Why I built KnowWho

Most of our work comes from people. Networking events, membership clubs, conferences, meetups and introductions. A typical evening in London ends with a couple of drinks, and I get home after midnight. Far too tired to sit down and type everything into a CRM.

So the business cards go in a pile on the desk, and I go to bed. The next morning the business is already running: emails to answer, decisions to make, work to do. By the time I can sit down, I am tired again, and the pile is still there. Slowly the context goes. Who was who. What we talked about. Then comes the dread of opening the CRM and typing it all in, days late.

That was the annoyance. Entering everything by hand, configuring fields, keeping it all tidy. But there was a bigger problem.

A CRM gives you a flat list of contacts. My work runs on a network, and a list cannot hold one.

I need to know where I met someone, and who else was in the room. Which club, conference or meetup we share. Who introduced me to whom, because people introduce me to other people all the time, and I want to know who my best introducers are.

That was the biggest thing for me. Not a better contact record, but the relationships between people.

I had wanted to build an AI CRM for a while. At first it was going to be a separate app with its own chat. Then AI assistants learned to connect to other tools, and the separate app was no longer needed.

So I built KnowWho for us, at Khiliad. We used it internally for over half a year, and we loved it, so we decided to release it.

An AI CRM is not a new idea. What is different here is the focus: the network and the relationships, not the contact on its own. Say what happened after a meeting, and months later say a name and it all comes back, including who you met them with and who introduced you.

I have spent about thirty years building software, as a developer and then as a CTO. I use KnowWho every day.