How Alexandra van Viegen Uses wait who? to Never Forget a Connection Again

Alexandra van Viegen attends a lot of events. Web Summit. Local Amsterdam meetups. Investor dinners. Founder roundtables. For someone building a B2B SaaS company, that's just the job.

At each one, she'd meet 20 to 30 people. Connect on LinkedIn on the train home. Feel good about it.

And then, by Monday, she couldn't remember who half of them were.

The problem

"I'd scroll through my connections months later and think 'Wait... who is this person?' I knew we talked about something interesting but couldn't remember what."

It wasn't just the names. It was the context. Alexandra is sharp and her conversations at events tend to go somewhere — a shared problem, a potential introduction, a business angle worth exploring. But without a way to capture that context, it evaporated.

The LinkedIn connection remained. The substance of the conversation didn't.

"I used to think networking was about collecting connections. Now I realize it's about remembering them. wait who? is my memory for my network."

— Alexandra van Viegen, Founder at Onboardly

What she tried before

Alexandra tried the usual approaches. LinkedIn notes after events — but you had to remember to do it in the moment, and you usually didn't. A spreadsheet she kept for about three weeks before it became a burden. The "connection requests with a personal note" approach that nobody consistently does after a long day at a conference.

The problem wasn't discipline. It was that the effort-to-value ratio was too high. The tools available required more work than the habit would sustain.

How she uses wait who? now

Alexandra connected her LinkedIn to wait who? once. After that, every new connection she makes is automatically pulled into the network map, scored by industry.

After Web Summit, she could see immediately: 4 new connections in hospitality, 2 in fintech, 3 in SaaS tools. That instant sorting tells her who to follow up with first — because her company does customer onboarding for B2B SaaS, so those 3 SaaS connections are the ones worth reaching out to within 48 hours.

"The industry breakdown is the thing I didn't know I needed. I used to follow up based on who I remembered best, which wasn't necessarily who was most relevant. Now I follow up based on what actually makes sense."

Finding prospects in her own network

The biggest unlock for Alexandra wasn't post-event follow-up. It was discovering how many potential customers she already knew and had completely forgotten about.

Onboardly's target customer is a B2B SaaS company with a customer success function. When she ran her full network through wait who?, she found 60-plus connections who fit that profile — people she'd met at various events, worked with at previous companies, or connected with online over the years.

"There were people in my own network who were perfect prospects. I'd been doing outbound to companies I didn't know while ignoring people who already had some sense of who I was. That's kind of embarrassing in retrospect."

She used wait who?'s AI drafting to reach out to those connections — not a pitch, just a check-in with a natural opening to mention what she was building. Of the first dozen she contacted, four replied immediately. Two took a call. One became a customer.

The 48-hour discipline

Alexandra is strict about the 48-hour follow-up rule now. The night after any event, or the next morning at the latest, she opens wait who? and sends follow-ups to everyone worth keeping in touch with.

"The AI drafts are a starting point. I always change something — add the specific thing we talked about, adjust the tone. But having something to edit instead of starting from scratch is the difference between sending five follow-ups and sending zero."

In her first two weeks using wait who?, she had 12 meaningful conversations — with people already in her network who she hadn't spoken to in months or years. Three of those turned into sales pipeline.

"The pipeline was already there. I just hadn't looked."

— Alexandra van Viegen

What she'd tell other founders

"Stop treating networking like a separate activity from selling. The people you've met over the years are your warmest pipeline. You just need a way to see them clearly."

"Most founders I know are doing cold outreach while their warm network goes cold. That's backwards. Work the network you have before you try to build a new one."

Alexandra still attends events. She still meets 20 to 30 people at each one. The difference is that she now follows up with all of them — systematically, within 48 hours, with messages that feel personal rather than transactional.

She no longer wonders who that person was. She already sent them a message.