It's 4:53 on a Friday. The client wants the launch video live today.
The footage is buried in a folder called "FINAL_v3_REAL." The captioned cut is sitting in someone's DMs. The notes are split across Slack, a text, and a voice memo you haven't listened to yet. You've got five tabs open and you still can't find the ten seconds you actually need.
If this is your job, you felt that in your chest.
Matt Wessels felt it for years. He and his co-founder, Diwash Thapaliya, ran a marketing agency before this. Their days were exactly that: great work, buried under a pile of tools that didn't talk to each other. Every file in a different app. Every note in a different place. Hours gone every week just finding things and chasing approvals.
So they built the thing they wished they'd had. It's called Soontra, and it went live this week.
The idea is simple. Put the whole job in one place.
Your footage, your scripts, your thumbnails, your feedback, your numbers. One workspace. And sitting inside it is an AI assistant named Astrono that actually does the annoying parts for you.
Lost a clip? You don't dig through file names. You just describe it. "The part where she talks about the discount." Astrono listens to what's said in your videos and looks at what's on screen, and pulls the exact moment in seconds.
Giving feedback? You draw right on the frame. Box the logo. Circle the spot where the color's off. No more "at like 0:34, the thing on the left." It's tied to the exact second, so nobody's confused.
Need this week's numbers? YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram all land on one screen. No more logging into three dashboards to build one report.
That's the whole pitch, really. Stop babysitting your tools and get back to the work.
Why it's built for brands and agencies first
Soontra works for any creator. But Wessels is aiming it first at the people who feel the pain the most: direct-to-consumer brands and the agencies that pump out their content.
That's not a guess. It's where he came from. An agency runs ten times the volume of a solo creator, across more clients, on tighter deadlines. The mess is bigger, and so is the time you get back when it's gone. The top plan, Studio, is built for exactly those teams, big storage, lots of seats, room to run.
"Everything in Soontra is something we needed running an agency and couldn't buy. We were tired of losing an hour a day to apps that don't know about each other."
Proof, not promises
Here's the part most founders wouldn't dare do.
Instead of just telling people Soontra works, Wessels is running a whole content operation on it, in public, where anyone can watch. The workspace shows up on camera. The wins show up. The bugs show up too. If it can run his business out in the open, the thinking goes, you'll believe it can run yours.
Try it
Soontra is live now in open beta at soontra.com. It's free to start, with a short trial on the paid plans, and the team built the whole thing themselves with no outside money.
The bet is that once you've worked one place instead of seven, you're never going back.
"The fastest way to prove this works was to build our own business on it, out loud. If it works, you'll see it. If it breaks, you'll see that too."