Mutual connections

LinkedIn shows mutual connections for free. Open a profile at your second degree and the count is under the headline; click it and the list appears. For someone you found on LinkedIn who's active there too, that's often enough.

What it cannot show is everything outside LinkedIn. Your inbox knows who you write to, your calendar knows who you've sat in rooms with, and your Google Contacts knows who you saved. LinkedIn sees none of it, so the mutual you share by email, the one who would happily make the introduction, is invisible, while the stranger who accepted a connection request in 2021 counts the same as a close colleague, because there is no strength in the count, only a number.

Sales Navigator adds TeamLink, which surfaces your teammates' LinkedIn connections into a target account. That's a second degree built purely from who your colleagues clicked accept on, on the Advanced tier at $159.99 a month per seat.

Happenstance builds one network from seven connected accounts: Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. The same person appearing in three of them is one person with three pieces of evidence, and the evidence becomes a strength score. Email is read as headers only, never content.

Ask “how am I connected to this person?” and the answer is the mutuals you share, where each relationship came from, and how strong it is on your side and on theirs. Ask “who do I know at Stripe?” and the answer is everyone there you know, then everyone your friends and groups know, with the mutual who gets you to each one. Ranking is by strength on both sides, so the first name is the one to ask.

The second degree is where it pays off. A friend on Happenstance is someone who agreed to share networks with you, and sharing is always mutual. A group is a team, a fund, a cohort or a community that pooled its members' networks. Groups are free and unlimited, and the largest make 380,000+people searchable. That's a second degree built from relationships that happened rather than from connection requests.

Before a cold email. Check for a mutual first. If one exists, the email becomes an introduction request, and those get answered. Happenstance for sales

Before an application. “Who do I know at Figma?” turns a resume in a pile into a referral. Happenstance for job seekers

Before a pitch. Investors take meetings from people they trust. The mutual who knows the partner well is the one to ask, and the one Happenstance ranks first. Happenstance for fundraising

Before a first meeting. Knowing you share a former manager or a college friend changes the first five minutes.

500,000+ people use Happenstance to answer these. The introduction itself, the thing a mutual connection is for, is at warm introductions.