During the last 5 months, I've had the opportunity to work with an early stage start up, Tone Mobile LLC located in NYC. As of yesterday, the entire team learned that we just received our final paychecks due to the financial situation the company was experiencing. I was on vacation this past week and just got back from taking my son to the hospital. One hell of a week! Overall, I didn't regret the time I spent here as it gave me the opportunity to learn first hand about QA and get into the process. My QA lead mentored me these last 5 months to learn the basics on manual testing, sanity testing and regression testing. Definitely will take this further with learning about automation to become a more well rounded QA tester.
Prior to starting my role as a Technical Support Lead at Tone, I was the Customer Support Specialist at DramaFever for about a 1 year and 3 months. I left DramaFever in November 2015 to join Tone for an exciting opportunity. For the first time in my career, I was able to build a team and process from the ground up. This journey wasn't easy. I spent the last 10 years trying to get my foot into the door in the IT world but was turned down countless of times. Eventually, I found a way around it by serving as a Customer Support Specialist at my first start up. That was when my journey began in the start up world and took off from there. My first day on the job was tackling a queue of several hundred tickets with a team. Eventually, I went on to lead a team for the late night shift when late mentor/friend stepped down from his post at the time due to his health. The queue eventually swelled to 1,000 tickets as our normal volume. Yes, it was exhausting but we were able to work overtime and get that queue down. I enjoyed the work. Unfortunately, I also fell ill back in February of 2013. After visiting my doctors, I was recommended to take time off to get myself back on track. As much as I tried sleeping during the day and working in the late night hours, I couldn't adjust to it and as a result went through 6 months with very little sleep.
Once my doctors gave me that wake up call, I had to leave my role at the start up to take the next 2 years off to recover and be healthy again. This was when I joined DramaFever as part of a growing support team. At the time the support team was only the Customer Support Manager, 2 full timers and 2 part timers. We made the rules as we went. Eventually, the team grew to 10 members. I also ended up taking ownership and responsibility for the mobile app support tickets for our iOS app and Android app when the company expanded and my manager had to oversee the other projects. It was a great experience because this propelled me to my new passion for mobile apps and eventually getting my foot into the door in QA. I've also managed the FAQ's and wrote guides for our app.
When my manager moved on to his new role at another start up, it was also my time to move on as well since the company was then acquired by the WB. It was hard leaving my team behind but I knew it was the right time to go forward and take my new experience further. I remained in contact with my manager till this day and continue to help out with beta testing their products. It's my way of thanking him for putting me on a great path. Never will forget this.
Finally, this brought me to Tone. We worked directly with the governments and US State Department on distributing our phone kits to villages where mobile access is non existent or limited. We developed an app to allow fishermen in Indonesia to communicate with one another. The experience was awesome and I enjoyed hearing the feedback from our remote team on the ground. It was also the first time I've led a team overseas and till this day my new team and I remain in contact with each other on WhatsApp. I've also wrote guides so that our team in Indonesia can translate them for the fishermen and train them to use our apps. These last 5 months seemed like a blur but I will never forget the experience. It helped me gain a better understanding about the early stage start up world. It can be risky as some start ups become successful companies while others fail. I had a great run here and will never forget the experience. I enjoyed working with a team overseas and hope to visit them someday in the future. We became friends over time and this is a bond we will never forget.