Sonar

Matthew Berman was working at 500 Startups as a distribution team member, helping startups with growth. While advising a company called Maven, the CTO Taylor Wayne came to him with a problem: "All of our customers are trying to text with us. What do we do?" There was no good solution on the market. Instead of just giving advice, Matthew spent the next six weeks building a prototype for what would become Sonar—a platform making customer communication as easy as messaging a friend via SMS, Messenger, or WeChat.

Matthew came to the game with a marketing background but had been coding since age 15. He wasn't a first-time founder; he'd previously gone through batch four of 500 Startups with a team task management startup called Teamly that eventually folded. This time, he built more deliberately. The prototype gained traction quickly: Maven started telling other companies about it. "Before long, they started telling other companies about it and it kept growing and it just made sense. I always knew I wanted to dive back into the startup thing."

Matthew's earliest customer acquisition came through his network and word-of-mouth. He did cold outreach leveraging his 500 Startups connections and focused heavily on content marketing to position himself and Sonar as thought leaders. By January 2016, he had about 120 paying customers. The customer base showed clear 80/20 dynamics: about 15% of customers paid $1,000+ per month (enterprise), while the rest used smaller plans. Matthew was coy about exact revenue figures but confirmed they were "doing five figures" in monthly recurring revenue and achieving 35% month-over-month revenue growth throughout 2015.

Word-of-mouth and content marketing were Sonar's primary growth levers. Matthew noted that inbound leads from content converted at high rates because prospects already understood the value of customer messaging—they just needed to be sold on Sonar's software. He was not doing significant paid advertising, spending under $200/month on retargeting. His growth strategy for 2016 centered on doubling down on content, building third-party integrations (Zendesk, Salesforce, Shopify), and exploring his network. He spent minimal money on customer acquisition, relying instead on sweat equity and strategic partnerships.

As of the interview (early 2016), Sonar was a four-person team at seed stage with $1M raised on a convertible note (negotiated down from a $6M cap to $5M cap). Matthew's goal was to hit $1M ARR (roughly $83-88K MRR) by end of 2016 to raise a Series A. When Nathan offered him $2M, $4M, then $8M in hypothetical acquisitions, Matthew turned them all down, saying the team believed the company could be bigger and was committed to building a lasting business rather than exiting early.