App
Footing
A tool for young professionals to manage and build their network. Sync your Linkedin connections and build a system to stay in touch with important career professionals.
- Role
- Founder
- Year
- 2026
- Kind
- Web App
Where it Started
As a young professional trying to grow my network, I’ve attended a lot of networking events and met a lot of pretty cool people. However, I don’t think I’ve managed to maintain a relationship with almost any of them, mainly because I always forget to follow up after I meet people.
Building a relationship is a very intentional task, especially if it’s with someone you aren’t necessarily going to see every day at work or something like that. I realized that I hadn’t been going about networking with the level of effort or deliberation that it required.
This got me thinking: is there a tool that can help me to identify and actively build relationships that I want in the professional space?
What already exists
After spending some time researching tools already in the network management/CRM space, I noticed 3 tools that kept popping up: Dex, Clay, and Monica.
Dex
Probably the closest competitor in terms of offering contact syncing from different sources and network tracking
Pros
- Pretty much has all the important integrations (LinkedIn, contacts, email, etc.)
- Simple, usable interface that also looks great
- Tracks email and meeting notes as well as just cadence
Cons
- $12/month to get any actualy usage out of it
- Kind of a pain to set up, requires a mobile app to get a lot of the integrations
Clay
A full relationship manager that assembles data from itself and your accounts.
Pros
- It will pull in and give you a lot of information automatically - like social profiles, job changes, company updates, etc.
- Insane capabilities in terms of data enrichment
Cons
- $167/month for any real tiers - absolutely brutal pricepoint
- The amount of data, integrations, and information it has in general can be overwhelming
- Too complicated of an interface - and too much information for my purposes
Monica
An open-source personal CRM you can host yourself.
Pros
- Free!
- Customizable because it's open source
Cons
- More geared toward personal relationships and remembering things like gifts and birthdays
- I know it's open source and free, but the interface is so ugly
- Doesn't have a LinkedIn integration
None of these tools fulfilled my specific issue of having a place to manage only my professional network. I wasn't looking for something to track everyone's personal information, birthdays, etc., I just wanted somewhere to choose my important contacts and maintain a consistent repore with them. Dex was very close to this honestly, but it feel short solely in the fact that it wasn't free (Sorry! I'm broke).
Is it just me?
Before building anything, I went looking for other people describing the same problems. I wanted to understand:
- whether people were concerned about building their network
- whether they found it difficult to do
- which specific challenges kept getting in the way
Network building is a common problem
People seem to recognize that networking is a valuable tool in your career, but it seems like there are a lot of struggles on how to actually do it. There are consistent reddit posts pretty much everyday all along the lines of 'How do I build my network?', which gave me confidence that it's something a lot of people struggle with.
Reddit
2 comments
“How do you intentionally build a network that becomes a real business asset, not just a list of contacts?”
r/EntrepreneurRideAlong · u/Anxious_Diver_7002 · 3mo ago
Reddit
3 comments
“Everyone says ‘network,’ but how do you actually do it as an absolute complete beginner?”
r/businessnetworking · u/Obieadz · 2d ago
Reddit
5 comments
“How can you build a network when you're not born wealthy?”
r/AskReddit · 1y ago
Most people agree that a great network is built over time
A clear trend was people saying that networking isn't just about meeting someone at an event once; you have to build an actual relationship with people in order for them to actually trust you and want to help you.
Reddit
2 votes
“I like to think of it as building a business family rather than a transactional process.”
u/CaptainTime · 3mo ago
Reddit
3 votes
“Go out drink a good coffee, try to bring your value to others and will be simple. It's a slow journey, do not rush it.”
u/Budeanu-Lucian · 3mo ago
Reddit
“Asking for their insight is a form of value in itself because people love to talk about what they know.”
u/The_Unsentimental · 7mo ago
People have trouble approaching it from how they can give value to someone
Young professionals especially have trouble recognizing how they can make a relationship a two-way street when they don't have any experience to begin with.
Reddit
3 votes
“To build a powerful network, you must focus on giving value first by sharing helpful resources or introducing two people who can benefit from knowing each other.”
u/Biz-Coach · 3mo ago
Reddit
“You are taking the ‘have something to offer’ too literally. You need a mentor. That is where it starts.”
r/careerguidance · u/JustMe39908 · 7mo ago
Reddit
“...but if I'm just starting out and have no professional network to reach out to, how am I supposed to do that?”
r/careerguidance · u/BlackQueerThrowAway · 7mo ago
Defining success
By the end of the month, can I build 3 relationships from nothing? To me, this means 3 people that I can reach out to at any time and ask for something - like a friend.
Minimum Viable Product
Based off what I found, network building is developed through intentional, consistent, and proactive communication. To approach this with an MVP, the solution I came up with was simple:
01
Import a contact
Extension that imports either singular Linkedin profiles or your full connection list
02
Set a cadence
You decide how often each person is worth hearing from
03
Get told when it's going stale
The part I kept failing at on my own
The Main Issue - Getting the data out of LinkedIn
There was a problem sitting underneath step one. LinkedIn has no public API, and they actively block scraping. Any version of Footing that pulls connections down from a server of mine either gets blocked or gets your account flagged, and neither of those is a thing we can hand a user.
To combat this, I implemented an extension. It reads pages inside your own logged-in session: the same profiles you could open yourself, in the browser you already have open.
That still leaves risks, so I added some rate-limiting. Every run is capped: a daily budget of profiles, a cooldown before a full re-sync can happen again, and randomized gaps between fetches so a sync moves at something closer to reading speed than to a crawl of the whole list at once.
None of this makes scraping LinkedIn sanctioned, and I won't pretend otherwise. What it does is keep Footing's footprint under what one person browsing their own network would generate. With no users yet, that was the cheap version to build.
What's next
My current plans for the platform going forward.
Run the month on myself
Three relationships from nothing, using the tool instead of my memory. I set that bar before building and I'm currently in the process of executing.
Put it in front of people who didn't build it
Two methods for this: sharing with my friends, and figuring out different marketing channels to get this on front of people.
Reduce risk
Is there a safer way to get data? I've been looking at Clay recently, one of the competitors I identified before, and exploring whether or not it makes sense to connect to that platform instead and use the massive amount of data it accesses. Stay tuned for that.