Cracking The Code Of Introductions
Long story short, all entrepreneurs want to connect with the best people, services, companies. We want to crack the best way to do this and have been working on something for the past few weeks. It’s integrated to Kima Forward, the in-house platform we are developing to support our portfolio companies. First, let’s not forget the rules of introductions:
- You need to list the people/companies in your network and also ask them to contribute in order to improve that list.
- You must always use a double opt-in approach in order to respect the privacy and the choice of people who don’t want to be put in a forced position. That is not cool.
- You must avoid edge effects: someone who wants to connect with a famous individual in her field or requires the wrong introduction because she hasn’t well assessed her needs.
Now that the rules are set, here is what we’re doing at Kima Ventures: We have three lists which can be sorted depending on the country, the sector and/or the expertise.
- People & Services: This is a list of valuable people/companies and their services: Lawyers, PR Firms, Branding, Marketing, Financial Services…
- Pay It Forward: This is a list of experts. We don’t display names and details in this one to avoid the“star” effect. Instead, we display milestones that defines the expertise/experience of each person.
- Portfolio: Our companies :)
Every time someone asks for an intro, we receive a notification to monitor this intro. The goal is 1) to understand what our portfolio companies need 2) to make sure that they are heading toward the right direction.
Once we have validated the introduction, the person receives a simple email like the one below. We wanted to keep it super simple but not rude. Therefore a no can either sound like “not now”, “conflicted” or “not interested”.
If you click on yes, Kim A. does the intro ;)
Pro tip: if you’re a productivity addict like me, our friends at Gorgias can help you create templates to follow-up:
“Thanks {{bcc.0.first_name}} for the intro! (bcc)
@{{to.first_name}}, glad to connect. Would love to meet…”
This is our attempt to crack the code of introductions. Time will tell but it looks like we are on the right path and that’s why we want to share this experiment with you guys.
I almost forgot ! We also have a nice Slack Plugin to generate introductions without displaying contact details:
Please use this method, share it and send feedbacks :) also don’t forget to submit or recommend great people, services and tools here: https://forward.kimaventures.com/submit/
