Why I Started Intriq
When I was working closely with sales teams, CRMs were everywhere. They were implemented, populated, reviewed in meetings, and treated as the system of record. On paper, things looked organised.
Opportunities were logged. Pipelines were full. Kanban boards were moving.
And yet, something fundamental felt off.
CRMs were very good at showing us opportunities we already knew existed. They were far less useful at helping us discover new ones.
Once an opportunity surfaced and was recognised, it would get tracked, managed, and optimised. But the harder question was always unanswered: where do the next opportunities come from? A giant list or board of deals did not help anyone see what they were missing.
Over time, I realised this wasn’t a tooling problem. It was a framing problem.
Relationships are dynamic, but we treat them as static
An individual’s relationships change every day. Some grow stronger, some weaken, some go dormant, some resurface unexpectedly. This happens at the personal level, but it also happens at the company level.
A company is only as strong as the network of relationships it has access to. Yet those relationships are often opaque, fragmented, and hidden inside individuals’ heads.
If I happen to know the CEO of a company through a shared hobby or a long-standing personal connection, how would anyone else in my organisation ever know? The only way today is for me to mention it. But you don’t know what you don’t know. If a relationship is invisible, it is effectively unusable.
This is where value quietly leaks out of organisations.
We like to think that the collective network of a company is the sum of everyone’s relationships. In practice, it is far less than that. Because relationships are not surfaced or mapped, the combined value of the network is never fully realised.
Relationship debt compounds quietly
Over time, organisations accumulate what I think of as relationship debt.
It looks like management repeatedly saying things like, “I just met someone from X company, does anyone want to do something with them?” These are well-intentioned moments, but they are often long-tail and wishful. Without context, ownership, or visibility, they rarely turn into real outcomes.
The same issue trickles down to individual contributors. Less-networked individuals are unable to leverage the networks of their more connected peers. More senior or well-networked individuals, consciously or not, assume that others have little to contribute. In reality, someone junior might have a family connection, a past friendship, or an unexpected bridge that never gets activated.
None of this is malicious. It is structural.
Just like tech debt, relationship debt doesn’t break things immediately. It slowly reduces optionality, speed, and trust over time.
We focus too much on building new networks
Most tools in this space are obsessed with building more external relationships. More leads. More contacts. More outreach.
I believe this misses something important.
There is often far more leverage in understanding and activating the relationships an organisation already has than in constantly trying to build new ones from scratch. Warm paths outperform cold ones. Context beats volume.
This does not mean relationships should be transactional or exploited. In fact, the opposite is true.
There are only so many meaningful relationships a person can realistically maintain. Business should not be about maximising surface-level connections. It should be about respecting, nurturing, and aligning the relationships that already exist.
Transparency is uncomfortable, but powerful
I am aware that many people deliberately hide their relationships from their organisations. Sometimes this is about job security. Sometimes it is about control.
But if a relationship can be easily “stolen,” it was probably not very strong to begin with. Strong relationships are built on trust, history, and mutual respect. They cannot be replicated by simply knowing a name.
When relationships are made visible in the right way, transparency does not weaken individuals. It strengthens organisations. It allows people to collaborate instead of compete quietly. It lets trust compound instead of fragment.
What Intriq is trying to do
I built Intriq initially for myself and my organisation, because I wanted a way to understand the relationships we already had, not just the deals we were chasing.
Intriq is not meant to be another CRM. I hope it never becomes one.
It is not about tracking more opportunities or forcing people to log more data. It is about making relationship capital visible, dynamic, and shared. About helping organisations see what is already there, but currently hidden.
My hope is that leaders can start to recognise the cost of operating with low relationship transparency, and what becomes possible when teams are aligned around growing their networks together rather than in isolation.
I would be genuinely disappointed if users never get the chance to realise what they can achieve when everyone in an organisation is willing to grow their relationships in tandem.
That belief is why Intriq exists.