I found myself giving some online dating advice to a friend who just moved to NYC and was trying out online dating. I’m not sure what you have to do to consider yourself an expert at online dating, but I definitely consider myself a guru on the subject. I’ve dabbled on lots of online dating sites for a few years and I met my current girlfriend online. I often help friends with their online dating profiles and like anyone else who has been on the dating scene in NYC I’m very liberal with giving out advice on how other people should run their personal lives.
What started out as an innocent email to a friend with some advice on his JDate profile turned into a really scathing rant about how cold online dating is and how much of a numbers game it is. I surprised myself by how mercenary my advice sounded when I reread it. Being new to running my own business, I can really relate to how difficult it is to approach strangers with a sales proposition. The underlying skills needed to meet someone online or sell a product online seem to be the same. What little formal sales training I’ve had often used dating metaphors to try and help you understand how to make a sale. I’ll try out the converse and use sales metaphors to help you with online dating. You have to be brief, to the point, and Always Be Closing.
Remember, “Coffee is for closers!”
Transcribed from my advice emails with all identifying names/info removed, here is my expert JDATE profile and dating advice:
The key is to say very little about yourself. Edit your profile down to the most basic info possible. Have fun with it, I think that if you are serious about dating women on JDate, the key is to devote about an hour per day 4-5 days per week cruising JDate and contacting as many women as possible. My advice would be to get to know the woman as little as possible online and push for a first date at a bar, coffee house, or any public space. Avoid buying your date food at first, meet in the afternoon where you will seem generous buying her a cup of coffee or a drink (most people don’t drink a lot in the early afternoon.)
Put a $10 limit on this first mini-date, and if it leads to a real first date put a $40 limit (for both of you) on it. Never ever spend more than $40 on a date with any woman. Also avoid bringing women back to your apartment. I feel like you should know all of this already, but you probably don’t. Start listening to Tom Leykis’ 101 podcasts that you can get from ITunes. I don’t care that you don’t have an IPOD, go download them and listen!
Any online dating site is full of a lot of suspects. What you are actually looking for are prospects. Suspects just waste your time and energy. Here are 3 simple rules to transform suspects into prospects. Remember, your goal on any online dating site when talking to a woman is to do the following:
1) Make sure the woman is not a man.
2) Convince the woman you are not a psycho and it is safe to meet you in a public space.
3) A.B.C. -> ALWAYS BE CLOSING: Within 2-3 contacts push for a phone call and to meet in public. If a girl spends more than 2-3 emails getting to know you it is 90% likely she will never meet you in person.
Your stats:
1) Remove your income, have your income as not disclosed. I could write a whole essay on why that is a good idea.
2) Include finance as one of your interests (this relates to why you don’t list your income. Create the illusion that you have lots of money without actually saying it.)
3) Remove your political alignment. If anyone asks, you are a vigilant Ron Paul supporter. You wrote in his name on the ballot even though he didn’t appear on the ballot in NY. You will avoid any political disputes with this viewpoint. It’s important to ask yourself this question, “Would I date a really hot girl that voted for the other candidate in the last election?” If you say No, then delete your profile and give up on online dating.
Your Ideal Match:
1) Remove age range, you can ignore requests out of your age range.
2) Remove all of your requests except non-smoker.
3) Remove any restrictions on political alignment.
It seems snobby to make too many limitations and it is downright stupid for a man to do this considering that not a lot of women reply to men. So you should have no problem filtering out the women who contact you directly who you aren’t interested in at all (just don’t respond back, that is the proper etiquette.) However, being a non-smoker is very politically correct in NYC, so this is the one appropriate filter for a man to request from a woman online. Don’t worry, smokers are always lying to themselves about quitting in the near future, so if the perfect woman for you is out there and she happens to be a smoker, she will still contact you because in her own mind she can somehow classify herself as a non-smoker because she is planning on quitting.
On Dealing with Rejection:
In business, immediate rejection is 10 times more valuable than rejection after wasting hours of effort! The same goes for online dating, it is definitely a numbers game. Send out 100 emails, get 5 responses, out of those 5, 2 will lead to actual dates. Send out 100 IM’s, get 10 responses, get 3 conversations out of that. If you see it as a game, then you can deal with this rejection better. They aren’t rejections, they are failed sales pitches. Either you sell them on why they should meet you in person or they sell you on why you shouldn’t. Either way a sale is made. Watch Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross to get psyched up!
To my friend’s credit, he is already a savvy business person with a good eye for sales. Here is his feedback:
The frustrating thing about online dating in general is that women control it. It would be a lot more efficient if it was controlled by men. You know that the girls are telling their mothers and grandmother’s that there are no guys out there, but in reality there are tons, they just don’t know how to identify them. It is actually quite clear, because if you read the JDate success stories, in many cases the girl rejected the guy at first, for whatever reason, and then on a second, third, etc. pass they decided to talk to the guy. The real question is how many of those 2nd, 3rd connections were just not made. In any case, it is what it is, you are just going to have play along.
If businesses controlled 100% of consumer behavior we would live in a theoretically 100% efficient market. In real life there is an incredible inefficiency in connecting supply and demand. This is why great salespeople seem to walk on water, at times they can connect supply and demand at an amazingly efficient rate (even to the point when they are supplying needs that there aren’t even real demands for.)
A sale is always made! One way or another.
I had my girlfriend read this post and she told me that I didn’t follow any of these rules when I met her. However, I think I followed all of them so well she didn’t even notice; and that is quite an accomplishment since she is a salesperson herself. The best advice I ever got on selling was to never sell the customer, simply help the customer buy from you. So you will never really have to sell yourself online. Put the goods out there and let the demand find you, but you have to remove the natural obstacles for the consumer.
Tags: essay