One of the things founders consistently tell us when they start using Vinly is that the warmth score makes the invisible visible. They knew, in a vague way, that some of their relationships were healthy and others had been neglected. The score turns that vague sense into a number they can actually act on. This post explains what goes into that number, how it moves over time, and what to do when you see it change.
Why a Score at All
The case for quantifying relationship health is not about reducing relationships to a metric. It is about removing the cognitive load of trying to hold the warmth state of 50, 100, or 200 contacts in memory. Human memory is not built for this kind of distributed tracking. We remember recent interactions well and distant ones poorly. We overweight the people we have spoken to lately and underweight the ones who have drifted but still matter.
A warmth score externalizes that tracking. Instead of asking yourself to remember when you last spoke with each person on your list, you get a concrete signal: this relationship is healthy, this one is slipping, this one needs attention now. That is not a replacement for judgment. It is a foundation for it.
What Goes Into the Score
The warmth score in Vinly is built from several inputs, weighted differently depending on the contact's tier and the nature of your relationship history with them.
Recency
The most important factor is how long it has been since your last meaningful interaction. Not every interaction counts equally. A quick LinkedIn like does not carry the same weight as a substantive email exchange or a phone call. Vinly tracks meaningful contact separately from passive engagement, and the recency clock runs from the last thing that actually mattered.
Frequency and Pattern
Beyond the most recent interaction, the score accounts for the pattern of contact over time. A relationship where you have had regular meaningful exchanges over the past year looks different from one where you had a burst of contact a year ago and nothing since. Both might show the same time since last contact, but they have different warmth profiles. The relationship with a healthy pattern is more resilient to a gap than one where a single interaction is the whole history.
Depth of Interaction
Not all communication is equal. A brief back-and-forth email where you share a link and they respond with a thanks is not the same as a call where you work through a problem together. Vinly uses signals from your interaction history to estimate depth, and deeper interactions earn more warmth than surface-level ones.
Context and Notes
The manual context you add over time also influences the score. A note that says this person is currently going through a major transition, or that you are in an active conversation about a potential collaboration, adjusts the baseline. The score is designed to reflect not just the raw interaction data but the relational context you bring to it.
How Scores Change Over Time
Warmth scores decay passively and recover with interaction. A contact who scores 85 today will score lower in three months with no contact, and lower still in six months. The rate of decay is faster for relationships with thinner foundations and slower for deep, long-standing relationships.
The score also responds to what happens in the other person's world. A major professional change, like a new role or a company announcement, temporarily adjusts the score to flag that a natural outreach opportunity exists. The underlying warmth has not changed, but the system is surfacing the fact that the moment is particularly good for a check-in.
Recovery is typically faster than decay. A single genuine interaction, a real email exchange or a call, can move a score significantly. This mirrors how relationships actually work: a good conversation can restore warmth that took months to fade.
What to Do When You See a Score Drop
A score dropping is not an emergency. It is an early warning. The right response to a declining score depends on where it is and how fast it is moving.
A score that has dropped from a strong baseline but is still above the threshold for natural outreach is a prompt to schedule a touch in the next week or two. Find a natural hook, write a specific note, and the score should recover easily. A score that has been declining for a few months and is now in the lower ranges is a signal to prioritize this contact and put a concrete note in your outreach plan rather than leaving it as a background intention.
A score that has dropped to very low levels, and for a contact who genuinely matters to your network, is worth a more deliberate re-engage strategy rather than a casual check-in. The message needs to acknowledge the gap, come with something genuine to offer, and feel like a real reconnect rather than a routine touch.
The Score Is a Tool, Not a Verdict
A few things worth being clear about. A low warmth score is not a statement about the quality of the relationship or whether the other person still thinks well of you. It is a statement about the recency and frequency of your interactions. A dormant relationship with a genuinely good foundation might score low but revive quickly with a single good conversation. The score tells you where the maintenance stands, not where the relationship stands.
Similarly, a high score is not a guarantee that everything is fine. A relationship where you have been exchanging pleasantries regularly but have not had any real conversation in a year might score well by the numbers but be more fragile than it looks. The score is one input into your judgment about your network, not a replacement for that judgment.
Use it to prioritize. Use it to catch the relationships that are slipping before they slip too far. But keep your own read on the people in your network alongside the number. The combination of the signal and the human context is what actually guides good relationship maintenance.