What do you do when nobody you know knows the person you need to meet?

Scott Cundill · 2026-09-21 · Johannesburg

You ask somebody who does know them, openly, with everyone copied in, and you accept that they can say no. It sounds obvious. It is also the one situation almost every piece of advice on warm introductions skips, because that advice starts by assuming you already share a contact.

In Johannesburg you often do not. The person who could change your quarter sits two buildings away in Sandton and has never heard of you. Nobody in your phone has their number. Now what?

Why does the usual advice not help here?

Search for how to get a warm introduction and you will find a great deal written about etiquette. Keep the ask short. Write a forwardable email. Say why it is worth their time. All of it sound, and all of it written on the assumption that a mutual connection exists and only needs asking nicely.

When there is no mutual, that advice has nothing to say, and people fall back on the thing they were trying to avoid. The cold message. The LinkedIn request with a paragraph attached. The one that gets read in the lift and deleted before the doors open.

Are there really only three ways to get introduced?

Yes, and it helps to keep them separate, because each one has a different person doing the asking.

The first is making an introduction. You know two people, you think they should meet, you introduce them. This is the generous one, and in a network that measures trust it is what builds your standing.

The second is requesting an introduction. You want to meet someone, and you ask a person you both know to make the introduction. This is the one all the etiquette articles are about.

The third is the one this article is about. Nobody you know knows them. So instead of a mutual, you ask a member who does know them, even though that member does not know you.

How do you find out whether you share anybody at all?

You look before you ask. On My Most Trusted this is called the Golden Handshake, and it is a plain panel on a person's card. It either tells you who you both know, by name, or it tells you that nobody you know knows them yet.

That second sentence is the useful one. It saves you from guessing, and it saves you from bothering a friend with a request they cannot fulfil. It also stops you from treating "we could not look" as though it meant "there is no path", which are very different things.

How do you ask a stranger for an introduction without being a nuisance?

By being transparent about exactly what you are asking for, before anything is sent.

On the platform, this path is called the Advocate road, and it only opens when you have found somebody through a community directory and share no mutual connections with them at all. It is a last resort by design. When you take it, three things happen, in this order.

First, you are shown a short ethics agreement, five promises, every single time. Not once at sign up and then forgotten. Every time.

Second, you write why you want to meet this person. Not what you want to sell them. Why a meeting makes sense.

Third, you are shown a preview of exactly what will be sent, word for word, before anything goes anywhere.

Then the platform sends one real email, in your name, with everybody copied in. There is no accept button, no landing page and no token to click. Nobody has to say yes first. The email, with everyone copied in, is the introduction itself.

What stops the people who know everyone from being flooded?

A limit, and it sits in the right place.

Asks on the Advocate road are throttled, both for the person sending them and for the person receiving them. The product's own reasoning is worth quoting, because it gets the priority right: the limit that protects a person is the one on receiving.

That matters in a city like this one. The best connected people are exactly the ones everybody wants a favour from. A network that does not protect them burns them out and loses them, and then the introductions stop.

How do you know whether an introduction actually happened?

This is the question nobody asks, and it is where most referral tracking quietly lies to you.

A system sends an introduction, gets a success response back, and marks it done. But a success response only means a message was accepted by a server. It does not mean the introduction was recorded, or reached the right people, or that anyone met.

The platform treats that gap seriously. After an introduction is sent, it reads the member's referral history back and checks that the record exists with both people's identities matching. Matching one of them is not enough, because matching one can confirm the wrong introduction entirely.

If it cannot confirm, the introduction is marked as sent but unconfirmed. It is never marked as failed, and it is never retried automatically. The reasoning, again from the product itself, is hard to argue with: a duplicate introduction is worse than an uncertain one. Two identical emails landing in someone's inbox make you look careless. An uncertain one simply means you check.

What should you do after the introduction goes out?

Follow up, on purpose, and without pestering.

The platform keeps a referral history with every introduction given, received and pending, and gives you a way to follow up, to chase gently, and to say thanks. An introduction someone makes for you and never hears about again is an introduction they will think twice about making next time. The thank you is not politeness. It is how you get the second one.

So what should you actually do this week?

Check before you ask. Find out whether you share anybody with the person you want to meet, by name.

If you do, ask that person, briefly, and give them something they can forward without editing.

If you do not, ask someone who knows them, openly, with the reason stated plainly and everyone able to see exactly what was sent. Accept a no without argument.

And whichever route you take, confirm it happened, and say thank you when it does.

Why does Johannesburg need this more than most places?

Because this city runs on relationships, and it has very little patience for people who waste its time.

The Johannesburg Introductions Collective lists its leading introducers by name. Every one of them holds a Trusted Advocate or Super Connector rank, which only comes from introductions actually given, over and over. If you need a door opened here, they are a better start than another cold message.