The Spurious Connection Play
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Thom's most-repeated operating rule is to email the person you have the thinnest legitimate reason to contact, and to do it relentlessly. He cold-emailed his advertising agency's boss — whom he'd never met — because he'd heard she was leaving to start a bakery and he was starting 'another bread product based business'. She invited him for a beer; her husband turned out to be the Financial Times food critic, who reframed their van-collection trip as a pilgrimage worth building the brand on. The mechanism is that a weak pretext plus a low ask (a coffee, a beer) is enough, because people generally want to help, want to tell their story, and want to meet like-minded people. The second half of the rule is preservation: never step on anyone, because a squashed relationship is an opportunity that never comes back.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Find the thinnest legitimate link
Look for any real overlap — same building, same industry adjacency, same journey. Thom's link was 'you're leaving to start a bakery, I'm leaving to start a pizza company', which was enough despite them never having met.
Pro tip Name the overlap in the first line. It converts a cold email into a warm-ish one.
- 2
Make the ask tiny
Ask for a beer or a coffee, not advice, money, or an introduction. A low-cost yes gets accepted; Thom's ask was literally 'we should go and have a beer'.
Watch out Asking for the big thing up front converts a would-be ally into a polite decline.
- 3
Show up with the story, not the pitch
In the meeting, share what you're actually doing and why you're excited. Tim Hayward became their first genuine supporter because they turned up with a plan to go to Italy and learn about pizza, not with a funding deck.
Pro tip Enthusiastic people fund and champion enthusiastic people. Let the idea be interesting rather than polished.
- 4
Do the grim gigs and collect the cards
Thom's other source of connections was showing up to depressing events — making pizza in a Hammersmith car park in the rain on a Tuesday — and chatting to whoever was there. Someone gives you a card; that's the asset.
Watch out The event itself will often lose money or feel pointless. The connection is the return, and it lands late.
- 5
Follow up a year later
Email the card person much later with a low-friction offer — 'great to meet you, come and have a pizza sometime'. Thom says these follow-ups repeatedly surfaced landlords, sites and mates-of-mates who moved the business.
Pro tip Keep the re-contact specific and generous rather than transactional.
- 6
Never squash anyone
Refuse the step-on-throats model of business. Thom's reasoning is mechanical, not moral posturing: people you thought were irrelevant reappear in your life constantly, and every burned relationship is a permanently closed door.
Watch out The person you dismiss when you're small may turn up on your doorstep years later, as Thom's Swingers contact literally did.
In the wild
Thom emailed a senior person at his own advertising agency he had never met, having heard she was leaving to start a bakery in Cambridge, suggesting a beer on the grounds that he was starting a bread-adjacent business too. She invited him to her house. Her husband was Tim Hayward, the Financial Times food critic, who was the first person to be genuinely enthusiastic about their plan and told them the pilgrimage to Italy was the thing to build the brand around — 'pizza is the most saturated market in the world, you've got to find a reason why you're different'. That reframing led to a two-page pitch, four production companies, and a Food Network TV show.
→ The show opened doors in Naples they could never have got on their own and gave the young business a sense of momentum.
Thom's grandmother had once decorated a house in Cheshire for John Timpson. On that basis alone she told him to send an email. Timpson agreed to host Thom and his brother for a day, where they learned his 'upside down management' model — the most important person in the business is the one serving the customer, every shop manager can spend £500 to fix a complaint without approval, and store targets pay out a third of everything above the line.
→ A day of direct mentorship from a retail operator, obtained from a decades-old family connection with no business relevance.
Common mistakes
Waiting for a real introduction
The whole point is that the connection is spurious. Thom's view is that any reason to reach out is a good enough reason, and holding out for a warm intro means most of these opportunities never get created at all.
Treating one meeting as the whole return
Most of these contacts pay off a year or more later, via someone the person knows. If you judge each coffee by what it produced that week, you'll stop doing them just before the compounding starts.
Playing the aggressive TV version of business
Thom is scathing about the step-on-throats model. Every relationship you damage removes a future option, and in a small industry where everyone knows everyone, the damage is durable.
From the transcript
“send the email to the person with the spurious connection”
“any reason to like reach out to people, just do it because people always want to help”
“that person whose throat you stepped on is like an opportunity that you've squashed that will never ever come back to be an opportunity”
From the episode
“I Quit My Job And Built A $10M Pizza Business” - Thom Elliot Founder of Pizza Pilgrims
Thom Elliot