Keeping in touch with 50 champions across our orbit. That's a ball I used to drop constantly.

A ball I historically dropped

I wear a large number of hats, and one thing I've historically let slide is keeping in touch with the people who matter most to our business — champions at customer companies, open source contributors, power users, meetup organizers, and other folks in our orbit. It's good to periodically check in and ask how you can be helpful. Everybody knows this. But when you've got competing priorities pulling you in ten directions, the check-in email is the first thing that gets deprioritized.

The contacts go cold. The opportunities dry up. You only reach out when you need something, which feels transactional. And you know you should be doing better.

What changed

TextForge in combination with our CRM and Claude Code lets me stay on top of the timing for all of it. The system tracks who might be good to check in with and when, drafts a check-in that references the actual relationship — not a generic "hope you're doing well" — and queues it for my review.

When someone replies and gives me a set of things they need my help with, I jump in and just go do that. That's not something you delegate to a computer. But the actual tracking of key relationships and who needs a check-in is something TextForge has helped me automate to a great degree.

This helps me do things like source speakers for our Akka.NET community standups on YouTube and stay on top of conference travel — the kind of community coordination that only works if you're consistently in touch with people.

How it works