My Network

Your network is private to you, and it's a powerful asset. Once you bring it in, Pioneer researches each contact from the open web, building a grounded private profile. Then, on any lead where you know the person you want to reach, you can ask: who in my network can get me in?

Add contacts to your network

1. Click My Network in the sidebar.

2. Click Add contacts, then paste whatever you have for the people you know:

   • a profile URL: LinkedIn, X, or any other page someone is identifiable from (their personal site, GitHub, Substack, a faculty bio)
   • an email address, bare (jane@acme.com) or named (Jane Doe <jane@acme.com>)

   One person per line, in any mix. Paste is tolerant of messy input: a clean list, a spreadsheet, a sent-mail or CRM export, or raw mixed text. Pioneer pulls the people out and ignores the leftover columns.

3. Click Add and Pioneer starts researching each one.

Pioneer works through the queue building a private profile for each contact: current role and company, a short about, recent news and posts, communities they're active in, and any contact channels it can find. Each piece of information is sourced from the page it came from.

Duplicates are dropped for you, both within the paste and against contacts you already have, including ones already synced from your calendar (matched by email address).

Adding people by email address

An email address is enough to research someone; you don't need to find their LinkedIn first. This is what makes a sent-mail export or a CRM dump usable as-is.

An address carries two separate pieces of evidence: the domain says where someone works, the mailbox says who they are. Pioneer only accepts a person it can tie to the mailbox itself, one of:

• the name is visible in the mailbox (jane.doe@, jdoe@)
• the domain is the person's own name
• a page on the web carries that exact address next to their name

If none of those hold, research fails rather than guessing. That's deliberate: the wrong person in your network becomes a wrong warm path, which is worse than a blank.

Shared mailboxes are rejected. info@, hello@, support@, careers@, no-reply@ and the like are a company, not a person, so Pioneer won't add them. Anything in your paste that tried to name a person but couldn't, a rejected mailbox or a link that resolves to no human, is listed back to you after adding, so you can see what was skipped and why. A paste with nobody identifiable in it is an error, never a silent "added 0".

Research status

Each contact has a status chip:

• Queued: waiting to be researched. A large import may spend hours in the queue while Pioneer paces itself behind a per-user research cap.
• Researching: being researched right now.
• Done: research complete, full profile ready.
• Failed: couldn't be researched, or the person couldn't be pinned down with confidence. Click Retry to try again; an email-only contact can be retried on the address alone.

If a contact stays queued for a long time, it's not broken; the queue is working through a backlog. Only a contact that started researching and then went silent is stalled. The whole queue going quiet is the real signal that something is wrong.

Star a contact (strong ties)

Click the star icon on any contact to mark them as a strong tie, someone you actually know. Starring gets them:

• Deeper research: a wider search of their posts, talks, and press (up to 50 signals instead of 25)
• Guaranteed hearing: they're seated on every ask and bridge question
• Priority in searches: ranked ahead of unknown contacts

Unstarring never deletes what research already found. It just removes the priority.

The contact drawer

Click any contact to open their drawer: a researched profile with their current role, a short about, recent signals (what they posted, argued, launched, or became, with sources), and contact channels Pioneer found (email, work number, other profiles). Channels Pioneer looked for but didn't find are shown as not-found, so you know the blank is an answer, not an omission.

You can also add private notes to any contact: a title and a body of your own, written in Markdown. A note is your personal scratch about a relationship ("met at Battery Week, she mentioned her plant is expanding"), separate from the researched profile. Notes are private to you and never feed into research, asks, or warm paths.

Find a warm path to a lead

On a lead's person card, the champion Pioneer identified on that lead, you'll see Find warm connection. Click it, and Pioneer searches your network for people who can introduce you:

1. Pioneer writes two or three bridge questions ("who knows someone at this company?", "who shares a community with this person?"), each searching for a different kind of overlap.
2. Each question runs against your network and returns a shortlist of contacts who might bridge to the target.
3. The results are ranked with a confidence level, a connection type (works there, ex-colleague, same community, knows the champion, and so on), and a suggested ask: a two-line opening you can use.

You can also type your own bridging question if the generated ones miss. Every person named is a link into their contact drawer.

What if nobody is a match? Zero is a legitimate result. Pioneer shows you the closest near-misses and why each was passed over, so you learn what your network has instead of what you asked for.

Ask your network a question

Beyond warm paths on specific leads, you can ask a plain-language question of your whole network: "Who should I talk to about process-heat incentives in California?" or "Who in my network knows the founders at Acme?"

1. Go to My Network and click Ask your network.
2. Type your question. Pioneer reads every researched contact and returns a handful of grounded suggestions: who, why them (citing what they actually did recently, not just their title), and a suggested opening.
3. Results appear as a short list. Each contact is a link into their drawer; each suggestion cites the evidence.

One ask at a time per user. If a previous ask is still running, you'll need to wait or cancel it.

What if nobody is a match? Zero is a legitimate result. Pioneer shows you the closest near-misses and why each was passed over, so you learn what your network has instead of what you asked for.

Share a link to your network

You can create a shareable link that lets someone else, even someone without a Pioneer account, ask a question against your network. This is useful when the person who needs the intro is a co-founder, an advisor, or a friend who wouldn't sign up for Pioneer themselves.

Create a share link

1. Go to My Network and click Share.
2. Choose how many questions the link may ask (1, 2, 5, 10, or 50). That allowance is what keeps one shared link from spending your whole network-ask budget.
3. Optionally label the link (like "Co-founder" or "Sequoia intro") so you can keep track of who you shared it with, and optionally tick Only one email address can use this link and type that address.
4. Click Create share link. The URL lands on your clipboard, ready to send.

You need at least one contact in your network before you can share it.

How it works for the person you shared it with

They open the link and see whose network it is, how many contacts it holds, and an ask box. Before asking, they verify an email address with a 6-digit code Pioneer sends them, so you always know who asked; if you restricted the link to one address, that's the only address that works. Then they type a question, and Pioneer answers with grounded suggestions from your network: who, why them, and a suggested opening. They never see your contact list, and they never need a Pioneer account.

Manage your links

Open the same Share dialog to see every link you've made: its label, whether it's still active, how many of its questions are used up, and every question asked through it with the answer it got. Copy grabs the URL again. Revoke ends a link at once, for everyone holding it: anyone who opens it afterwards sees "This link is no longer available". Revoking keeps the question history, which is your record of what was asked.

Share links are read-only. The person using one can ask questions and read the answers; they can never see, edit, or export your network.

Manage your network

Your network is private to you: never shared with teammates, never mixed into the org's shared records. Contacts you add, research Pioneer runs, warm paths you find, and asks you make are yours alone.

To remove a contact, go to My Network, open the contact's drawer, and click Remove. This deletes the contact and all their research.

To add a private note to a contact, open the contact's drawer and click Add note in the Notes section. Give the note a title (leave it blank and it gets a dated one) and a body; you can edit or delete a note at any time.

Next steps

• Refine Your Pipeline: get more signal from every batch
• Export Your Board: take your leads into your outreach workflow
• Troubleshooting & FAQ: answers to common questions

Need help?

If you have questions, reach out to us at support@pioneerclimate.com