Affinity
p/affinity
The most powerful relationship intelligence platform.
Anne Gherini
Affinity — Relationship Intelligence, Reimagined
Featured
82

Affinity is a relationship intelligence platform helping professionals leverage their networks to achieve their business priorities. Using patent-pending technology, Affinity helps teams manage and grow their networks by unlocking introductions to decision makers and auto-populating pipelines to increase deal flow.

Replies
Ryan Hoover
The Alliances feature where you can share and get visibility into someone else's network is most unique and interesting. The obvious use case is within a team or company but this can also be handy for investor <> founder relationships. How are you seeing people use it now, @shubham_goel1?
David Carpe
@rrhoover that’s what i’m most interested in - just requested a demo
Shubham Goel
@rrhoover @passingnotes Great question! As you rightly pointed out, there are two main ways our customers are benefitting from Alliances today: Internal alliances - Allowing them to get instant visibility into any of their colleague's networks. A simple example would be: "Who at my company knows someone at company X? I'm trying to strike a deal with X and need to figure out the best path to get into the door." External alliances - Allowing them to get visibility into trusted partners' networks. As you mentioned, the founder <> investor relationship is really key. We are super bullish on this - we imagine a world where every time an investor gives an entrepreneur a term sheet / invests, it should almost be contractual for them to ally with the entrepreneur. After all, one of the biggest value adds investors provide their companies is access to their network for fundraising, business development, and sales - and Affinity is a really tangible way to do that. Many of our customers that are startups (you can read in reviews above as well) ally with their investors and vice-versa as soon as they join Affinity. Apart from founder <> investor relationships, we've seen so many other alliance relationships on Affinity: advisor <> founder, non-profit fundraiser <> board of non-profit, VC <> limited partner, salesperson <> ex-colleague who sold to the same territory.. We really do think that for anyone who leverages their network, there is a group of 15-30 people outside your team who consistently help you do your job better - external alliances are designed to make that as tangible as possible. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have follow up questions :)
Dylan Boyd

After trying about every tool out there for CRM management for our relationships and portfolio management, this checked all the boxes. It's ability to capture meetings, calls, emails, documents and notes between teams is amazing. We have actively been using it from the early days and continue to use it today for our entire globally distributed team. Smart list creation and the fact that everything is LIVE capturing what you do allows our team to stay in touch and in tune with everything going on. The privacy settings are also a great offering allowing you to not include full details or even subject lines where certain teams do not need to see it. Excited to watch this product continue to expand.

Pros:

I looked for a platform to manage the sourcing, conversations and ongoing portfolio and relationships management. This is it.

Cons:

Mobile app does not have the full experience... yet.

Anne Gherini
Thanks, Dylan! We appreciate all your support. We are working on the mobile app, so expect to see big improvements soon. If you have any features you would like to see on mobile, let us know.
Rebecca Garcia
Looks interesting! Wish there was clear pricing and/or a startup/solopreneur option.
Shubham Goel
@geekgirlweb Thanks for the feedback! We're launching public pricing in the near future :) Feel free to check out the reviews above - we definitely do have startups using Affinity and I think we could potentially be a good fit for you! If you sign up for a demo on the website, we should be in touch with you very shortly!
Andrew K Kirk
@geekgirlweb I agree. Their Drift bot will tell you that pricing is $125/user/month. I'm sure it's a great product. Considering this pricing put them near top of CRM market (think enterprise tools like Salesforce, Insidesales.com, etc), I did have sticker shock.
orliesaurus
I feel like this should *exactly* be what LinkedIn paid's subscription needs to offer
Shubham Goel
@orliesaurus That would be pretty awesome if they did!!
Anne Gherini
LinkedIn is a great tool, but with modern relationship building you need to know more than "who you know." By analyzing communication streams we can automatically build your team the most robust people graph and implement all this data right into your workflow. This is also why LI uses Affinity :)
Lawrence Lin Murata

We used Affinity at NewtonDrive.ai when we were fundraising. We were using a simple spreadsheet previously and imported it into Affinity. It really help us leverage our investors' networks and manage our ongoing conversations with investors.

Pros:

- spreadsheets on steroids: familiar UX but much more powerful

- smooth transition by importing spreadsheets

- leverage external networks

Cons:

- none so far

Anne Gherini
Thanks Lawerence! We love all the support 🙌🏻
Jackson Dahl
Affinity is an incredibly powerful tool that acts as a "brain" or command center for your team's network. Blows most relationship management and CRM tools I've used out of the water. The team is responsive and iterates quickly, and the product is fantastic. If relationships are fundamental to your team's business, I'd highly recommend it.
Shubham Goel
@jacksondahl Thank you so much for the kind words!!
Mike Smith
I have been interested in this "relationship intelligence" space for a while. I think Linkedin is TREMENDOUSLY lacking in this area which makes for an opportunity. I'm curious how you compare to Relationship Science and Reachable? I always thought the "best path" feature is a billion dollar opportunity if done right
Anne Gherini
@mrmikesmith Hi, Mike. RelSci is a repository of information on influential people. Affinity is analyzing your team's communication streams and automatically turning that into valuable data right in your workflow. So every person and company your team has talked to will be analyzed. We are then able to see who everyone knows and how well, informing you on your best path to an introduction. You can upload a list of prospects or just query one name in Affinity and instantly see our relationship intelligence at work. Affinity also allows you to drill deeper to have a clear understand of the nature of every communication or meeting (this can be customized with our privacy settings). You can also use our product, Alliances, which allows you to connect outside your company to maybe an investor or advisor, and see who they know and how well. Affinity puts you in the driver seat by making relationship data actionable. This is why even LinkedIn is a customer. Happy to chat more if you have any questions :)
Kate Talbot

Looking forward to where Affinity goes!

Pros:

I like the reminders of emails to send to people.

Cons:

Wish more people used it, because it's limiting if you only have a handful that do.

Anne Gherini
Thanks Kate! Based on our current sales trends I guarantee more people will be on and looking to connect in this next year ;) Also, you can Ally with someone even if they don't have an Affinity account. Both Allies will be able to see who each other knows and how well (no contact info given). Your Ally can connect with you for free.
Brandon Bayer
Do you support any email or calendar system?
Shubham Goel
@beedesignllc We support Gmail as well as most versions of Microsoft Exchange (2007 upto Office 365). What email/calendar system are you using?
Shubham Goel
@beedesignllc Oh no :( Do they have IMAP support? We might be able to get you onboard if they do. Drop me a line at shubham at affinity.co and we can go from there!
Kyle Lui
We've been using Affinity for over a year, and it is an amazing CRM platform for deal makers. Where it is exceptional is being able to leverage the full network of an organization. Not only does it save me time, but it gives me much better access to what my team is working on. While Affinity started off working with VCs and other investment firms, it has branched out into other areas such as Sales. Anyone in a customer, prospecting or external facing role can make good use of Affinity.
Shubham Goel
@kylelui thank you so much for the kind words :) glad you're enjoying your experience on affinity!
Anand Sampat

I've been using this for over a year for everything in our startup, from lists of customers and prospective customers to lists of investors, advisors, and the like and I have enjoyed the simplicity. Compared to other CRMs this tool is much broader likely because it leverages a spreadsheet-like interface which makes it much more familiar, yet somehow it feels a lot easier to use. Other CRMs are only optimized for sales, but don't go broader to accommodate other use cases and that made them very unintuitive.

But aside from the basic features, hands down the best features are the network ones like the ability to map your network and see the strength of your connection and leverage it with the Alliances feature. By adding allies who can help you get intros to people in a secure and safe way (without exposing people's entire rolodexes) you can leverage their network and expand yours. I would highly recommend this to anyone running a startup who has to manage a number of different people and organizations in one place, it's been a lifesaver for us.

Pros:

- great UI, w/ a familiar spreadsheet-like interface

- simple concepts - person & organization

- leverage network w/ alliances

- A+ support

Cons:

- hard to visualize a pipeline

Shubham Goel
Thank you for the kind words Anand! I'm so glad you've enjoyed using Affinity so far. Would love to hear more on what you'd like to see in terms of visualizing a pipeline! We have a lot of new stuff coming up this next quarter and hopefully that addresses some of the concerns you have with the platform :)
Harry Stebbings
A product that has truly changed the way I work and made me so much more efficient across the team! Amazing and recommend to all!
Shubham Goel
@harrystebbings I'm really glad you have enjoyed using Affinity :) Please don't hesitate to reach out with any feedback you have for our team!! :D
Anne Gherini
@harrystebbings You are the best, sir. This means so much coming from our team's favorite podcaster ;) 20minVC was like the Bible for the Affinity team when we first sold into Venture.
Joseph Baena
Congrats @shubham_goel1 and team!
Shubham Goel
@joseph_baena thank you so much!
Catherine Lu

We tried out Affinity and loved the product. We were thinking of replacing something built in-house that was very custom to our organization, which has 11 firms working closely together with a unique process. Ultimately, it was too much effort to move, but if we were starting from scratch, we would have gone with Affinity!

Pros:

Great UX for deal management and finding relevant relationships within your network

Cons:

None

Anne Gherini
Thanks Catherine!
Marianne Bulger

After using Affinity for 6 months, I am thrilled with how the product has impacted our workflow in the office.

Pros:

Superior UI as a CRM for internal network management

Cons:

Search functionality still needs work. Some functions are not very intuitive. Gmail integration doesn't always work.

Anne Gherini
Thanks Marianne for your support. Our team is working on perfecting search. We are always open to feedback.
Mar Hershenson
We have been using this product for 2 years now. WOW - amazing!! Full disclosure we are investors but truly, the best CRM for investing firms.
Shubham Goel
@mar_hershenson Thank you for sharing your feedback Mar!
Anne Gherini
@mar_hershenson Thanks Mar 😀 Pear and Affinity make a great team.
Anthony Ghosn

Excellent product

Pros:

Extremely simple plug in that automatically ingests and understands your network

Cons:

I cant think of any, but for posterity, just make sure that you're looking at how your conversational data is displayed to your team.

Shubham Goel
Thank you Anthony for the kind words!
Kevin Mehrabi
Who made your video animation?
Anne Gherini
@kmehrabi Monstro Ventures did our animated video. FirstCut did our logo animation and testimonial videos. Both are awesome!
Cassie Wallender
I've been using Affinity for 2 months now and I love it. Great way for me and my team to keep track of our external communications and stay on top of follow-ups. h/t @koz
Shubham Goel
@koz @cassiewallender thank you for sharing your feedback!! Please let us know if there are any features you'd like us to work on more and we'll add them to our roadmap!
Jae Beom Bae
This seems to be purely B2B... safe to assume there aren't any options for individuals or 1-3 startup teams?