Two ways to build your map

Which one depends on what you want from it.

Your map is made of the people you tell Kith about. There are two ways to fill it, and they lead to different maps: one gives you quick insights fast, the other a slow build-up of deeper meaning. Neither is wrong, and you can switch.

All at once, then hide

Bring everyone in at one go — your LinkedIn connections, the people in your phone — and ask Kith to put them all on the map. Then take off the ones you don't want there: tap a person and choose Hide, or just tell Kith. Hiding only takes someone off the map; Kith still knows them and can still answer questions about them.

1. Get your LinkedIn data and drop the file into Kith. It reads everyone in it without putting anyone on the map yet.
2. Ask for them in plain words: "Add all of them", or a slice — "Add everyone I connected with this year", "Add everyone at Stripe".
3. Look at the map and hide what doesn't belong. The old employer's whole floor, the recruiters, the people you can no longer place.

You have a map by the end of the afternoon, and it shows things you could not see in a list: where your people cluster, which companies you are strong in, who knows whom. It knows that you know these people, and for most of them not much more than where they work.

One by one, as you meet people

Tell Kith about each person as you meet them, in person or online. One sentence is enough, and the more of how you know them it carries, the more the map can do with it:

• "Met Priya at the SEA Hack demo night. She runs growth at Stripe and races sailboats."
• "Theo is Marcus's cofounder, we had coffee at Kowloon Roastery. He wants intros to hardware people."
• "Nadia from Stanford, the one who offered to read my deck."

This is slower — a map of a few dozen people after a month, not a few thousand after an afternoon. But every dot on it means something. Kith knows how you met, what they care about, what they offered, and who introduced whom, so when you ask who could open a door it has a reason to pick them.

Which one?

If you want to see the shape of your network now, go all at once. If you want the map to carry what you actually know about each person, go one by one. Many people do both: import for the skeleton, hide the noise, then add the meaning to the people who matter as they come up — and Kith fills in company and role for those from the import without asking.