How to find customers through your investors and advisors

The real problem is finding the path

Your investors and advisors probably know someone at several of the companies you want to sell to. Neither of you knows which ones. They cannot recall thousands of people on demand, and you cannot see inside their heads, so a friendly "let me know if you think of anyone" tends to produce nothing.

The fix is to do the search before you ask. Asking well is its own skill, covered in how to ask your investors and advisors for customer introductions. This page is about the step before it: finding out who can reach whom.

Write the list before you search

Searching without a list gets you a pile of impressive names who would never buy. Pick twenty to fifty companies and the role that would actually own the problem at each. If you do not have that yet, start with how to build a target account list.

Add one line on why each account belongs there. You will reuse that line when you write the request, and your backer will want to know it before they spend a favour.

Four ways to find the paths

Look at LinkedIn yourself. Connect with each backer and browse their connections if their settings allow it. Ascend, a seed fund, suggests using LinkedIn's filters to build a list of no more than twenty people, then letting the investor choose who they are comfortable contacting. This is free and works well with a handful of backers. It shows who is connected, which says nothing about how well they know each other.

Send your list and ask them to mark it. Share your accounts and ask your backer to mark anyone they know well. It takes them ten minutes if the list is short, and it gives you the thing LinkedIn cannot: their own judgment of the relationship. Most people will do this once. Few will do it every month.

Ask for their connections file. LinkedIn lets each member export their own connections. Some advisors will share that file if you ask plainly and say where it goes. You can then match it against your accounts. It goes stale quickly, carries no sign of relationship strength, and many people will reasonably say no.

Use a tool that searches linked networks. This is the one to reach for once you have more than a few backers or ask every month. The tools differ mostly in how they get at other people's networks, and that difference decides who will agree to take part.

What to compare in a tool

Does the backer have to do anything? Some tools map public overlaps, such as shared employers and boards, with no action from the person. Those paths are easy to get and often weak, since two people who overlapped at a large company may never have met. Paths from a person's own connections, email and calendar are stronger, but that person has to agree.

What can you see? A name and a company is usually enough to decide who to ask. Be wary of anything that shows you more of your backer's private history than they would show you themselves.

Who controls the request? Your backer should see each request and be able to decline it without an awkward conversation. A declined request should stay private and cost them nothing.

Can you ask from where you already work? Several of these tools now connect to Claude or ChatGPT. That helps if you do your account research there.

The tools

The Swarm is the closest match for someone who wants to bring in an advisor's network. An admin picks a group such as investors or advisors and sends a request. The person opens a portal without creating an account and shares their LinkedIn connections, and it also maps public overlaps. It is strong on data and has an API, which suits a team building its own workflow. The Swarm alternatives covers when something else fits better.

Connect The Dots scores relationships from two-way email and messages, and outside people such as investors and advisors can join and share with the team. Village combines networks people sync with public mapping and has outreach tools built in. Happenstance lets people in a group search each other's networks in plain language.

NetworkOS takes a narrower route. You create a one-way team and invite your advisors and investors, each person links their own account, and you search the networks they share from the web app, Claude or ChatGPT. You see a name, role, company, location, LinkedIn profile and who knows them, and the advisor approves each request before anything goes out from their own inbox. The cost of that is participation. Each backer needs an account with their contacts imported, so anyone who does not join stays invisible, and there is no large public database to fall back on.

Rank the paths before you ask

Once you have a list of possible paths, sort it. A former colleague beats a conference contact. Someone your backer emailed last month beats someone they last spoke to years ago. A path through an advisor who has worked in that market beats a partner whose portfolio merely includes a similar company.

Then cut hard. If an account has only a weak path, either send a good cold email or find a stronger path through someone else. Asking your backer to introduce someone they barely know costs them credit and usually fails anyway.

Then make it easy to say yes

Send each backer one or two names, with a sentence on why that person and a paragraph they can forward without editing. Say that no is fine. After the conversation, tell them what happened, even if the answer was no. What to tell an investor after an introduction has the note, and it is the reason they will help you a second time.

The short version

Make the list first. With a few backers, LinkedIn and a marked-up spreadsheet are enough. With more, or a monthly habit, choose a tool based on what your backers will agree to, and check what each one asks of them. Rank by how well the person is known, ask for a small number of named people, and always report back.