The Results
In two hours, we got:
50 new prospects ("seeds" as we called them)
Invites to present in different teams
Referrals from people who hadn't even tried the tool — they just told a colleague about it
The tool went from invisible to "wait, what's this everyone's talking about?"
Making It Easy to Spread
But here's the thing — finding connectors isn't enough. You need to give them the tools to actually spread the word.
So we built the infrastructure:
A Teams channel for ongoing communication and updates
A Confluence wiki with documentation and FAQs, so people could easily learn more
An official portal announcement for legitimacy
The Connection I Didn't Know I Was Making
Later that night, I was explaining the whole experiment to my husband. The posters, the QR codes, how adoption spread through specific people rather than broadcasts.
He stopped me: *"You basically did what Veritasium explains in that video — you built shortcuts in a small-world network."*
I had no idea what he meant. So he showed me.
The concept: in any large network (like a company), most people are clustered in small groups. But a few specific people bridge these clusters — the person in three Slack channels, the engineer who pair-programs across teams, the one everyone asks for tool recommendations.
These are the connectors. Reach them, and you don't need to reach everyone else.