Meetings Weren't the Bottleneck. Onboarding Was.

In my last post I described how I went back to the cold call, with an agent doing the calling. About 1 in 5 people it reached out to ended up in a meeting with me, and in one month 20 businesses signed up to pilot Axia.

Is that enough? No. Because the next queue was already forming.

The queue I didn’t see coming

A pilot isn’t a customer until Axia is running on their business. And getting it running meant me, one business at a time: helping them set up their email, then working through their company’s compliance questions before anything could connect.

Every one of those is a fair conversation. But it’s slow, and it runs at the speed of one person. That’s the same wall I hit on the phone fifteen years ago, just moved further down the line. The agent filled my diary. Onboarding emptied it again.

The other four in five

Then there was the database. If 1 in 5 people became a meeting, the other four didn’t. Some were friendly, some were busy, some just weren’t ready. A lot of real conversations, sitting still.

I didn’t want to chase them. A follow-up nobody asked for is the “just checking in” I built the agent to avoid. So I asked a different question: what does every one of those businesses want, whether or not they need Axia today?

After fifteen years in networking, I know the answer. They want referrals. Every business wants more introductions to the right people.

So Axia now starts with an introduction

Before anyone sets anything up, we do for them what Axia does for me. This isn’t a matching platform. It’s an introduction, with V8 in the middle: Axia does the legwork, and we make the introduction. We find out who they’d like to meet, look for a fit in our network, and ask the other person first. When both sides say yes, they meet.

That changes the order of everything:

• They see it working before they buy it. The outreach and the conversation aren’t a demo. They’re happening for their business, with real people.
• Value comes before setup. Asking for an introduction needs no inbox and no access to their systems, so there’s no compliance review standing between them and the first result.
• The quiet contacts start moving. Someone who wasn’t ready for a meeting about Axia is usually happy to be asked who they’d like to meet.
• The network gets better with every ask. Each person who joins is someone the next person might want to meet.

How an introduction works

The short version:

1. You tell us what you do, who you’d like to meet, and how you’d like to be introduced.
2. We look for a fit, and a person checks every match.
3. The other side is asked first, without your name or details.
4. Only when both of you say yes are names shared, and you write first.

The full details, including how we handle your data, are in How V8 Nexus Introductions Work.

What it costs: three coffees

Asking is free, and your first introduction is free.

After that, an accepted introduction costs £10, which is roughly three coffees, one for each step: £3.50 to set up your ask, £3.50 to find the person, and £3 to ask them first. A declined introduction costs nothing, the person you’re introduced to never pays, and we take no commission on any business that follows.

I think of it as buying Axia a coffee. It keeps her working, and every introduction she makes is worth more to both sides than the cup.

If you work in a regulated profession, check your regulator’s rules on paying for introductions before you accept a paid one.

Why onboarding is smoother now

When someone who has had a good introduction decides they want Axia running on their whole pipeline, the setup conversation is different. They’ve already seen how it talks to people and how it brings the right ones together. Compliance still has its questions, as it should. But now they’re about something the business has already watched work, not a promise from a stranger.

It’s also why we’re moving to onboarding in small steps. Instead of one big setup at the start, we ask only for what a feature needs when someone switches that feature on. Email access, for example, comes up when they want Axia working on their email, and not before.

The introduction isn’t a free sample bolted onto the front. It’s the shortest honest demonstration of what Axia does: find the right person, start the right conversation, and get two businesses talking.

Try it

Tell us who you’d like to meet. Find me introductions.

Alan Law is founder of V8 Global and architect of Axia. Leadership Insight posts examine the structural decisions behind AI-native commercial systems.