Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, everyone! It’s been almost a month since our last update, but we’ve been very busy, as you’ll see in a jiffy. It’s just that I’ve been on vacation, on a 10-day trip to Greece, a greatly deserved one, I might add shamelessly. It was great, thanks for asking; I seized the last chance to take a dip in salty water (this doesn’t account for the bowl of soup I spilled all over my jeans yesterday) and I have to say that it was great! I even shifted from pale white skin tone to, well, less pale white skin tone. You don’t care about my vacation? Why am I talking about this? Here’s your damned update.

The Soniq team has been working around the clock to deliver you what we promised and we’ve been brainstorming a lot. Sure, your regular office work goes without saying, but we went out of our way to try and brew some neat new ideas, and I have to say that I’m very satisfied with the way the things are going. But enough of this empty talk! Here’s what we’ve been up to!

Demoing the Soniq Stars concept on Discord

Soniq Stars landing page

The highlight of the entire previous update was the Soniq Stars app idea that we’re working tirelessly on developing, but this is still months away from becoming reality (although you may get a chance to Beta-test it sooner than you might think).

So there we were, sitting around a proverbial cauldron of potential ideas and I have to say that the things were brewing. Every single Soniq team member started sprinkling the brew with spicy, tasty ideas, but one spice was the one that made all the difference on our taste buds.

Every rock-solid product needs good market validation, and no matter how experienced, smart and wise they are, no team can predict how exactly their thoroughly-contemplated idea is going to do on the market. Unfortunately, some ideas are difficult to validate, and this is exactly what we thought of our music competition app-to-be. Well, we thought so until we realized that testing this idea without the actual app is more than possible, that is.

The majority of our community is active on Discord and this is the community/communication channel that we receive the vast majority of traffic on, so why not put things into motion and come up with Discord competitions that will lead up to our MVP release and help validate our product, as well as prove to you, our community, that we are very serious about what we’re doing.

Well, things have been put into motion and you can expect the first Discord competition to be live, come November. We’re working on the details and we’ll be announcing everything on our Discord channel (which you can now consider our main channel for everything from casual chit-chat to important announcements), so make sure that you join in on the discussion!

I am personally working on coming up and formatting the rules of the competition, and we’re going to feature a referral system that will help you earn SONIQ by bringing competitors. Of course, the competition winners are going to be rewarded in even more SONIQ, and we’re revving up our reward pool for a couple more creative ideas, too.

In any case, expect more details, very, very soon!

Branding

Whoa, this is a new one, huh!? Yeah, well, you might’ve liked our logo and color scheme so far, but we knew we’re going to have to focus on our branding a bit more, and that time has finally come; not just for Soniq Stars, but for Soniq, in general. We decided that our branding is not something we were gonna go budget-friendly with, so we hired the best, most experienced company around! We’re not talking only logo, we’re talking everything that relates to branding: color schemes, fonts, banners, even the marketing aspect of it; the whole nine yards. You’ll see it for yourself, we’ve had some sketches shown to us and we are absolutely amazed and super hyped!

Developers

Our team of developers were particularly difficult to grab a hold of this month. Every time I’d approach their desk for report info, they were so engaged in what they were doing (whatever it is they do with the silly symbols and long lines of aesthetically unappealing programming text), that I felt guilty to distract them. They managed to mumble a couple of simple sentences from between their headphones and from behind their huge screens that basically boil down to Soniq Stars landing page development and refactoring the front end and finishing up on the Soniq referral platform that I mentioned earlier (we’ll update you on this soon), where users will be able to refer competitors for a reward in SONIQ. Also, the back end team was busy writing a Discord bot that will help us automate a lot of stuff. We are also upgrading our developer operations in order to make smoother deployments in the future.

Design

As you know very well, we’re working on coming up with a landing page for our first product, Soniq Stars, and if you don’t know, what the hell, why aren’t you reading my updates!?

No school like the old school

Anyway, the Soniq Stars landing page is on the home stretch; you can expect it to be live soon. Our team of designers is working on the responsive design, while the developers are finishing up the desktop version of the landing page.

Before the release, you’ll see some illustrations that will help our community see our vision more clearly. The Soniq Stars prototype is in the works; the user flows and wireframes are being heavily worked on.

Soniq Stars wireframes

Marketing

We sat down and wrote our entire marketing plan. All the activities, timeline and cunning techniques we might use. We jotted them down. And boyo, was it a glorious excel document. (Before you ask, no, it’s a trade secret, you can’t: “Take a quick peek at it”). We defined our milestones, our hopes and dreams for the next couple of months. Were they ambitious? Yep. Were they overzealous to the point where we started chanting “SO-NIQ-SO-NIQ” in our offices? Maybe. Were they an over-the-top “you guys aren’t realistic, stop this madness” kind of a blood oath… I mean goals? Welp, I guess we’ll never know.

Our Marketing Manatees* (“monkeys” is so derivative) did a thorough research on what we should focus on in the upcoming quarter and we trust every bit of their fluffy, huggable insight. They also used every bit of their husky, aquatic intellect to plan our upcoming Audio Forum appearance in October and to come-up with ways we could make our Discord contest as memorable as possible, so to quote Scar from Lion King:” Be prepaaaaaared”

*trademark pending

Business

Our business sector doesn’t like wearing the suit & tie combo, but they aren’t the tiniest bit as rock ’n’ roll as I am. Nonetheless, every bit of their work is just as boring as it is important — extremely.

They occupied themselves with solving tedious legal and bureaucracy issues; product development is a top priority for us, but we still have to dedicate some time to paperwork.

Here’s a bit of exciting news: we’re planning to incorporate SONIQ! For those of you who don’t know what “incorporating” (not me, I totally know what “incorporating” means) it’s essentially creating a legal entity for SONIQ which will bring us many benefits. Before rushing into this there’s quite a few details to be worked out: boring stuff, such as ownership, responsibilities, vesting, intellectual property etc.

We have already busied ourselves with working out these details and are in communication with an agency that will help us register our company in Estonia. Oh, and did you know that Estonia is becoming a blockchain nation?

We’re also working on the coin utility model. That is to say, we’re specifying where and how the SONIQ token will be used inside the Soniq Stars application to the tiniest detail.

We want to provide real world value to the people who spend SONIQ inside the app, not just invent an artificial use case for no particular reason but boosting the SONIQ volume. That being said, we still don’t want to overuse and force you to use SONIQ by requiring it for every action. This would scare off our non-crypto audience, but more importantly, we want to make our products available to everyone out there; we want the entirety of our audience to be able to watch their favorite videos hassle-free and provide obvious value to those who decide to use SONIQ in all of our future products!

Community management

What can I say? I’m back from vacation and primed and ready to do some grunt work! I am proud to say that we’ve decided to move everything we chat about to Discord, so you can expect to be hearing a lot more from us in #general. There’s gonna be a lot of work for me regarding the upcoming #discordcompetitions, which I’ll be running for the most part. You can expect updates regarding this from me soon, you may even see an announcement video that might feature our team, in the flesh!

Soniq ft. the Orange Man and Kanye West

Stay tuned and don’t bite those nails too hard!

The Soniq team

We feel that we’re really becoming a team; a unit that’s going to provide solutions that will help the contemporary musician get paid. We’ve organized a BBQ a week ago (if you’re on Discord, you’ve seen a couple of sweet photos that I’ve shared) and we had a great hang! Of course, there was more to it than drinkin’ beer and eatin’ chicken and pork — we turned it into a photo session that resulted in amazing pics that we’re gonna use for our upcoming team section. See? We’re always thinking about Soniq!

The Soniq team — a bunch of knuckleheads

So, there you have it! This is what we’ve been doing since our last update. There are many things in the works for Soniq and we feel like we’re really hitting the jackpot! Hope you’ve enjoyed the read!