You open LinkedIn to check on three prospects and a former colleague you met at a conference. Twenty minutes later, you have read a stranger’s hot take, scrolled past four ads, and still have not seen a single post from the people you meant to look up.

Judi Fox stopped asking the algorithm for help. With Claude, a Google Sheet, and her existing Squarespace site, she built what she calls rooms: small, hand-picked groups of up to 29 people, each one a single tap away from a LinkedIn feed that shows only their posts. On this episode, she opens the app, walks through a room she built in under an hour before an in-person event, and shows the admin page where she adds people to it.

Once you work this way, networking stops depending on what LinkedIn decides to show you. You decide who matters, you show up on their posts consistently, and you arrive at events already knowing names, faces, and job titles.

Judi’s starting point predates AI by years. At 01:30 she says letting an algorithm decide who she spends her time with seems wrong at a basic human level, because no algorithm can know which people she actually wants to hear from. Around 2017 she began keeping track of the people she had not seen in a while, first as browser bookmarks, then in folders, then in a spreadsheet. She is an engineer by training, so columns and sheets were the natural next step, and a spreadsheet costs nothing to run.

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