Success Of Dating Apps
So investing in security is essential if you want to make a successful dating app. According to research by IBM Security, more than 60 percent of leading online dating apps are at medium or high risk of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities include phishing, fraudulent. Finding the Right App. It’s much harder to have success with online dating apps if you are using the wrong dating app for you. You’ll need to figure out what type of person and relationship you are looking for. Some apps are better known for finding hook ups than true love.
Shop Entire Look (Outfit details @ bottom of post)
Dating in 2018. What a confusing thing to do. In a world full of options, technology, and hours of mindless scrolling a day, is there even a real strategy to having success at dating?
To give you a little background on my experience dating, I found myself single back in 2015 when dating apps were ALL the rage, ya’ll. At first, I was super skeptical about getting on one because I’m from the city I live in (Dallas) and have several friend groups full of opportunities to meet other people!!
I was out every weekend, meeting new people, but started to get tired of the same douchey Dallas guys who were immature and unable to commit.
Fast forward to today, I’m in a happy relationship and all thanks to this little app called Hinge. Hinge was the game changer for me. Without it, I would probably have never met John who truly is such an amazing guy.
Enough about me.. so before diving in please do know that I understand that not everyone is cut out for online dating. If you strongly believe in the philosophy that things will happen when they’re supposed to, then this post probably isn’t for you.
I believe that with timing – everything happens the way it supposed to; but on the same token, I know that if I want to achieve something, I’m going to have to try at it and give it my all.
I get asked all the time how I met my boyfriend, and if I liked dating apps. I feel like I was very successful with online dating, and today I wanted to share some of the things I learned through my experiences!
1. Mindset Is Everything
Before you decide to go online in hopes to find Mr. Right, I found that making sure my mind was in the right place helped me be more successful. I looked at dating in a very casual manner. I didn’t put a ton of unnecessary pressure on myself to meet my husband overnight.
This might not sound romantic, but I looked at dating like a job. I wanted to be successful, I wanted to grow, and to do that, I simply had to put myself out there and try. I went on a lot of dates, and the more times I put myself in this awkward position, the better I got at it!
The biggest thing is to not put too much pressure on yourself and make sure you look at it as an opportunity to grow. In this process, you’re simply taking steps to the next chapter. Don’t get discouraged when you meet someone that isn’t a good fit for you or your life.
And don’t give up just because it’s hard. With a positive and strong mindset, you truly can achieve anything!
2. Communicate
With dating apps, you have two ways to establish a first impression: your profile and the things you say in the direct messages. This is like a job interview process, so it is OK to express genuine interest and engage in genuine conversation.
If someone doesn’t reciprocate or if someone takes several days to respond every time you reach out, they may not be as dedicated to the process. This can be a red flag and would signal it’s time to keep swiping!
Communication is the foundation to any successful relationship, and I believe it also helps weed out anyone who might not be serious in finding a match. *Bonus points if he wants to call or FaceTime before you meet!*
Texting and direct messaging is great and all, but you’re not trying to become someone’s new penpal. I would give a guy around 1 to 2 weeks to ask me out before I would let them go. And honestly, I would talk to several people at the same time to kind of feel out my candidates. 🙂 It’s work, ya’ll!! But fun work, in my opinion!
3. Your First Impression: The Profile
When it comes to your dating profile, I suggest getting some good photos in good lighting. Ask a friend to help you get some cute pictures outside or close to a window in your house. Natural light always enhances those beautiful features! Unfortunately, in dating apps, looks are the first thing that you will be judged on.
The more effort you put into getting a good pic of yourself, the more success you will have. The description section, depending on which app you use, always frustrated me because I never knew what to say. Like how do I summarize me in a few words?! What kind of task is this?!
Therefore, I tended to keep it short, outlining some of the key things that pretty much anyone could identify about my life. What I do, hobbies, city, school. Pretty basic. Personally, I’d much rather get to know someone face-to-face vs via DM/text message. If they really want to know more about me, they’ll take me out and see what they’re in for! 😛
4. Cyber Stalker Skills
Look, I have no shame in my cyber stalking game. If you need to know something about someone, hit me up! Lol, kidding…but we DO live in the 21st century ya’ll, and most of us have social media profiles. If your app gives first and last name, Google that sh*t. See if anything comes up in searches or photos. Look at Facebook profiles and Instagram handles. This saved me SO much time when dating because I’m pretty picky. #SorryNotSorry
When you take the time to do some extra research, you’ll get to see from an insider’s perspective what this person is like. Unfortunately for me, my boyfriend didn’t “do” social media so he had nothing interesting on his profiles (sorry babe, I think you’re interesting in real life though?!). He called me before I agreed to meet up, and his voice had me hooked. 😉 He got bonus points for picking up the dang phone and not hiding behind a screen!
5. Have Fun & Relax
Dating truly is a very emotional process. You’re putting yourself out there, allowing yourself to be extremely vulnerable, and setting yourself up for potential disappointment. Trust me, I hit a wall at one point in dating after being let down numerous times. I was just about to give up, but I didn’t, and in the same month I thought about moving to Europe and becoming a gypsy, I met my boyfriend. 🙂
Try your best to just have fun. I went on dozens of dates that didn’t end up being a romantic connection, but I still had fun with each and every single one. Try and stay lighthearted with it as long as you can. And my rule is there are no rules. If you want to kiss on the first date, do it!
Another way to look at it is you are in pursuit of your forever person, but right now is the only time in your life you will be single (that is if you’re seeking a lifetime of marriage) 😛 try and enjoy it and take time to invest in yourself. Being single truly allows you to become who you are. It is a beautiful time of life and it should not be taken advantage of or frowned upon.
From what I’ve been told, the best dating apps right now are Bumble and Hinge. This post is not sponsored, this is strictly through word-of-mouth. Another good one is The League, but that one requires an invitation.
If you have any questions about dating apps or my experience using them, please comment below or send me a direct message!
Until next time…XXXO
Outfit Deets:
This look is a perfect date night look! I would wear it to a nice dinner on a Saturday night with my man. The ruffles add a feminine touch, and the skirt accentuates the waist. This is the perfect outfit for my booty-poppin ladies as it creates the perfect symmetry on your beautiful figure. Not to mention, the Sam Edelman heels are my favorite pointed-toe heel EVER. They give you the sexiest, slender leg and are SUPER comfy to walk in. It’s a win-win!
Top Skirt Heels Bag
Online dating has shaken up the romantic world in ways both good and bad. But whether we like it or not, one thing is for sure—online dating is here to stay.
Not one to get left behind, I’ve been trying my luck on a smorgasbord of dating apps over the past few months. And being the gigantic nerd that I am, I turned the entire experience into one big social experiment.
Success With Dating Apps Reddit
Today, returning as a battle-hardened veteran of love, I’m going to share with you my personal experiences, and tell you which apps I think you should get, and which apps I think aren’t worth your time. Juicy statistics included.
THE SETUP
Location
I’m currently living in a relatively conservative Asian country. So naturally, that’s where I was swiping from. The residents here are pretty closed-minded for the most part when it comes to things like dating and relationships. Doubly so for more promiscuous activities like casual sex. That being said, there seemed to be a substrata of people that were more down with the times, so to speak. These people were my target demographic. More on this later.
I also live on the outskirts of a city, so I had to broaden my search radius quite a bit to actually find people to match with.
Apps Used
I used 4 dating apps in the experiment, they were:
- Tinder
- Coffee Meets Bagel
- Bumble
- Hinge
Most dating apps are badly designed and are headaches to use. I chose these 4 because I felt they were the least buggy ones out there (spoiler: they were still pretty buggy).
I also picked these apps in particular because they were primarily designed to be used on mobile devices. Who even uses dating sites anymore?
Orientation
I was swiping as a male looking for a female.
Age range
18-32. I needed to cast a broad net because so few people were on dating apps.
Distance
I set my search radius to 50miles. This is a really, reallywide range. You wouldn’t normally need to do this if you live in a city, but I don’t. So, I had to cast the widest of nets. I did end up going downtown for most of my dates (~20 miles from me), but thankfully never had to go any further.
Ethnicities
Yup, you guessed it. I was swiping on all of them.
Pictures
I used 5 pictures on my profile. I thought 5 was the perfect number because it didn’t seem like too few, nor did it se— Ah, who am I kidding? I’m not particularly photogenic so I wasn’t spoiled for choice here. I took my best 5 photos, slapped them on the apps, and called it a day.
The first picture was a half body shot showcasing my face, the next 3 were travel pictures, and the last one was a group shot with my friends in which you could clearly identify which one I was.
I won’t post my exact pictures for obvious reasons, but I’ll do the next best thing—show you some pictures very similar to mine so you get an idea of what kind of profile I was rocking.
Just imagine the poses in pictures 3 and 4 in front of interesting travel backdrops, and in 5, I was the only guy in focus so you could easily identify which one I was. Also, the pictures I used were pretty average quality. They weren’t shot with a Canon-MP9001-with-automatic-hot-ification like these ones. That being said, they weren’t gas-station-bathroom-selfie-quality either. If you do have the option to use great, professional-looking shots, then you should definitely use them.
The Bio
Again, I’m going to completely fabricate a bio for you in the same style as the one I used. So, it’s not going to be my exact one, but something closely resembling it.
8’10 Martian, majored in Intergalactic Gender studies
Worked as a former cow abductor back in the day, but wasn’t quite feeling the vibe of the job. I’m an accountant now.
I like working out, doing math, and drawing giant dicks on the cornfields of nearby planets with my spaceship’s laser cannon
Your mom will love me 😉
The idea was to give the ladies an idea of who I was, and what my life was about while throwing some humor into the mix. If you bore them, you’re as good as gone (unless you’re hot). To be clear, I had my actual life story in my bio. The alien stuff was a fabricated example.
The Prompts
Some apps give you the choice to answer a few fun questions about yourself to give your potential matches an idea of your personality. Definitely use them if you have fun answers. These are the ones I used (also fabricated but in the same style).
2 truths and a lie…
I dated both twins of the same family, I’m a professional chess player, I send chain mail for fun
I appreciate when my date…
Takes care of herself and can handle my jokes
I like…
Big butts and I cannot lie
As you can see, the prompts were all pretty lighthearted and most importantly, not boring. In hindsight, I probably spent way too much time crafting those.
THE GAME PLAN
Competition Analysis
The first thing I did on my online dating journey was to suss out the competition.
How did I do this? Well, I did a little recon. I borrowed some pictures from one of my female friends and set up a dummy profile for her on Tinder (remember to ask for permission). Doing this, I gained first-hand insight into what my competition was like.
And it wasn’t pretty… for them.
I mentioned this before, but swiping from a conservative Asian country reduced the size pool of my potential matches by a shit ton. Just because so few people were on dating apps. But, unbeknownst to me, my terrible location also had a silver lining: My competition was way worse.
Best Dating Phone Apps
Most guys on online dating had terrible profiles. A handful had high quality shots, but most were weird selfies or pictures that didn’t even show their faces.
Competition was low—moderate at best. Good news for me.
The Ranking System
Seeing as how I lived 45 minutes from civilization (and also with my parents) at the time, I had to come up with a very unique dating strategy if I was going to get any private time with my dates.
What followed was a deviously simple but effective ranking system to prioritise which dates were worth bearing the 2 hour long journey downtown for, and for which matches I’d be better off staying put at home.
The ranking criteria were as follows:
- Coolness – This is a measure of how ‘cool’ the potential date was. So things like looks, similar interests, and background all played a role in their cool score. This was the #1 priority
- Logistics – Simply put, this was whether the potential date lived alone or with their parents
- Everything else – This includes things like whether the girl had 3 legs, didn’t speak English, or lived in a dodgy area of town. Just everything else really
The importance of coolness is self-explanatory, but I put so much emphasis on good logistics mainly because I’m kind of an introvert. I’d take a quiet date at home with soft music cooing in the background over seeking out adventurous and potentially life-threatening experiences any day.
I believe this more low-profile type of date helps eliminate distractions from the outside world so both parties can more easily focus their attention on each other. And also, privacy is good if things take a romantic turn.
Quick disclaimer: Inviting a girl back to your place for the first date isn’t a great idea. I would suggest doing this on the 3rd or 4th date.
So, when I was chatting to potential dates on the apps, I ranked them and prioritized them accordingly, going out with the ones with the highest ranking first, working my way down the list. Don’t get me wrong, the list was either non-existent or very short most days. I’m not a giga-chad by any means. But it did come in handy a couple of times (mostly to decide whether it was worth going out at all).
Swiping Strategy
My strategy was to only swipe on members of the opposite sex I found attractive. For the first few days, I swiped until I ran out of likes on every app. This turned out to be way more draining than I thought.
Very quickly, I came to realize that Hinge didn’t have a particularly large user base in the country I was in. I ran out of people to match with within a day. For the remaining 3 apps, I continued swiping until I ran out of likes for 3 straight days.
After that, I cut-back on the swiping on Tinder and Bumble (liking ~10 profiles a day now instead of 100), while pretty much still swiping through my daily set of Bagels on CMB (liking ~7 profiles a day).
After a couple weeks, I looked at the results I got (number of matches) and decided to drop Bumble from the running for reasons I’ll explain later in the article. Now, only 2 apps remained: Tinder and Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB).
I carried on swiping on the 2 apps for a few months.
First message
In an effort to be as efficient as possible, I thought of the most original lame joke I could, and assigned it to a keyboard shortcut on my iPhone. I would then send this message to every single one of my matches when we matched. The exception was if they had something that I found really cool on their profile, then I commented on that instead.
Vibe
I tried to keep the vibe of the text conversations fun and casual. It was usually a few get-to-know-you style questions mixed in with some banter. I also tried to get as much information as I could during these exchanges on 1) how cool they were and 2) their logistics situation—in as much of a non-creepy way as possible. The whole name of the game at this stage was to get the girl on the other side of the app comfortable enough with me to agree to meet.
Asking for the Date
After a few rounds of back and forth, I would start to hint at the idea of going out on a date. How much back and forth I needed to do depended completely on the individual match. Some were comfortable meeting within 3 exchanges, while others would seem to never want to hang. I also came up with a pretty lame-but-endearing way of asking them out, and stuck that onto another keyboard shortcut on my phone to save labor.
THE RESULTS
I’ll keep this section short and sweet, only showing the outcome of my online dating adventures. Check out the next section for a breakdown of these numbers and a short review of each dating app.
The Success Rates
Raw Data
BREAKDOWN OF EACH APP
Tinder
Tinder fared decently with a match rate of 6.53%. This was the lowest out of all 4 apps by far, but I still say “decently” because it’s still pretty good considering when I last used Tinder, I got something like a 1.50% match rate. Since then, I got better pictures, actually wrote a bio, and moved to Asia, where the competition is absolute garbage. I suspect the combination of these 3 things improved my chances to what they are now.
Anyway, from these matches, I got the phone number at an 11% rate, which was alright. But the real magic happened when trying to convert the numbers to dates. Almost half of the girls who gave me their numbers from Tinder eventually agreed to meet. This was the highest of the 4 apps by a mile.
I have this sneaking suspicion that the reason why girls on Tinder are more likely to meet is because they’re looking for hookups more than anything else. And when you’re on the lookout for hookups, you don’t screen your matches nearly as hard as when you’re looking for a relationship. This lowered bar was probably the main reason that more girls were more willing to meet with me (yay for low standards).
Coffee Meets Bagel
CMB felt like my secret weapon. With an astoundingly high match rate of 15.5%, I was in match heaven. From the matches I got, I number-closed 1 in 10, and slightly over a third of those numbers turned into dates. Pretty good odds considering the sheer volume of matches I was getting on the platform.
I think people are more willing to swipe right on CMB than the other platforms simply because the app limits the number of profiles you have access to in a day. Unlike Tinder or Bumble, where you have 100 right swipes and infinite left swipes a day, CMB only shows you 25 profiles. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.
Bumble
With Bumble, I got a match rate of 11%, got the phone number from my matches 18% of the time (about every 1 number for every 5 matches), and from those phone numbers, 3/10 of them turned into dates.
Bumble was weird. I was getting match after match the first 2 weeks I was on there. After that, nothing but crickets. It seems like Bumble gives a boost to their new users and promotes their profiles to more people during the first one or two weeks. But when this newbie boost ends, then you’re doomed to the bottom of the pile—unless you’re hot.
Hinge
Unfortunately, Hinge doesn’t have a large enough user base in the country I’m in. The sample size was too small to pull out any meaningful data from. However, when I was using Hinge in the past in countries with much larger user bases, I did experience a decent amount of success. In fact, more success than the other 3 apps at the time. So, definitely don’t count Hinge out if you’re swiping from the US/UK.
CONCLUSION
After 4+ months and over 15,000 swipes, I can safely say that the apps that yielded the best results for me were Tinder and Coffee Meets Bagel. Bumble was great for the first week or two, but then completely flatlined. And there weren’t enough people on Hinge where I live for it to compete with the others.
I found that CMB gets you more matches, but girls from Tinder are more likely to want to meet. Also, the matches from Tinder seemed to primarily be looking for entertainment and not a serious relationship. The matches from CMB on the other hand, were mostly looking for serious relationships. Surprisingly, the matches I got from Bumble seemed more open to casual relationships. Less so than the Tinderinas, but more so than the CMB-ers.
This makes sense if you think about it. Apps like Tinder or Bumble let you choose from hundreds of profiles every day, and people looking for hookups will appreciate the wide selection. While people looking for something more concrete will appreciate the pseudo-commitment CMB is designed to offer by limiting the number of people you can interact with a day. This makes it more likely that you’ll talk to your already existing matches instead of just running off to find someone new the second you get bored.
Free Dating Apps
So, which app(s) should you use? I’d personally recommend Tinder & Coffee Meets Bagel. Bumble falls off way too hard after a week if you aren’t gorgeous. And there’s no one on Hinge where I’m from. Also I should note, if your pictures aren’t great, then Tinder is going to be horrible for you too—speaking from experience. So if your photos are bad and you don’t want to take better ones, try CMB (and Hinge too, if you’re in the US/UK).