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Manyhats | local.foundation Blog

TL;DR

Role-based networking for multi-hat startup professionals. Manage your founder/investor/mentor identities without losing context or connections.

The Networking Problem

I have been there so often already: Pitched as a founder at a startup event, then two hours later I'm wearing my mentor hat at the same venue mentoring other founders. Or I'm organising at a community meetup in the morning, then switching to my co-founder role for an evening pitch session. Who can guess what happens next when I try to follow up?

  • The founder I met always thinks I'm a mentor who might train them full time
  • The startup I wanted to support organising their operations can't find my mentor contact info
  • I forgot which "me" I was when I had that amazing conversation about concurrent programming in Elixir
  • The community builder I wanted to collaborate with only has my founder LinkedIn, not my mentor contact

Such situations are super annoying and wasted opportunities in my view. Also, I am aware that probably everyone who reads this also has tried strategies to cope with that issue! You've probably tried separate contact lists for each hat (profile you embody), multiple LinkedIn accounts, or even color-coded systems to track which version of yourself each person knows.

I know all these solutions because either I or someone on my team has tried them, and we learned our fair share by testing these solutions. But what we really learned was the following: CRMs are annoying to maintain, especially after your fancy new Obsidian template wears off and does not work as well as you thought when downloading it from some forum you found it in.

Here's what really hits as you become more active in the startup ecosystem: this problem scales exponentially. When you're hitting 3-5 events per week across different roles, managing hundreds of connections who know different versions of you becomes a full-time job. And current tools? They assume you're one person with one professional identity.

What we all want is some assistant that just pops up and collects the information of this very interesting person we are talking to. The very next morning when we grab coffee, we that assistant should help us review who we should talk to first from all the connections we just made the evening before.

What we all want is some assistant/PA that just pops up and collects the information of this very interesting person we are talking to and then pops up the next morning when we grab coffee to review with who we should talk now first from all the connections we just made the evening before.

— , local.foundation

I now have 2 pieces of information for you, one is a happy cheerful message, the other one is a bummer. And since I learned that one should never end a text with a bummer, let's address it first:

We did not (YET) invent the invisible PA that does all the annoying part. Sorry to bring that to you, give us a few well-running companies and we might get there.

But as I said, we also have very good news: We found a way to take 80% of the manual bookkeeping out of running your personal CRM/contact list and I will now share with you what we came up with:

  1. Many Hats
  2. Context Preserver
  3. Automatically Populated CRM
  4. Ancient Technique 01: QR Codes
  5. Ancient Technique 02: Maps

1. Many Hats

As someone active in the startup ecosystem, I don't just have projects. I have several professional identities that require different approaches, different networks, and different presentations of myself. I might be a co-founder of local.foundation at an event that brings together founders and investors. Two hours later, I am a mentor and volunteer of a community that operates in the startup space (cough cough 351 cough cough).

Now I currently have a few ways of providing contacts:

  • I use the same contact (LinkedIn/WhatsApp/Telegram/...) for both events and gather all contacts under one domain
  • I use different contact points for different audiences, which means I will switch apps quite often
  • I use our new fancy shining app because it beats existing solutions by far:
  1. Create a hat (founder/investor/community builder/personal)
  2. Attach links to socials, files (did anyone talk about pitch decks?!), notes to your hat
  3. Show your hat-specific QR code when connecting with your audience

2. Context Preserver

Okay, we now solved the first problem: how do I get my information across to the interesting person I just talked to fast. Now the second problem: I forgot the topic/relation we established during our conversation when viewing the account the next day.

Basic problems deserve fancy solutions was the saying, right? Well, how about seeing:

  • The event that you connected at
  • The hat you used to connect to that person
  • The other person's hat and correlated information

Okay, might feel a bit thin, but we are extending the app day by day so if you want a few months off the paid plan, whisper me your solution

3. Automatically Populated CRM

Here's what makes this really powerful:

Smart Pre-Population

Based on your hat, we automatically populate your CRM with relevant contacts. Founder? Get investors, incubators, and accelerators. Skip hours of research and start connecting immediately.

Full CRM Features

Filter by region, event, name, role, logical groups. Export to CSV, email, or integrate with your existing tools. All the fluff and puff you'd expect.

What's the Price?

€5/month
First Month FREE

Sounds too good to be true? We're not even done with what we offer!

4. Ancient Technique: QR Codes

Well, they just work and look interesting, and what they enable is the following:

  • Event check-in at the venue and therefore accurate attendee data
  • True and consensual in-person connection
  • On-use location data, which we will come to in a minute

What they remove: Accounts spamming to connect to EVERYONE on the event app because they just launched their 6th AI agent in 2 days.

Imagine a world in which you can open the conference app without being greeted by 40 requests for connections and a Calendly link attached because someone wants to "learn from you how you managed to achieve X for 5 years in a row!" Imagine a world where you open the conference app and see a list of people to follow up with because you connected to them yesterday night. Imagine a world where opening the conference app gives you valuable insights into which hats are at which event! — Actually, I am teasing here, let's check the last point for this post.

5. Ancient Technique: Maps

Maps are useful, right? You see where you are, you see where other things are. You can estimate how far something is (roughly). These things have been around for some time, they are in use for many reasons, from Wardley maps to Apple Maps, we use them. Now as I said, maps (the new ones that we carry around with us) show where we are (the blue dot) and show where events are (some color that we will specify before we launch). Okay, we now have a map of events and can see how far we are from the event. Can we use some of the stuff from above to be displayed on the map without exposing personal information?

And this time there is only one happy answer: Yes we can.

Let's display the hats of event attendees on the map as well. I can now hunt for investors checking in at an event 500m from my location instead of going to another event that I would have gone to but where all the product people gather currently. Well, they have fancy food probably, so I can go there afterwards anyways :)

But not only from a user perspective — this opens many doors on navigating a city by events. As an event organizer myself, I now have the data that secures me sponsoring for future events. I can show the talent I attract and the connections I facilitated by staying up all night before the event to decorate the venue.

Ready to Transform Your Networking?

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