A pitch ends with decision-makers to approach cold; the warmer question is who your team already knows who could open the door.
Importing your network
Your network (sidebar, under Teach Prospektor) takes the knowledge as data, without any integration. The screen is one main act (paste a list) with the two file imports behind the ghost buttons below it, and the small ⓘ by the title holding the fine print:
- A pasted list: pick a category (Employees, Investors, Partners, Customers, Advisors, Friends & former colleagues, or Other… to name your own), then one per line: who, then how you know them, after a comma or a dash. A minute of typing, no file needed. Press Add the list.
Employees is first for a reason. Every other category describes somebody outside your company; your own colleagues are the one group you can ask for an introduction with no favour owed, and their networks are usually the largest reach a workspace has. If only some of your team have imported their own LinkedIn connections, a pasted employee list (names, roles, and a profile link after the comma or dash if you have one) covers everyone else without asking them to upload anything.
- A LinkedIn export, per member (Import LinkedIn connections): from LinkedIn, Settings & Privacy → Data privacy → "Get a copy of your data" → tick Connections → Request archive; LinkedIn emails the
Connections.csvwithin ~10 minutes, and it uploads here. Re-uploading replaces your previous import rather than double-counting. Email addresses in the export are dropped at import and never stored; the studio keeps who and where, never how to email a stranger. - An email address book, per member (Import your email address book), with instructions per provider:
- Google (Gmail / Google Workspace): contacts.google.com → Export (in the left sidebar) → Google CSV, then upload the file here.
- Outlook / Office 365: outlook.office.com/people → Manage contacts → Export contacts → all contacts → Export, then upload the file here.
What is kept per contact: name, company, job title. Email addresses, phone numbers and everything else in the file are dropped at import and never stored. Re-uploading replaces your previous address book import.
- A message tally, per member (Rank them by how well you actually know them, folded into the LinkedIn door): request the same archive again with Messages ticked, and upload the
messages.csv. What is kept per person is four facts: how many messages you sent them, how many came back, and the dates of the first and the last. No message text, no subjects and no thread titles are ever read, the same rule the address columns get. Import your connections first: the tally is added to them rather than stored on its own, so removing that import removes the tally with it. - A written
## Networksection in the brief, for ties that read better as prose.
Every import is attributed to the member who brought it, and only that member can remove it. Importing calls no model, and nothing network-shaped ever travels on a shared link.
Warm paths
A tally changes the order, which is the point of adding one. Without it the studio ranks your LinkedIn half by how many people you know at a company, so forty people you have never spoken to outrank the one who actually replies to you. With it, three rules apply. Someone who wrote to you and never got an answer scores zero; that is how newsletters and cold sequences stay out of your warm paths. Group threads do not count towards anyone. And a connection nobody ever messaged is weak by default, but still ranks above one-way traffic, because a connection is a connection.
With a network in the workspace, every finished pitch gains a Warm paths panel: ranked you → connector → target paths, each connector actually in your network, each claim evidenced with the page it was read on (or the line of your own data that states it). An honest "checked these, found nothing" is a normal result.
The best path comes with two drafts, not one
The hard part of an introduction is that saying yes means writing something, and your connector has ten minutes.
So the panel drafts both halves:
- The ask: under 100 words, in your voice, for you to forward to your connector: how you know them, one specific low-commitment request, and an easy way for them to say no.
- The email they send on: under 100 words, in their voice, addressed to the target and finished. Your connector can send it as it stands, change a line first, or ignore it.
Each has its own Copy. Anything the studio does not know is left in [brackets] for whoever fills it in, including in the second draft, because a guess written in somebody else's voice is not honest.
The studio still contacts nobody. Both drafts are text on your screen. No mailbox is connected, nothing is sent, and your connector's address is not something the studio holds.
It runs by itself after a pitch run that scores 50 or better when the workspace has a network (a warm path is a way in, and below that line the pitch has just said not to go in) and on demand from the panel (Find warm paths / Look again) for any pitch, including one below the line or one that predates an import. A search is sized to your network: one check per connector, and it answers within about three minutes with whatever it established.
If an agency runs your workspace
A workspace an agency set up also reads their network when it looks for a warm introduction. You see only the people who match the company you are pitching, each marked as theirs ("known to amy@… at Moderne Ventures, your agency") and a path through one is written as running through the agency, because that is who would make the introduction. You never see their list.
Nothing is copied. Their imports stay theirs: the member who brought one can remove it, and removing it takes it out of every workspace at once. Detaching from the agency ends the reading immediately.
If you are the agency: the client workspaces you created read your imports the same way, and Your network says so. One import is enough for a whole portfolio; there is no need to upload the same export into every workspace.
Connection-degree chips
The Everyone at ⟨company⟩ line above the decision-makers carries 1st · 2nd · 3rd+ chips: LinkedIn people-search links pre-filtered by degree. They open in your own logged-in LinkedIn, so the degrees are yours; a teammate clicking the same chips sees their own network. The studio never reads LinkedIn; it only writes search URLs.