Sonar, as most people know it, is the system of communication that submarines and boats use to navigate below water. It actually stands for “sound navigation ranging,” and was developed partly in response to the Titanic’s unfortunate demise. If only it had been invented sooner, Jack (not to be confused with our equally handsome co-founder of the same name) and Rose’s love story could have easily played out very differently.
Much like the Titanic’s historic accident, many operations teams don’t see the proverbial iceberg lurking below the water until it’s too late. They have no way of knowing how changes in their tech stacks will influence other teams and processes down the line, and often don’t know a problem even exists until everything breaks.
What if there was a way to better communicate across teams? To make navigating CRM changes easier? To streamline cloud software integrations and improve individual and organizational performance?
What if — wait for it — there was a type of sonar for tech stacks?
You see where we’re going with this.
The Story of Sonar: When Jack Met Brad (Not Rose)
It all started when our co-founders crossed paths at one of Atlanta’s biggest venture-backed SaaS companies. Brad, an operations director, and Jack, a product manager, immediately recognized the source of a common pain point: There were too many platforms that didn’t speak to one another.
Then, they hit that iceberg — hard.
While Brad was managing a complex tech stack at the office, he accidentally wiped out an entire year’s worth of documented revenue in one click. The mishap took the company offline for two days, cost the company over $100K, and kept deals from closing. He didn’t even have time to yell, “iceberg, right ahead!”
Following this devastating mishap, Brad had a bit of an epiphany: He had no idea how it happened, but he knew he needed Jack to help find a way to never, ever do it again.
Thus, Sonar, the change management platform, was born.
The Problem That Sonar Solves
Founded on October 11, 2018, Jack and Brad managed to create a platform that would help teams who feel underwater navigate around the problems that are hard to see in tech stack integrations.
Sonar, which collaborates between everything from CRM to marketing tools, illuminates the silos between sales, marketing, revenue, and customer success teams to support all aspects of company revenue ops, and uses 40 years of engineering best practices to face the challenges that cloud software integration is creating today.
By focusing on processes, communication, and documentation, Sonar helps teams achieve smarter workflows, impact analysis, and next-level support so that they can collaborate on tasks anywhere. Pretty cool, right?
The industry thought so, too, and Sonar ultimately raised $1.6M during their Seed round in the spring of 2020 from Parade Ventures, Craft Ventures, Slack Fund, and Marketwake Ventures.
But Wait, There’s More: Meet WizOps
Jack and Brad’s magic-making didn’t stop with Sonar — they also happen to be the conjurers behind Wizards of Ops, aka WizOps, a Slack community created specifically for operations professionals looking to gather, ask questions and share their industry expertise. The community currently boasts nearly 900 members from over 350 different companies.
“We started WizOps as a way to basically blow off steam and talk through our Salesforce conundrums,” shared Brad. “Somewhere along the way, it transformed into a community full of the smartest, most helpful people in the operations world.”
WizOps and Sonar work hand-in-hand, in some respects, allowing Sonar’s users to connect with and get advice from other operations specialists on WizOps. Together, both platforms reinforce Jack and Brad’s mission to improve communication and navigation for teams who work with tech stacks and are in need of better change management.
Think your organization could use some help avoiding icebergs, too? Try Sonar for free and find out how easy managing changes within your tech stack can actually be.