23,142 contacts?!
How do you keep track of the people you meet?
When I started planning Fledge in 2011, I created a spreadsheet to track the people I met and the conversations we had. 15 years later there are 23,142 rows of contacts.
A little simple math says that is over 1,500 people per year, every year for 12 years. And technically, it’s only been 11 1/2 years, so it’s more like 2,000 people per year. That is a lot of people!
I suspect you don’t make quite this many connections per year, but my opening question remains… how do you keep track of the people you’ve met and the people you want to keep talking to?
Beyond my CRM spreadsheet, the best tool I’ve found that helps with this flow is SaneBox. I’ve been using this tool for 12 years, too. It helps in a few ways, but most relevant to this topic is that it lets you attach a deadline to any email. If you don’t get a reply before the deadline, SaneBox sends you an email. With this, you don’t need to track email in a separate CRM. Every important thread can not fray.
The UI for this is perfect. You just bcc an @sanebox.com email address. The address name is the deadline, e.g. 1week@, 3days@, monday@, etc.
Today I reviewed 192 of these reminders, all related to sharing the upcoming Africa Eats Annual Report with potential investors, potential co-investors, etc.
Running through those 192 email took over two hours, which is why I’m asking here for advice on how others manage tasks like this, as the number of shareholders of Africa Eats is now well over 200, the number of potential shareholders is many more hundreds, and the number of people I talk to about becoming a shareholder is in the thousands.
What tools am I missing that make this type of work easier?
From the beginning...
If you’ve read enough of my posts, you might notice that the way I think is often a bit different. One of the patterns I use is based on an observation I had almost 30 years ago, that the order information is presented changes the choices people make.
Traveling but not OOO
I’m experiencing a new, modern phenomenon. I’m half way around the world from home, but not out-of-office (OOO). This is new to me, as in every past business trip, my calendar has been full of meetings or days of conferences. Not this time.
One year and two days ago…
Networking with 22,000+ People
Back in 2011, when I first started on the business plan that became Fledge, I created a spreadsheet to track my networking. A simple spreadsheet with columns for: name, email, org, date, notes. Excel, not a CRM database, so that I could make edits while traveling, without the need for the internet (2011 is back in the days of 3G and before WiFi was ev…
Brute force, axes, and dams
My favorite superhero is Batman, because he's the superhero with no superpower. Me neither. Much of what I'm able to accomplish comes down to three patterns that everyone could follow, but few people do.
Like you, I use Sandbox, but all the cool kids are using Superhuman email. I haven't been convinced to make the switch, but your needs have topped mine--and perhaps you've outgrown Sandbox.