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How Sonar works

Four stages, and three of them exist to throw things away. That is deliberate: the product is judged by whether the feed is worth reading to the end, not by how much is in it.

1. The chats you connect

A source is a public Telegram supergroup you add to a niche. An account joins as an ordinary member and reads what every other member reads. It never posts — not a message, not a reaction.

Which chats these are matters more than any setting. A general professional chat is mostly your competitors; the chat where the buyer sits is a different room, and finding it is most of the work of setting up a niche.

2. The pre-filter

Every message is checked against the niche's vocabulary before anything expensive happens. This throws away 90–95% of the traffic.

It exists for cost, not for quality: a language model call on every message in a busy chat would cost more than the subscription. The filter is deliberately loose — it is allowed to let noise through, because the model is behind it, but it must not drop a real request.

3. The model

What survives goes to a language model with your niche's lead definition — a written description of what counts and, at least as importantly, what does not.

This is the stage a keyword alert does not have, and it is the one that separates “I need this” from “I do this”. Those two are written with the same words; only meaning tells them apart.

4. The alert

A lead arrives in Telegram within a minute of the message being written, with a link back to the original. Open it and you see the person, the chat and the context.

You mark it useful or not. That feedback is what the niche is re-tuned on — it is the fastest way to fix a feed that is drifting.

What it throws away that you might want

Target precision is about 80%: roughly one lead in five will be off. Recall is lower than precision on purpose — we would rather miss a borderline request than teach you to skim.

Messages longer than a few thousand characters are skipped. Chats that go quiet stop being useful and we say so rather than letting them pad the source count.

Something missing? Ask in @SonarLeadSupport — the answer usually ends up on this page afterwards.