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 (the second view of Warm intros on the sidebar) takes the knowledge as data, without any integration. The first time you open Warm intro with nothing imported, the same paste box is the whole screen and there are no tabs yet: who you know, one per line, and Add them; the list lands here as People I know, and the two views appear, Introductions (the ones to pursue) and Your network (the people who make them). Under the title, your network as numbers: people, companies, strong ties and the last import, then a bar of the five tiers once a message tally is in (strong, warm, light, never messaged, one way); without one the bar is a single segment and a line offers the tally. Then Who introduces you (below), then the imports folded under one line, then the same paste box, with the file imports as quiet links inside the fold and the small ⓘ by the title holding the fine print:
- A pasted list: one per line, who, then how you know them, after a comma or a dash. A minute of typing, no file needed. Press Add them. The list is called People I know; click the name on its row to rename it.
Your own colleagues are worth a list of their own. Every other name is somebody outside your company; your 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 list of the rest (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 a LinkedIn export): 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 merges rather than double-counting: a connection you already hold is updated in what the new export says and keeps its message tally, a new one is added, and one LinkedIn has since dropped stays until you remove the import. An import older than six months shows Refresh on its row, which opens this door. 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 an 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. - Who engaged with a post (Paste who engaged with a post): say what the post was in a few words, then paste the names off the reactions panel or the comment thread, as LinkedIn shows them. Nothing is fetched from LinkedIn. Kept per person: name, role, company, and what they reacted to or wrote. The post is the list's name on its row. When somebody at a company you then pitch is on that list, the pitch's opener says what they reacted to, and the Warm paths panel names them.
- The people at customers you won (no door of its own): when the owner brings in the won deals from the connected CRM on Outcomes, the people the CRM lists on each deal land here as one list per CRM, Customers in Close or whichever it is. Kept per person: name, job title, the company and the day the deal was won. The CRM's email addresses and phone numbers are not read. A customer's staff can vouch for you, so the search names one as the door when the company you want is somewhere they can reach.
- A written
## Networksection in the brief, for ties that read better as prose.
Who introduces you
Not everyone you know will make an introduction, and a few people will make one to anyone you ask. The list under the numbers is where you say which is which: the people from your pasted lists, the people at customers you won, and your strongest LinkedIn ties, each with two chips, Always introduces and Might introduce. One press marks a person, a second press on the lit chip clears it, and the mark is kept on the import, so removing the import removes it. People you have marked are listed first. Somebody from a LinkedIn export who is not on the list is one paste away: type their name into the box and they appear with the chips.
The mark changes the order everywhere: Introductions to pursue and the instant answer say will always introduce beside a marked person, the path finder is told the team's word outranks any message tally, and the machine surface's who_do_we_know and list_doors carry it beside the tie's strength.
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.
Asking twice for the same company, or on the same pitch, while a search is still running gets you that search rather than a second one. A workspace can start 30 searches a day, and an agency and the client workspaces it created share 100; past that, the studio asks you to come back tomorrow.
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, and the ask has Open in Mail as well: it opens your own mail app with the subject and the text filled in and no address, because the studio holds none. 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.
Under the drafts, four chips say where the introduction stands: Asked, They said yes, No, Meeting booked. A press records it on the search (or on the pitch), a second press clears it, and Meeting booked opens Outcomes with the company filled in, because a meeting is an outcome worth recording.
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. The people listed under a company are the ones who work there, found by its name, each marked as theirs ("via Moderne Ventures, your agency") with their role and how strong the tie is. The search also reads the names and roles on the agency's lists, so a path it finds can run through one of their contacts who works somewhere else, such as an investor who knows the founder, and that person is named on the path. Any path through the agency's people is written as running through the agency, because that is who would make the introduction. You can't browse or export their list, and you never see their notes or the profile links. The search never reads their notes or message counts either.
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.