I am Mayank, an HEC Paris MiM alumnus working in marketing in Paris. There is one framework I use for making friends, finding jobs, and basically anything that goes from a wide pool to a narrow outcome. I call it the funnel theory. It is what helped me build a social life from scratch in Los Angeles, land my internship at MAC Cosmetics in Paris, and get my current job through a cold email. Once you see it, you can apply it everywhere.
The marketing funnel, briefly
In marketing there is a concept called a funnel. Take a company selling watches online. 100,000 people visit. 10,000 click a watch. 500 add to cart. 200 actually pay. The funnel is wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. People who make it to the bottom are called conversions.
The goal is to increase conversions. Three broad ways to do that.
Increase your leads. Get more people in at the top. Go from 100,000 visits to a million. In theory the 200 becomes 2,000. The most obvious lever and usually the most expensive.
Improve your funnel. Make it easier and more attractive to move through it. Better website, better offers, better experience. More permanent because you are doing more with the people already there.
Improve your targeting. Make sure the people coming in are the right kind in the first place. If you sell men’s watches and your 100,000 visitors do not want men’s watches, no amount of new visitors will fix it. Bad targeting is the actual problem.
Most companies overuse the first lever and underuse the third. Same is true in life.
Applying it to making friends
When I moved to Los Angeles for my gap year internship, I landed with two suitcases, an offer letter, and ten days at a hostel. I knew nobody. Here is how I used the funnel.
Increasing leads. I said yes to almost everything. Meetups, free classes, random invites. I reached out to every loose contact in the city. I went to bars and restaurants alone. The point was to maximize encounters at the top of the funnel, because without leads, nothing else matters.
Improving the funnel. Conversation skills, confidence, listening, asking the right next question. Mine were not built overnight. They came from years of practice. Two books that genuinely helped: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and Models by Mark Manson. Carnegie’s main idea, simplified: show genuine interest in other people, ask about them, people love talking about themselves and they love people who give them the chance. Read the book for the full version. Short and worth it.
Improving targeting. I knew what kind of person I am. Creative, outgoing, into language and conversation. I went to a language exchange meetup, where I met someone who pulled me into improv class, where I met more people. I went to a French speakers’ meetup and met two guys who became coffee-and-French regulars. I went to a socializing meetup in Santa Monica and met Andrew, who I caught up with for a beer every other week.
I also went to a beach volleyball meetup and an ultimate frisbee tournament. Did not meet anyone interesting. Because I am not sporty and the room was full of sporty people. Wrong targeting.
Even with good targeting, I also met friends in random places. Cristine in the back of an Uber Pool, still a close friend years later. Christian at a bus stop, turned out to be a senior engineer at Amazon. Joel, my flatmate, became a real friend and introduced me to his circle. The randomness is real. The funnel work is what lets you convert it.
For the day-to-day version of keeping relationships alive, see my networking for opportunities post.
Applying it to job hunting
Same three levers.
Increasing leads. Apply to more jobs. Send more cold emails. Reach out to more recruiters. Volume matters, especially early.
Improving your funnel. Better CV, interview skills, narrative, portfolio. Every percentage point of improvement compounds across every application.
Improving targeting. Stop applying to jobs that are not in your range. If you are a marketer, do not apply to engineering jobs. If you are early career, do not waste cycles on roles requiring ten years of experience. The wrong applications crowd out the right ones.
This is the framework I used to land my current job. I cold-emailed the CEO because the targeting was right (their stage, their need, my profile). The funnel was good (I had a YouTube channel as visible work). The lead was specific (one well-written cold email, not 50 generic ones). For the longer version, see my marketing career path post.
Applying it to professional networking
Increasing leads. Send more LinkedIn messages, emails, thoughtful comments on posts.
Improving the funnel. Work on yourself. Your communication, conversation skills, ability to understand what the other person cares about.
Improving targeting. Reach out to people statistically likely to reply. Alumni of your school. People who worked at companies you did. People whose work you can credibly comment on. The right warmth at the first message changes everything.
This connects directly to 9 career tips where I cover the No Hello rule and over-communication.
Things to remember
This is a framework. It does not apply 1:1 in every situation. You have to be honest about the cost of each lever. Cost can be money, time, or energy.
Sometimes leads are cheap. At a party, you can talk to 30 people in an evening. On LinkedIn with message caps, leads are expensive. Sometimes targeting is the only move that matters. Sometimes you just need to ship 100 more cold emails. Reading your situation correctly is the skill.
In general, pull all three levers at once. How you weight them depends on what you are trying to do.
For the long-form story version of using this approach to settle into a new country, feeling at home abroad is the right companion read.