The follow-up you meant to send
You met someone worth knowing. You had a good conversation and planned to reconnect the following week. To make sure this doesn’t fall through the cracks, you need to add their contact info to your address book, take a few notes about the conversation, and add a reminder to your calendar to send them a follow-up. It would also help to tag them (martech, entrepreneur, executive) and include a few highlights in your follow-up. You can do all this with your address book, a notes app, a calendar, and email. But if doing it right requires four different tools, it likely won’t get done.
The people who don’t drop the ball usually have help — a chief of staff or an assistant whose job is to keep track. Every morning that person gives you two things: here’s who you should reach out to today, and you never heard back from Dana; want me to draft something?
Most of us can’t hire such help, so we’re often not as effective as we could be.
The math of a network
Robin Dunbar, the Oxford anthropologist, put a number on how many stable relationships a person can actually maintain: about 150. It’s a famous figure because it’s humbling. Your ambitions for your network have no ceiling; your memory does. Somewhere past your closest dozen, people start slipping — the founder you clicked with, the operator who’d solved your exact problem, the intro you swore you’d make. They don’t disappear so much as go unattended, which over enough months amounts to the same thing.
A spreadsheet won’t fix this, and neither will another reminder. A calendar can interrupt you; it can’t brief you. What actually helps is having someone pay attention for you.
You could simply add some notes in Savvyy and have it remind you to reach out, help you draft your outreach, and nudge you to follow up if you don’t hear back. And when you speak with this person again, take more notes, and exchange a few emails, everything will live in one place, giving you good context for all your future interactions. That context is the foundation of a good relationship.
A nudge with a memory attached
So we taught Savvyy the first half of the job. It reads your emails, your notes, and the history you’ve kept, and creates outreach suggestions for you to act on.
It’s up to you whether to write something from scratch or have our AI assistant draft you a message using the email outlines you’ve already created.
Either way, you have the full context and can communicate effectively without switching between email and notes.
Catching what falls through
The second half is quieter and, honestly, worth more. When you send an email, Savvyy reads it and asks the question a good assistant would: does this need a follow-up, and when? Offer to send a deck, and it lands on your list. Say you’ll check in next week, and the reminder is already set. You don’t have to flag any of it; you just send your email the way you always have.
We’ve argued on this blog that your relationships deserve a quiet, private place, away from the noise of the feeds. Now that place starts to work, reviewing your activity as it happens, pointing out who to reach out to, and catching the follow-ups you’d otherwise miss.
It’s the chief of staff you probably wish you had.