In short. Pick three people you want to meet and one specific reason for each, before you go. Three prepared conversations beat twenty introductions, and the preparation takes about twenty minutes a fortnight before the event.
Most advice about networking events is about what to do in the room: how to open, how to leave a conversation, what to do with your hands. It is the wrong place to intervene. By the time you are in the room, the evening is largely decided.
What decides it is whether you arrived knowing who you were there to meet.
A fortnight before: pick three, and know why
Not twenty. Three.
Look at who is going and choose three people you would genuinely like to talk to, then write one sentence per person about why. The sentence is the whole exercise, and it has to be specific enough to be useful:
- Bad: “interesting business, would like to connect.”
- Good: “they moved from agency to in-house last year and I am considering the same thing.”
If you cannot write the sentence, they are not one of your three. That is a useful result, not a failure.
Why three is the right number
Because you can actually have three real conversations in two hours, and you cannot have twenty. The person who tries to meet everybody has twenty exchanges of names and remembers none of them, which is the experience that makes people conclude networking does not work for them.
It also changes what you say. “I wanted to ask you about moving in-house” is a different opening from “so what do you do”, and it is a better one because it tells the other person why they should care that you came over.
This is the reason we cap outreach on The Gantry rather than leaving it open. Free accounts get 2 nudges per event; Premium Members get 10. Scarcity does the work: if you only have a couple, you spend them on people you actually want to meet, and receiving one means something.
On the day: arrive early, leave the phone alone
Early is underrated. The first twenty minutes of any event is the only period where nobody is yet in a conversation, so it is the easiest time to start one. Arriving fashionably late means walking into a room of closed circles.
And having prepared, do not spend the evening looking at your phone to check who someone is. That is what the fortnight was for.
The week after: this is where it is won or lost
The follow-up is the part everyone knows about and almost nobody does, because by the time you sit down to it you have lost the detail that would make the message worth sending.
Two rules:
Reference the actual conversation. “Good to meet you at the breakfast” is indistinguishable from the other four someone got that week. “You mentioned you were rebuilding your onboarding, this is the thing I said I would send” is not.
Do it inside a week. After that you are a stranger with a favour to ask. Our post-event window is 7 days for exactly this reason: long enough to follow up properly, short enough that it stays a follow-up.
What to do if the room turns out to be wrong
Sometimes you get there and it is not your crowd. The honest answer is to leave early and not go back, and to treat the evening as cheap information rather than a waste.
The thing worth checking beforehand is the mix: a room sold as founders and funders that is mostly service providers selling to founders is a common and avoidable disappointment. Being able to see who is actually going, rather than who was invited, is the thing that prevents it. On the free tier you see 30% of the people in a Room you join, which is enough to tell whether the mix is what the invitation claimed.