Founders & startup CEOs

See how you'd use Dhaga

Here's a real slice of it. Meet Priya Raghunathan, a partner at Northwind Ventures — the lead investor you're courting for your seed round, sitting in a demo founder's account exactly as she would in yours.

It remembers what you'd forget. Priya's profile holds the one fact the whole raise turns on: she'll take the round to her partnership once you prove $10k+ MRR — and you just crossed $12k on expansion from Voltra plus two new design partners. The last thing she told you was direct: "Follow up when you hit $10k MRR and I'll take it to the partnership." You last reached out 24 days ago, which is past the 15-day cadence you set for her. Dhaga also remembers she was a former operator who loves a founder-led sales story, that she wants a customer reference call before committing, that Malik Johnson made the intro, and that her co-investor Marcus Feld would co-lead if she leads — every fact linked back to the note it came from.

Every morning, it tells you what you owe people. The daily view surfaces the people who've gone past their cadence — Priya among them — alongside the open follow-ups you owe, each tied to a person: send Priya the updated $12k MRR metrics (today), book the partner meeting for next week, get Jordan Blake a written offer before his competing deadline. Nothing lives in your head; it lives against the person it belongs to.

One network doing five jobs, visible. Focus the graph on Priya and you see the whole web: Marcus Feld as her co-investor, Malik Johnson as the advisor who introduced you, and Camille Dubois — a design-partner customer — as the reference she asked for, all as labeled edges. The events you met her at hang off the same graph: the Seed Roadshow, the Launchpad Demo Day, the launch party.

Every founder eventually notices the same thing: the company is a machine for turning relationships into outcomes, and you are the single point of failure. The angel who'd write a check, the staff engineer who might leave BigCo for you, the design partner whose feedback shapes the roadmap, the reporter who covers your space — they're all one Rolodex, and that Rolodex is a tired human brain being interrupted every fifteen minutes.

Dhaga isn't a pipeline tool or a sales CRM bolted onto your fundraise. It does the part that's genuinely hard: remembering people, and remembering why they matter, across five very different jobs your network is doing at the same time.

Run the fundraise without losing the thread

A raise is a few dozen parallel conversations, each at a different stage, each with its own promised follow-up. "Circle back when you hit $10k MRR." "Send me the deck once the design partner signs." "I'm in if you find a lead." Miss one of those and you don't get a rejection — you get silence, which is worse.

Capture each investor conversation the moment it ends, before the next one starts:

• Talk instead of type. Walk out of the meeting and leave a voice note — "met Priya at Foundry, likes the wedge, wants to see the retention curve, said come back when we're at $10k MRR" — and Dhaga turns spoken words into structured facts attached to that contact.
• Scan the card or badge from a demo day or a conference so you're not retyping names at a stoplight.
• Quick-add from the web or the browser extension when a warm intro lands in your inbox.

Then ask, in plain English:

• "Which investors said follow up after we hit $10k MRR?"
• "Who's waiting on the updated deck?"
• "Who passed, and what reason did they give?"

The answers come only from your own notes — and when Dhaga doesn't know something, it says so instead of inventing it. Before the next call, it can pull a short brief on that investor from your own history, so you walk in remembering exactly where you left off.

Remember who intro'd whom

The intro graph is the fundraise. A warm intro from the right person is worth ten cold emails, and forgetting who connected you to whom is how you fail to close the loop — no thank-you, no update to the source, no second favour asked.

Because your notes become a private, queryable graph of people and the relationships between them, "who intro'd me to whom" is something you can actually recover. Ask "who introduced me to Priya?" or "which of my angels have sent me the most intros?" and you get the connection, with the context attached. When a raise closes, you know exactly who to thank — and who to send the first update to next time.

Recruit your first hires from your own network

Your best early hires are almost never on a job board. They're people you met years ago and filed away with a mental note: "would be incredible if I ever started something." The problem is that mental note doesn't survive eighteen months of chaos.

Dhaga keeps the note for you. When you capture a conversation, capture the signal too — "sharp infra person, unhappy at their current gig, said ping me if you ever raise." Later, ask:

• "Who did I meet who might be open to an early engineering role?"
• "Which designers has anyone offered to introduce me to?"
• "Who mentioned they wanted to leave their current company?"

It turns a vague sense that "I know someone for this" into an actual list, drawn from things you were genuinely told.

Keep advisors and angels warm

Advisors and angels compound only if you use them, and using them means keeping them in the loop — which is the first thing that falls off when you're heads-down shipping. The relationship decays in silence, and by the time you need the favour it feels cold to ask.

Dhaga treats staying in touch as something you can be deliberate about instead of guilty about:

The reminders are opt-in and bounded — Dhaga surfaces the people and promises you asked it to watch. It doesn't broadcast your cap table or quietly surveil anyone. You choose what to keep track of.

Never forget which customer asked for what

Early customers are half revenue, half product team. One asked for SSO, another for a CSV export, a third said they'd expand if you shipped an audit log. Lose track of who asked for what and you either build the wrong thing or, worse, ship the right thing and forget to tell the person who requested it.

Capture the ask against the customer, then let recall do the sorting: "who asked for SSO?", "which design partners wanted the audit log?", "what did the last three churned accounts complain about?" Every fact keeps a receipt — a link back to the exact note it came from — so when you tell a customer "you asked for this in March, it's live," you can trust the March.

One brain, twenty context-switches, nothing dropped

The real founder condition isn't any single one of these jobs — it's all five at once, interleaved, on a day you switched contexts twenty times. Investor call, then a candidate, then a customer escalation, then a reporter, then back to the deck. Human memory was not built for that, and pretending otherwise is how threads get dropped.

Dhaga is the layer that survives the context-switching. Capture takes seconds and happens in the moment — voice between meetings, a card at an event, a quick-add from your desk — so the detail is still fresh instead of a note you'll write "later" and never do. Recall is one plain-English question away. And the whole thing is one graph, not five tools, so the investor who's also an advisor who also intro'd you to a customer is a single person, remembered whole.

Your network is your asset — and it stays yours

The map of who you know and why they matter is one of the most valuable things a founder owns. Dhaga is built on that principle: it's privacy-first and self-hostable, you can bring your own API key, and you can export all of your data at any time. It doesn't sell your contacts, mine them, or make them anyone else's. The proactive features are opt-in and bounded — a tool that works for you, not a service pointed at the people you're trying to build with.

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We built Dhaga as a small startup ourselves, running our own raise and our own network out of it — so this is the tool we needed, not one we imagined. Bring in your contacts, capture the next investor call by voice, and see what it feels like to stop being the single point of failure. If you like knowing how the thing you rely on actually works, the engineering blog goes deep on the architecture and the privacy model.

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