Happenstance vs Draftboard

Draftboard publishes how it scores a route: length of overlapping employment, recency of the connection, multiple overlaps at different companies, titles and departments, relative seniority. Every item on that list is drawn from work history. None of them observes an interaction between the two people.

That design has a genuine advantage, which is that it works without anyone connecting an account. Point it at a company and it'll produce routes. The cost is that a route rests on overlap rather than contact: two people at the same 400-person company for three years, in adjacent departments, at similar seniority, score well whether or not they ever spoke. Send that ask to a teammate and you've spent the only currency that matters in an intro request, which is their willingness to be asked again.

Happenstance ranks the other way. The graph is built from what your connected accounts recorded: who answered your email, who sat in a meeting, who is in your Google Contacts, who you follow and who follows back. Fewer paths survive a test like that. The ones that do are the ones a colleague will forward without hesitating.

Draftboard's workflow starts with names you already have. You submit target accounts, or import a CSV out of a prospecting tool, and it returns scored routes into them with a stated reason to ask each person. For an account executive with a territory list, that's exactly the right shape, and the intro request tracking that follows is Draftboard's workflow.

Most questions about people don't arrive with the list already written. "Which of my connections have gone on to found something?" "Who do I know in Berlin?" "Who has hired a head of finance before?" "Who can tell me what it is like to work at this company before I take the offer?" Those are searches, not scorings. Happenstance is the same product for all four, plus web search when nobody in the graph fits.

The scope difference follows from that. Draftboard sells to founders, sales teams, partnerships and agencies, with board recruiting and job hunting as secondary use cases. Happenstance is one search box that an investor, a recruiter, a job seeker and a founder each point at a different question, which is also why the free plan matters: nobody has to justify a line item to ask who they know.

Nobody on the team will connect an account. Inference is what the constraint leaves you with. If activation is the blocker, a tool that maps second and third degree reach from imported lists will produce something before anyone has connected an account.

The ask needs to be tracked. Draftboard follows an intro request through its lifecycle, so a manager can see which asks were made, by whom and what came back, and the tracking is as much the product as the routes are.

You want to pay per result. $0.30 a quality path with a $0.90 ceiling per target and 50 free paths is a low-commitment way to test a target list, and some teams prefer metered spend to a subscription.

The list is the job. If the whole task is routes into fifty named companies and nothing else, a product built for exactly that will feel more direct than a general search box.

What you keep. A sales team already working an account list inside Draftboard keeps the list workflow and the request tracking. Both stay in Draftboard, and adding a free tool beside them changes nothing.

What Happenstance adds. The sources Draftboard does not read, which are calendar, Google Contacts, Twitter and Instagram, and the questions that do not start from a list. It also adds the ranking that tells you which of the routes you were handed is backed by something real, which is useful even when the routes came from somewhere else.

Moving over entirely makes sense when the metered model stops fitting: a large target list whose cost is unknown until you run it, a team that wants everyone searching rather than a few people submitting lists, or a use case that was never sales. You lose intro request tracking and the CSV-in workflow. You gain plain-English search across seven sources, free groups that advisors and investors can join, web search past the graph, and the API and MCP server. Search your own network free.