What is the warm network in InstinctGTM?

Part 3 · Operate

The warm network

People who already know you, and the rules that stop you spending them.

01What it is

A list held apart from your prospects: former clients, people you worked with or for, operators you know. Each one carries how you know them, what you worked on, and when you last spoke. Asks are drafted from those fields, approved one at a time, and never sent by us.

02Why it exists

This is the highest-converting lane available to a founder and the one that reliably goes unworked, because asking somebody you know feels harder than sending to somebody you do not.

The reason it is built as its own lane rather than a tag on the prospect list is that a warm relationship is not a cold one with better copy. Different cadence, different tone, different measure of success, and a different failure mode. A signal-based opener sent to somebody who came to your wedding reads as automated, and the relationship is worth more than the ask.

The second reason shapes every rule below: a warm relationship is finite. A cold prospect who ignores you costs nothing. A warm contact burned on a careless ask is gone permanently, and so is everyone they would have introduced. That is why the re-contact interval is a hard block rather than a warning, why nothing here is batch-approved, and why the product records what you offered for an introduction and never suggests a figure.

03How to use it

01Add people by hand or paste a list. Set how well you know each one yourself: close, warm or faint.
02Fill in what you worked on together. That field is what the draft opens with, and when it is empty the draft says less rather than inventing warmth.
03Set when you last spoke. It is the most useful field here: somebody you spoke to last month and somebody you last spoke to in 2019 need different messages.
04Draft an ask with one specific thing you are looking for. Read it, approve it, then send it yourself from your own client.
05Log gives as well as asks. A contact who has received something is warmer than one who has only ever been asked.

04What good looks like

You give it: A close contact, last spoken to three months ago, with "the CRM migration we ran together in 2021" on the record, and an ask for anyone dealing with a failed CRM migration.
You get: A four-sentence message that opens from the migration, admits nothing needs admitting at three months, asks one answerable question, and ends with an easy no.
Why: Every sentence restates a field you typed. The drafter has nowhere to get a shared history from except the record, which is what makes it impossible for it to invent one.

Derived from the rules in the code

05What weak looks like, and what it costs

You give it: A faint contact with no shared history recorded and no last-spoke date.
You get: A shorter message with no history claim in it at all, and an opening that admits the gap rather than assuming there is none.
Why: An unknown last-spoke date is treated as a long gap, because assuming the friendlier case is how a draft ends up writing to a stranger as though it were last week. With no history on record there is nothing to claim, so it claims nothing.