How to ask your investors and advisors for customer introductions

Why the usual ask goes nowhere

The request most founders send after a round closes is some version of "do you know anyone at fintech companies who might want to talk to us?" It is friendly, it is reasonable, and it rarely produces anything.

The problem is the work it hands over. Your investor has to turn a category into names, from a network of several thousand people they cannot recall on demand, then decide which of those names is worth a favour, then write the email. That is a quarter of an hour of thinking, and it arrives alongside the same request from every other company in the portfolio. It is not refused. It just never gets done.

Every fix below removes part of that work from your backer and does it yourself.

Start with a list of accounts, not a category

Before you ask anyone for anything, write down the companies you want as customers. Twenty to fifty is enough to start. For each one, note the role you need to reach: the person who owns the problem you solve, not the most senior name you can find.

This list is the thing your investors cannot produce for you, because only you know which accounts fit. It also turns "do you know anyone in fintech" into a question that has an answer, which is whether they know someone at one of these companies in one of these roles.

Find who they know before you ask

The best introduction requests name a person your backer already knows. Finding that person is the step most founders skip, because the information sits in other people's heads and inboxes.

There are a few ways to do it by hand. LinkedIn shows your mutual connections with anyone at a target account, and a first-degree connection of your investor's is worth checking. Fund websites list portfolio companies, and executives at those companies are people your investor can reach. An advisor's past employers are a reliable map of who they still talk to. None of this tells you how well they know someone, so treat it as a list of questions to ask, not a list of introductions to request.

Software can do some of this. Venture firms often run Affinity, which captures the whole firm's relationships from email and calendar; it is built for the fund rather than its founders, so you see it only if your investor runs searches for you. Bridge lets a fund's platform team share a network with its portfolio and route introductions through it, which works well when your investor already uses it.

NetworkOS is built for the founder's side of this. You invite your advisors and investors, they connect their accounts, and you can search everyone's network at once in plain English. Each result shows who knows the person and why they matched. You see a contact's name, role, company and LinkedIn profile, never their email address or messages. The honest limits are that sign-in is Google only, and a backer's network is searchable only after they join and connect their accounts.

Write an ask they can act on in a minute

Once you know who to ask about, the request itself should take your backer less than a minute to act on. It needs four things:

• One named person, or two at most, with their role and company.
• Why now. One sentence on what makes the conversation timely or useful to them, not only to you.
• A forwardable paragraph. Who you are, what you would like from twenty minutes, and why it could be worth their time, written so it can be pasted unchanged.
• An easy no. Say plainly that skipping it is fine.

The general version of this, for any introduction you want, is in how to ask for an introduction.

Let the customer say yes first

Ask your backer to check with the person before making the introduction. This is the double opt-in, and it protects everyone. Your investor does not spend credit on someone who would have resented the email, the prospect is not ambushed, and you start the conversation with someone who agreed to have it.

It also changes how prospects respond. A buyer who said yes to a conversation turns up to it. One who was copied on an introduction they did not ask for often does not reply at all. The connector's side of this, including how to word the check, is in how to make a warm introduction.

Keep the asks rare and batched

Every introduction spends some of your backer's relationship with the person they know. Spending it carefully is what keeps them willing to do it again.

Send each investor or advisor one or two named asks at a time, and space them out. Some founders put one or two asks into each monthly update, and make sure every one of them is about a named person. A long list in the week after the round closes reads as a request to spend everything at once, and it tends to get none of it.

Spread the asks across your backers too. An angel who ran sales at a company your buyers know may be a better route than your lead investor, and asking them shares the load.

Close the loop every time

Tell your backer what happened. The meeting took place, the prospect is in a trial, the deal closed, or it went nowhere and here is what you learned. One line is enough.

This is the step that decides whether you get the next introduction. An investor who never hears back has no way to know whether their favour was used well. One who hears that the meeting turned into a pilot will think of you the next time they meet someone who fits.

When they say no or go quiet

A no is useful. It usually means the relationship is weaker than it looked, or the timing is wrong for the person, and your backer is protecting it. Thank them, and do not ask about the same person through someone else on the same board without saying so.

Silence is more often a request that was too much work than a refusal. Send it once more, shorter, with the paragraph already written. If it still sits, take it off your list for that backer and move to the next route. Some introductions are not worth making at all, and your backer may see that before you do; when not to make an introduction covers what they are weighing.