relationship-map

Relationship Map

A founder's mental model of their network is the twelve people they saw most recently. The next client is almost always someone else — a past client, delighted eighteen months ago, who has since forgotten what the founder does.

Forgetting is the default, not a judgement. This map exists because the number that predicts the next contract is not warmth. It is days since last real contact, and it is a number nobody keeps.

When to use

Quarterly. Before a conference. When the founder needs an introduction, a reference, or a second opinion and "doesn't know who to ask" — which almost always means they know, and have not thought about that person since 2023. Also whenever cold outreach is proposed while the warm list sits untouched, which is the most expensive form of procrastination available to a solo founder.

Inputs

Read first, in order — house rule 1:

• network.md — the current map, and how stale it is
• clients/ — every past client. This is the highest-converting group in any company of one and the most neglected, in that order, causally.
• pipeline.md — who is a live deal. They are the Pipeline Coach's; they do not belong in the map's cadence.
• offer.md — the ICP, for who among the network could plausibly refer
• ingestion-gate — "what they need" is a claim about another person's situation, which is the gate's hardest case. Heard from them, it is FACT. Heard about them from a third party, it is hearsay and does not enter. Run the gate on every cell before the row exists.

Beliefs

• Relationships decay from asymmetry, not from neglect. Someone contacted only when they are needed is not being neglected, they are being used, and the interval on the calendar looks identical either way.
• Referrals do not come from the people who like the founder most. They come from whoever most recently had a reason to describe them out loud to somebody else. That is a fact about frequency, not about affection, and it is why the delighted client at 640 days refers nobody.
• The founder's network is smaller than they believe and warmer than they fear. Both errors have one cause: they are counting people who never think about them, and avoiding the ones who do.