular logging some super impressive stats. Much love to all of you.

We’d also love to thank all the reporters who wrote about Sonar and the launch, including folks at Gizmodo, Mashable, The Next Web, InsideMobileApps, Appolicious and the Inside Network. Can’t tell you how much we appreciate the love!

Lastly, the biggest hooray goes to the team, who stayed many a late, late night to make the app look fab and work great, and who, on launch day, went into overdrive, replying to feedback and tweets galore, and welcoming new users with typical Subby flair.

All-in-all we couldn’t be happier, and are super excited for what’s next (and we hope you are too). Onward!

Love and submarines, the Sonar Crew

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Poppin’ Bottles with Little Green Men: Sonar for Android Launches Today!

We spill a lot of ink here telling you about team Sonar, who we are, what we’re up to, and you can see we’re a pretty diverse crew aboard this ol’ submarine. That means it’s extra incredible when we all rally around a super exciting project like the one we’re unveiling today. And so it’s with great pleasure that we announce the release of Sonar in Google Play! Completely redesigned for the platform and slick-as-can-be, Sonar’s new Android app brings the great friend-finding functionality of Sonar’s here-now social network, and adds a brand new Friends tab, where you can find and chat with any of your Sonar Friends even when they’re not nearby. We’re also adding localization in 6 languages. What a great day to invite all your friends--especially Android-owning international friends!--to join you on Sonar. We’ll wait... go ahead. Ahem. So if you’re in New York, swing by Sonar Intergalactic HQ today and you’ll find us raising a glass (or many) to a huge milestone and team effort we’re all incredibly proud to reveal. And be sure to keep an eye out for a special friend hanging around in the Sonar app over the next few days; if you’re seeing little green men, trust us: it’s not just your imagination! Also, a huge thank you and admiring shout out to two superstar devs who helped out: Mark and Yang! Happy Sonaring, iPhone and Android users alike! the Sonar Crew

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Subby and Andy Travel the World!

Hey fellow Subby lovers! September is a big month for us - we’re taking our Android platform from beta to Google Play, and not only that, we’ve been working here to make Sonar available in six other languages. That’s right, Subby is traveling the world, and you can join in! But we can’t take all the credit for this big win. Without our international friends who have translated, proofread, and perfected our app, none of this would have happened. With that, all of us here at Sonar would like to thank Emmanuel, Edgar, Javaughn, Torsten, Luca, Diogo, Pedro, Omar, Dunja, Akshay, and Sasha, for all of their help in making our app even better. Thanks to them, we’re so excited to say that Subby is crossing oceans and exploring new places with his BFF Andy. The pair are having a grand old time enjoying a little taste of a big world, and have even sent us some photos of their trip together. Take a look at some picture perfect postcards from their journey! 

Subby and Andy travel to the Chichen Itza Temple in Mexico.

Future Indiana Jones in the making here!

Subby and Andy continue their trip down South to Rio de Janeiro in Brasil to enjoy the beach!

Subby and Andy travel east to Paris and visit the Eiffel Tower.

Such smart berets.  We hope they brought us back some too!

Subby and Andy continue their journey north to Germany and visit Oktoberfest central!

Subby and Andy take their exploration down South in Italy and pose with the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We’re jealous of all the pasta they got to feast on!

Subby and Andy finished their exploration out further east in Russia where they visited Saint Basil’s Cathedral!

We'd like to give credit to photos used in this post, specifically the Eiffel Tower, the French flag, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Italian flag, a scene from Oktoberfest, the German flag, the Saint Basil's Cathedral, the beach in Rio, the Brazilian flag, the Mayan temple, and the Mexican flag. 

Also in regards to the Android logo, portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License. http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/brand.html

[sonarme-blog-blog]

The Summer @ Sonar!

Dear Sonar friends,

They say that after Labor Day, it might as well be fall, but we’re not ready to give up on summer just yet.  We’re looking forward to apple picking, Halloween candy, Thanksgiving turkey, and catching autumn leaves in all their glory. But before the weather turns crisp, we’ll hold tight the memories of sun and sand as long as we can. Here’s a look back at what we did this summer:

This August:

Our fearless and former intern Wendy organized and hosted a student startup tour for NYC college and MA students interested in startup life. Wendy led a tour of NYC startups Grovo, Oneclipboard, and of course, Sonar Intergalactic HQ. We were pumped to have so many smart students come by and chat with us about the startup scene and what it’s like to work at Sonar.  If you’re an NYC student or startup interested in participating in the future, holler at us! 

Speaking of interns, we’ve now said goodbye to our amazing summer interns, Shyam, Jack, Mark, Wendy, and Sundi, and welcomed a new intern, Meghna, who will be helping us out with all things content and community.

Look out for her posts, and if you’d like to be featured in our blog or have a great idea for a post, please get in touch with her! 

Our intern Mark, cutting his farewell cake!

Our most recent adventure this summer? The team retreat to Ocean City, MD, hometown of our CEO Brett Martin. There was corn, crab, and old bay aplenty, accompanied by some quality team time to talk about what makes Sonar, Sonar, and what makes working on a mission to connect friends and future friends so darned great.

Team Retreat in Ocean City, MD!

But enough reminiscing, we’re moving forward with full speed ahead and working on some pretty exciting projects. Keep an eye on our blog - we’ll tell you all about them here, soon enough!

X’s and O’s till then, Sonar friends.

Team Sonar

[sonarme-blog-blog]

47 People Checked In, 0 People Checked In

We’ve heard from a few of you, loyal wonderful users, wondering why you sometimes see inconsistencies in the number of people checked in when you open Sonar in a venue. Why does the total number of people in a venue seem different from how many appear as checked in? 

When you look at the list of venues in the Places tab, you’ll see a number next to each venue, representing the number of people currently checked in. This is to give you a sense of how busy each venue is. When you click into the venue, you’ll see friends who are checked in there, but will need to check in yourself if you want to learn about the people there who you are not already connected to. Once you check in you will likely see more people checked in there, but the two numbers still may not match, as some of the check ins may be private or be limited in visibility based on the users’ permissions settings.

We’ve made some changes to adapt to minor modifications in one of the public APIs Sonar is built on, while continuing to re-emphasize friends and connections over those folks who you are not already connected to. This way we tell you as much as we can about your friends nearby first, since that’s what we’ve found many of you care about most!

As always, we appreciate your feedback ever-so-much, and continue to build and tweak features based on the smart thoughts and opinions you share. Please keep it coming! 

[sonarme-blog-blog]

How To Rock TechCrunch Disrupt

Howdy! Brett, here. As a 3x veteran of TechCrunch Disrupt (Battlefield runner up + two alumni updates), I hear from a lot of people asking for advice on how to maximize their time on stage. So with Disrupt San Francisco kicking off shortly, I’ve laid out a few thoughts on what you can do before, during, and after your presentation to get the most out of any pitch.

Prologue

Break in. Firstly: how does one even get on stage to start with? Hint: NOT by sending in a blind application and putting your feet up waiting to get picked. That’s the equivalent of sending your business plan to start@sequiacap.com and expecting Roelof Botha to hit you right back. In other words: don’t hold your breath. Start by emailing every single person you know that has ever met anyone at TechCrunch.

Leading up to the event

Define and prepare for success. What do you want to get out of Disrupt? If you’re looking for funding, do you have your documents ready? Customers? Are you set up to accept payment? If you’re gunning for more users, have you built your viral landing page? Be prepared to capitalize on the opportunity that you fought so hard to get.

Practice, practice, practice. This is an obvious one, but it’s surprising how many very smart people mess this up. You probably have more experience writing slick optimization algorithms than keeping your cool in front of 10,000 people, so write out your speech (yes, speech). Once you’ve memorized it practice it for everyone that will listen. Twice. If you are looking for inspiration, this guy was pretty good.

Eliminate contingencies. Are you seriously going to have wi-fi problems on game day? Be like Steve and have plans B and C ready.

Leverage your airtime. Your time on stage is a valuable asset. If you are trying to lock down partnerships or customers, consider dangling the carrot of mentioning them on stage. We used our time on stage to help score a fantastic, early partnership with Media Temple that served as a reference for subsequent deals.

Game Day

If you are new to tech like I was, Disrupt will be your introduction to everyone that matters in your industry. You’ve got this.

Sell the dream, not the app. People watch Disrupt because they are genuinely interested in technology; how is yours going to change their lives? Crystal clear, real world use cases will win over the audience; five minutes of poking around on your half-baked app will not.

Go big or go home. The absolute worst thing to do with your six minutes is to squander it on a perfectly safe, completely forgettable presentation. You are competing not only with 30 other hungry startups, but Twitter, dwindling attention spans, and hangovers. Getaround beat us by having their really smart, hot, coder/co-founder Jessica Scorpio roll up on stage in a red sports car that she opened up with her own app. Respect.

Be confident during Q&A, not obtuse. It is a privilege to receive live feedback from anyone, let alone from the brightest minds in tech. Don’t blow the opportunity by being defensive and pigheaded. Listen to and internalize what the judges say before responding. If you don’t have a clear rebuttal, it’s totally OK to simply say “Thanks.”

Be strategic about who you meet. Make a list of everyone you want to meet and decide exactly what you want to say to them. Use Sonar to see who's there and set up meetings to tell everyone you can about your product and your vision. Spend plenty of time hanging out backstage; you earned the right to be there! Prolong your video interview with Jordan or Colleen, high-five Eldon, psyche out, er, compare notes with the competition, schmooze the speakers and judges. Meet Greg Barto. That guy rules.

Party like a rockstar. This may be the closest you ever get to being one.

  Post Pitch

Drop it while it's hot. You won’t be at the center of the tech universe forever -- leave it all on the table. We’ve adhered to a strict "ask for forgiveness, not permission" strategy. There may have been Sonaritas served; there may have been blatant on-stage recruiting; there may have been commandeering of demo tables in high traffic areas that we had no claim to (love you, Peter & Leslie!); there may have been party crashing. Just do it with a smile and always say thank you.

Don't believe the hype. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor will be your company. Don't let the buzz get to you. What separates the real winners from losers are the founders that keep their heads on their shoulders, stay focused, and keep shipping.

Thanks for listening. Good luck and get after it. 

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Sonar Spotlight: Diogo Da Silva

Sonar Spotlight: Diogo Da Silva

We’ve been tweeting a lot looking for foreign language speaking Sonar lovers to help test our recently Android beta app. Diogo Da Silva has been a great help with the Portuguese translations and he’s the focus of our Sonar Spotlight today! Pleasure to meet you! Can you tell us a little about yourself? Hi! My name is Diogo Da Silva. I’m a 26 year old entrepreneur, native of Portugal, currently living in Germany. I worked for a company called BetaFabrik (an organization that funds and fosters startups), was the business developer for a startup called UPDT, and the product manager for another startup called NextLevel. Currently, I’m trying to launch my own startup. That’s awesome. So how did you find Sonar? I was reading an article on TechCrunch and was intrigued so I downloaded the app and began to use it. I’ve also seen it featured on Fox and other blogs. What do you use Sonar for? Business, socializing, or both? I use Sonar primarily at business conferences. I often attend those on my own and Sonar makes it easy for me to connect with other people that are in the same room as me. At conferences, I’ve seen people on Sonar that were nearby and had similar Twitter interests and was able to start conversations with them. I’ve also found it useful on vacations because not only can I check in and show my other friends where I am in the world, but also I can see if any of my friends’ friends are vacationing in the same area as well!  What are you favorite Sonar features? I really like that you can see who has checked in near you regardless of whether or not they’re a Sonar user. That way, if I see a friend of a friend and they don't have Sonar, I can invite them to use the app and chat with me.  How do you think Sonar is changing how people connect in today’s world?  Sonar is part of a technological revolution that is changing how people are connecting with one another. With Sonar, connecting with friends who are nearby is easy with a push notification. It also allows you to connect to people that are in your extended friend groups (Facebook) or are interested in the same things you are (Twitter). In today's world, networking is key to becoming successful and Sonar is a great tool for that. Sonar gives me information about my surroundings that I couldn’t uncover otherwise.

Thanks Diogo for letting us interview you and we hope that you experience success with your new startup and that Sonar can help you get there!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

TweetLove!

Here at Sonar, we can't contain our smiles when our fans send us some TweetLove. Today we're featuring Josh from Irvine, CA!

Thanks for the shoutout Josh! We're working hard to make it the next big thing :)

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Our Last Summer Intern's Departure!

Fellow Subby lovers, we hope you’ve been having just as wonderful a summer as we are. With the end of the season comes the farewell of one of our Engineering interns, Jyotirmoy Sundi. He’s been a great addition to the team and wonderful to have around the office. Big ups to Sundi for all his hard work this summer!

And now a word from Sundi himself:

“I remember my first day at Sonar and it seemed like just last week. I had walked into the room and was everyone was so nice! The people I worked with this summer were interesting, motivated, and productive. Everyone encouraged one another and had an entrepreneurial spirit that was contagious! As an intern at Sonar, I worked on drawing insights from the data that Sonar has by using various types of technologies and frameworks such as Hadoop, Scala, Cascading, Mahout, Cassandra and some crawling aspects. The most interesting thing I learned here was the power of Scala and how natural and efficient it is in comparison to the power of Java. 

Other things I worked on this summer at Sonar:

A mini crawler built using the Scalding framework: Here we fetched public data and then helped correlate people across different networks like Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, which helped to improve results for Sonar users.

Demographic behavior analysis.

Gender and Job Type classification based on publicly available training data.

I also got to attend a ton of startup events, which was one of the best parts of my internship. My favorite ones were the FourSquare meetup and the Bing Event for Humankind. At the Bing Event, I was able to network with a lot of different people and got to see some awesome product demos, like the one for a product that can detect your mood based on your facial expressions. There was another one that showed you how clothes looked on you in a store based on your body shape, without having to try them on! My favorite part about the Bing Event though, wasn’t the product demos or meeting new people, but was having the opportunity to represent Sonar and explain what Sonar is to others. The audience response to my answers reaffirmed that I had made the right choice by choosing to work at Sonar.

Overall it was a great summer for me, and I thank Sonar for the super awesome exposure to the world of data analysis. I especially want to thank Ben and Paul for all of their help. They were always there to help me solve issues when I got stuck, and helped teach me how to achieve better code quality in scala. They always knew the right direction to point me in when I needed guidance.” Aw, gush! What a guy! If you’re interested in joining Sundi in Sonar’s intern hall of fame, get in touch. Email us at work@sonar.me!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Sonar Spotlight: New Intern!

Subby lovers! As you all transition from the summer into the fall and swap your flowy dresses and seersucker shorts for a pair of leggings and corduroy khakis, Sonar gets a change as well! Hi! My name is Meghna, and I’m going to be Sonar’s new fall marketing intern. I’m from Long Island and studying Marketing & Finance at NYU Stern School of Business! I found out about Sonar through NY Creative Interns and was super psyched to work here when I got an email saying I was hired. I’m going to spend the semester spreading Sonar love to not only the Big Apple, but to the rest of the world through an assortment of social media platforms and learning what you, as users, really want out of Sonar. Be sure to be on the lookout for my tweets, Facebook updates, and posts here on the blog!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Sonar Spotlight

Greetings fellow Sonar Users! Today, we have the pleasure of casting our Sonar Spotlight on Joseph Teegardin, an avid Sonar user and the Media Relations Manager of North America for Nike.

Pleasure to meet you Joseph. So tell us about yourself. Where are you from and what do you like to do in your free time? My name is Joseph and I live in New York, NY. I love fast cars, quality television series, sneakers, all-things Apple, sports, cocktails, and Americana. I'm fortunate enough that my favorite things in life are a big part of both my professional and personal lives. What's your job exactly? That’s quite a long title you have. I work at one of the most amazing companies in the world - NIKE. I'm a Media Relations Manager for North America. I travel a lot due to my function and I love every second of it. Nice. What's your favorite city and why? New York, NY. It's home and the best city in the world. We love it, too. So how do you use Sonar? For personal or professional purposes, or both? I like Sonar because I can use it for both personal and professional purposes. It's great here, locally, and professionally when traveling. When's the last time you met someone through Sonar? Who was it and where was the run-in? About a month ago when I was in LA, I was eating at this restaurant with friends when I got notification from Sonar about a connection being close by. The name was really, really familiar but I couldn't quite place it till it hit me that it was a random Facebook friend from high school. I located them in the restaurant, went up to them and they were shocked. We ended up chatting for a while about what we had been up to and how crazy it was for both of us to be traveling and at the same place that night. That's the power of Sonar!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

Tweet Love!

Subby loves it when users of Sonar send us TweetLove! We’re featuring A. Traviss Corry of Toronto, Canada who is the Director of INcubutor.

Thanks for the tweet and the support! We think it has massive potential too :)

[sonarme-blog-blog]

A farewell to our dear engineering interns, the flyest of the fly!

Dearest Sonar users, how is it mid August already? This summer has flown by us, and what a summer it’s been! Today is the last day of two of our illustrious engineering interns, Shyam and Jack. We’ve so enjoyed their company and will be so sad to see them go! These kids killed it this summer and really impressed us with their smarts, hard work, and good humor. Here’s a quick note from the boys themselves on what they worked on this summer, and how they've made it to the Sonar Intern Hall of Fame.

Shyam speaks:

My name is Shyam and I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. Academically, I focused on a lot of hardware related topics, such as nano-device fabrication, and coming into this summer internship I didn't really have that much software engineering experience, so I was a little anxious before I got here. Since then, I've gotten the opportunity to work on some pretty awesome projects and learn a ton along the way. The work environment at Sonar really encourages you to learn by just jumping right into things and personally, I love that about this internship. The projects that I got involved with are all related to analyzing big data to better understand, and thus better serve, Sonar's user base. For example, one of the analyses that I got involved in looked into determining who from a user's social graph was one of their coworkers. Maybe a user wants to send out a Sonar status to all of their coworkers in the area to find someone to eat lunch with - we can help with that. This was a topic that I was really interested in because I could immediately see how the analysis that I was doing was shaping Sonar's interaction with its users. While working on these projects, I had to learn a few new technologies along the way, which was an intimidating task at first, but a great experience that was made much easier by all the Senior Engineers that helped me out. For me, the hardest technology to get a good understanding of was Scalding, as it combined the concept of Hadoop/Cascading and Scala, both of which were completely new to me as well. We used Scalding as way of running complex data analysis workflows on Hadoop based clusters without having to worry about all the small complexities that are normally associated with writing MapReduce jobs in Hadoop. When I wasn’t at Sonar Intergalactic HQ, I was off exploring NYC as much as possible, or hanging at home being a basketball/soccer junkie.

Jack's story:

As an intern at Sonar, I come prepared each day to learn something new, even from the first day. My first day I installed a lot of software, and spent much of the day grappling with Scala, a functional programming language. I was already familiar with several computer languages, such as Java and C, but Scala was very different. The idea that I was not supposed to modify my variables, that they were immutable values, how would I do any sort of programming like that? On top of that, since Sonar has a lot of data, we had to use Hadoop and Scalding, two popular ways to analyze data. Hadoop is open source software developed to help many people run jobs that analyze large amounts of data. Scalding was developed by Twitter, and they use it to analyze their own data. These methods use map-reduce to divide one big task into many small tasks, and distributes them to many computers in a cluster, and thus parallelize the program using multiple computers to run large jobs that would otherwise take way too much time or memory to run. These are all things I had never done before. It took a while, but I gradually became more familiar with new technologies, enough to write my own code to do analyses. One analysis I enjoyed working on was one we called “real social graph”, in which we tried to figure out who in your social graph you really hang out with. Currently, we figure your social graph to be all your friends on Facebook, your friends in Foursquare, people you follow on Twitter, and your connections on Linkedin. Though you’re connected to all of them, we figure that you only hang out with a couple, those to be in your “real social graph”. We can prioritize friends in your “real social graph” by analyzing which friends check in at nearby locations at similar times, and including these as your top friends and  people which may be most interesting to you. At Sonar, by doing all these analyses, I’ve learned some of the technologies we use here and have made really useful contributions to the team, even as an intern. Not to mention the fact that I’m surrounded by wonderful teammates that support each other, which makes this internship one of the most worthwhile experiences I’ve had. =]

We're so proud of these two! And yes, we're blushing now.  Thanks to Shyam and Jack for all their hard work this summer. These guys are fierce and will be sorely missed. Group hug!

[sonarme-blog-blog]

A quick hello and a slightly longer goodbye

Hey folks!

For dedicated readers who remember this blog entry, you might recall me introducing myself earlier in the summer.  I’m Wendy, Sonar’s summer marketing intern, and I’ve been authoring nearly all of Sonar’s blog entries and Facebook posts from the last two months.  Today’s the last day of my internship and it’s been a fantastic experience, so I figured I’d share some tidbits of my journey with you guys! I wanted to intern at Sonar because I hoped to experience startup culture and was fascinated by Sonar’s mission to use a mobile app to connect people in real life.  During the last couple of months, I got plenty of insight into both startup culture and Sonar’s mission, but I also learned so much more.  Interacting with users and doing community spotlight interviews taught me how to build relationships with strangers.  Analyzing marketing results taught me how to test our social media strategies.  Organizing a startup tour from scratch taught me the intricacies of planning an event.

The most important thing I acquired, though, was an attitude that I gradually absorbed over the course of 8 weeks.  I knew going into this that the startup environment is intense and exciting, but I still wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw at Sonar.  People here are fierce.  They’re dedicated, determined, and fearless.  They give it their all - I’ve sometimes left the office at 7pm and half of my team is still here, and the timestamps on emails from team members range from midnight to 4am.  Every morning, we have a quick team meeting where everyone updates everyone else on their goals for the day, and it’s amazing how many meetings, projects, documents, calls, reports, and product builds get done over the course of one workday.  But it’s not all work either - we do have a sense of fun, too! I’d like to thank the Sonar team for being an awesome, inspiring bunch.  In particular, I’d like to thank Brett for his wisdom and encouragement, and my mentor and supervisor, Ximena, for asking me the difficult questions, tasking me with challenging projects, and teaching me how to set and meet higher expectations. Last but not least, it’s also been awesome getting to know you guys, our users.  I loved learning about your stories through community spotlights and events like Northside Festival and CE Week.  Hearing about the connections Sonar helped you make made my job especially rewarding - you guys have been a source of inspiration too! It’s been an amazing ride.  Shout-out to Meghna, Sonar’s next intern who will be taking over this blog! It was a pleasure meeting you guys and I hope the rest of your summer is nothing short of terrific!