The Luma Networking Playbook

Every Luma event you RSVP to is a hidden room. The guest list shows 200 names. You can't see who any of them are until you walk in - and by then the evening has already started. Three hours later you leave with a stack of half-remembered conversations, no follow-up worth sending, and the quiet suspicion that the person you actually came to meet was on the other side of the room.

This playbook is the fix. It is the canonical, hour-by-hour FindMyICP routine for turning any Luma event into a deliberate networking surface. Read it once. Use it before your next event. Then make it muscle memory.

Why prep is the entire game

You can't out-talk a 200-person room. You don't have three hours of conversational stamina, you don't know who anyone is on sight, and the people you actually want to meet are wearing the same lanyard as the people you don't. The only way to make an event compound is to decide who you're going to talk to before you arrive.

That decision is the prep. Everything below is how to make it in 30 focused minutes spread across the day of the event.

6 hours before: reveal the guest list

Open FindMyICP on your laptop. Paste the Luma event URL. Within seconds you have every attendee name, title, company, and LinkedIn URL that the Luma page would have shown you piecemeal across 200 hover cards. This is the universe you're working with for the rest of the day.

Two things you're looking for at this stage:

• Density signal. Are there 8 founders, 30 engineers, 12 VCs? That tells you whether your goal is even achievable in this room. If you came to meet investors and there are three, refocus your goal to something the room can actually deliver.
• Surprise signal. Scan for one or two names that make you go "wait, they're coming?" Those are usually the highest-leverage conversations of the night. Star them.

4 hours before: filter to your ICP

Write your event ICP as a single sentence. (If you've never done this, our post on what an ICP looks like at a networking event covers the template.) Something like:

Tonight I'm looking for a senior product manager at a 50-200 person B2B SaaS that has shipped usage-based pricing, because we're six weeks from doing the same thing.

Hand that sentence to FindMyICP's AI ranking. It reads every attendee's enriched profile against your goal and ranks the room. Output is a Top 5 with one-line explanations of why each made the cut.

You're not done. Review the Top 5 manually. The AI is right about 80% of the time. Your job is to catch the 20%:

• Anyone who matches on title but has clearly moved on (read their last LinkedIn post).
• Anyone whose "adjacent" profile is actually more interesting than the surface match.
• Anyone you have a 2nd-degree connection to - those conversations are 5x easier to start.

You should walk away from this step with a Top 5 you're committed to and a backup Top 3.

2 hours before: research and openers

Open each of the Top 5 on LinkedIn. Spend two minutes per person. You're looking for exactly one thing: a non-generic conversation opener.

The opener template that almost always works:

I saw you [specific recent thing they did]. I've been thinking about [the same problem] because [your context]. Would love your take.

Examples:

• I saw you shipped a usage-based pricing migration in Q1. We're six weeks from doing the same thing at a slightly smaller scale. Would love your take on what you wish you'd known going in.
• I saw you led the Series A at Replicate. We're raising in a similar shape (infra, dev tooling, $5M target). Curious how you thought about partner-vs-portfolio fit.

Bad openers (skip these):

• So, what do you do? (You already know. This is filler.)
• I love what you're building. (Empty. They hear it 30 times a night.)
• Can I pick your brain? (Career-killer. Means nothing, takes their time, signals you haven't prepped.)

Write the opener for each of your 5 in a doc or your phone notes. Keep it short. You will not remember it on the spot otherwise.

30 minutes before: pre-game

Three things only:

1. Re-read your Top 5 and openers. One pass. Don't add. Don't edit.
2. Pre-write your follow-up template. One sentence in your drafts. After the event you'll be tired - this is the line of code that makes follow-ups actually happen.
3. Eat something. Not glamorous. The biggest reason people give up on networking events at hour 2 is blood sugar, not the room.

At the event: work the Top 5, not the room

You came for five conversations. Not fifteen. Not the whole room.

The walk-up move:

1. Find your first Top-5 within 20 minutes of arriving. Don't let them slip into a closed group first.
2. Walk over. Wait for a natural pause. Lead with your prepared opener.
3. Aim for a 12-minute conversation. Long enough to be real, short enough that you don't monopolize.
4. Trade contact info (LinkedIn is fine - business cards are for politicians). Ask: "Mind if I send you a note tomorrow about [specific thing]?"
5. Move on. Find #2.

You'll talk to people who weren't on your list too - that's good. The list isn't a cage. It's a baseline so the random encounters are upside instead of substitute.

Within 24 hours: send the follow-up

The five conversations are worth zero if they don't get a follow-up. The template you pre-wrote is for this moment.

Hey [name], great chatting last night at [event]. [One specific thing they said you found useful.] Sending the [article / intro / link] I mentioned. Open to [concrete next step]?

That's it. One message. Sent within 24 hours. Anything longer and they don't remember the conversation. Anything shorter and it feels transactional.

Common failure modes

• Skipping the 6-hour reveal. If you don't see the list, you don't have an event. You have a lottery ticket.
• Picking a Top 10. The point of the playbook is concentration. Top 5 forces tradeoffs. Top 10 is the same as no list.
• Skipping openers. Walking up cold to a senior person without a specific reason burns the conversation in the first 20 seconds.
• No follow-up. 80% of the value of a networking event is generated by the follow-up. People who skip it are paying full price for 20% of the value.
• Going to too many events. Two prepared events a month beats six unprepared ones. Stop saying yes to every Luma invite. Pick the ones where your ICP is dense.

Make it a habit

The first time you run this playbook it'll feel slow. The third time it'll feel obvious. By the tenth event you'll have a follow-up loop that compounds month over month - and the Luma events that everyone else treats as social outings become the most leveraged channel you have.

That's the entire FindMyICP thesis. The pre-event hour is where the night gets decided. We just give you the surface to do it on.