Building a tool to better manage my IRL professional network.
I'm building something for myself that makes it easier to do some of the following things:
- tap into my actual professional network (not according to LinkedIn) better- who do I know that does X?
- who should I get back in touch with?
- what does my real network actually look like? how can I better nourish it?
I don't want to spend a lot of time doing data entry or manual work and I would want a good deal of automation.
Who else is interested in trying it out (or chatting with me about it)?
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Fun! This is an area I've been exploring for a while with markd.co — which started out as an internal tool, a browser button for me to save people I find online and is now evolving into a relationship manager / personal CRM platform. In the past few months we've been talking to people who are looking for better solutions to manage their relationships, from recruiters, real estate agents, entrepreneurs, to community organisers, investors.
We should definitely connect and exchange notes! My email: [email protected]. :-)
Funny I have wanted to do the exact same thing. My biggest issue with linkedin for example is that there is too much noise. I have about 400 people in my network and I know most of them well but no idea who is who today unless i go and search through them manually.
Linkedin also makes it almost impossible to mass contact my own connected people. Also there is no easy to way to group my contacts (for example: co-workers vs recruiters etc) so that I can easily message my entire private group for something relevant to them.
More stuff like this. Ideally I would have a self hosted version as well.
First off, I'm impressed that you've managed to pretty much only have people you know in your LI network :) I probably actually know (i.e., met or spoken to > 30m) less than half.
A couple of questions on what you said:
Aside from what you described, do you see any other reasons you'd want to have a better handle on your network?
Haha Yes. I actually clean up my LinkedIn contacts every 2-3 months on average. I don't like to keep people in my network unless I either know them or they have interacted with me for any reason. A lot of people just send you invites and i occasionally accept a few but if they don't say anything after that, I remove them.
Now to answer your questions:
I just want to be able to utilize my connections better. Sometimes I wonder "Do I know any lawyers in xyz area" and may be some of my old friends are now lawyers but no idea. Just an example like that.
Not very important to be self hosted but since I am a techie, I like that option just in case. Possibly Open Source as well so I can make changes as needed.
Sounds great I think the social spaces get really cluttered up with noise. I would love to try it.
Great idea. I actually had a simple iPhone app built a couple years ago that did this. I would love to see it work. I might have the code around somewhere. Wouldn't mind chatting, what is the number one question you have?
What was the high degree of pain problem you were trying to solve?
Personally I have 3,000-5,000 contacts in my phone that are from the past years of traveling and meeting people, facebook friends, linkedin contacts, gmail, etc... that have been linked to my Address Book in my phone. The pain problem was: filter/clean up my network. I dont want to load all those contacts into a CRM and contact them one by one . I rather use my phone to call them because I'm lazy.
Interesting. And why do you want to filter/clean it up?
It's a different use case than what I'm looking to solve for myself, but I'm curious.
I want to filter/clean because it'll become easier to know all the people I can talk to. I wanted to get it down to a more manageable list to contact because I love staying in contact regularly with people especially via phone. And then also having a way to automatically know who to contact today, without having to open an app and click on people. So I had an app built that showed me 5 people a day that I haven't contacted and the only buttons available were "Pass" or "Call". Pass put that person on a list and they would never show up again. "Call" would immediately call that person and put them on an "OK" list. After going through allllll the contacts, it would start over automatically and present to me 3-5 people that I've contacted but haven't talked to in awhile and the process starts over again only showing me who i called during the last round. "Pass" people never showed up again for obvious reasons, I never want to talk to them again.