Network Path Map

The surface we map

A Network Path Map classifies, for up to ten ICP members you name, the single warmest credible way in: a real person-to-person connection, a shared institution, or a disciplined cold opener. The object is the relationship graph and the institutional overlaps around each target, built entirely from the network you describe, with no crawling or enrichment.

A CRM stores your contacts but does not rank the warmest credible path to a stranger. An execution retainer sends outreach but does not first map which door is actually open. This map does the classification, and it is send-agnostic: it never contacts anyone, so you decide whom and when to reach.

The evidence standard

Every classification passes an internal-consistency gate at the persistence boundary before your report is built. A path may not claim a warmer rung than your supplied evidence supports: the evidence behind a warm path must appear verbatim in the network or relationship notes you provided, and a path that traces to nothing you gave us is dropped to the cold floor. We do not invent a connection or an institution to make a path look warmer.

This is enforcement, not just instruction. The prompt asks for the laddering; the gate drops a path whose evidence is not a verbatim quote from your notes, mismatches its claimed rung, or runs past the 25-word evidence bound, so the discipline is proven on the output rather than hoped for.

The three tiers

For each member we classify the warmest path the evidence supports, dropping to the next floor only when the tier above genuinely fails:

• Specific relationship (engineered path). A real person-to-person connection: a direct relationship, a named shared contact, a shared community, or a content connection you have built, grounded in your supplied network or notes.
• Shared affiliation (institutional path). No person link, but a shared institution (alma mater, former employer, portfolio company, board, accelerator cohort, industry association) enables a non-cold opener.
• Cold outreach only. The floor, used when none of the above is supported. The member is flagged lower-priority with a value-first cold opener.

The activation playbook

Every warm path, specific-relationship or shared-affiliation and never cold, carries an activation playbook: not outreach we perform for you, but a grounded plan you run yourself. It never contacts anyone. Each playbook has three parts:

1. A verbatim anchor. The shortest exact quote from your own notes that makes the path warm, so you can see precisely why it was tiered where it was.
2. Three to five ordered steps. Concrete actions to open the path, each anchored in that quote. You decide whether and when to act on them.
3. A success marker. One line telling you what a working path looks like.

When a path cannot be grounded, when its anchor does not appear verbatim in your notes, you get an honest note in place of the playbook, never an invented plan. Every warm path gets exactly one of the two.

How it works

At intake you provide your company and value proposition, an optional description of who you already know in or around these accounts, and up to ten ICP members, each with a name, company, role, optional profile URL, and optional relationship notes. The analysis is grounded in what you supply: paths are built from the network and notes you describe, not from web scraping or enrichment. For each path we record the tier and subtype, a credibility grade, the concrete evidence it rests on, an estimated effort, and, for warm paths, an activation playbook anchored in a verbatim quote from your notes.

Accuracy and limitations

• Quality depends on the network and notes you supply. Sparse notes produce more cold-floor classifications, surfaced honestly rather than inflated.
• We classify paths. We do not estimate response rates, approve outreach, or send anything.
• Up to ten members per analysis.