Online Dating Model for the Other 80%

The following post was written as an exclusive bonus chapter for our active month-to-month subscribers of the Online Dating Blueprint

After a lot of hard work and refinement, I’ve started to settle on a messaging model and process. This model is inspired from a lot of testing and studying. Basically, I’ve fused the learnings of the PWF product with the approach that Indian PE has taught me. I’ve found that this fusion approach is impactful for the guys who, like me, are part of the “bottom 80%” in attractiveness. I’m a somewhat above average looking, not quite 5’6″, 30 year old guy who is relatively slim but not by any means in good shape (something I’m actively working on).

Understanding a Woman’s Reality on a Dating App

If you haven’t yet, ask some of the women in your life to share their messaging screen from Tinder. A few lessons you need to observe here:

Even Average Girls Have an Inordinate Amount of Matches and Attention

Look at how many matches they’ve got. Plus how many “possible” matches they still haven’t swiped on. And then watch them swipe and see what percentage of the time they get a match. Compare this to yourself. Unless you’re a top 20% SMV guy (the linked article is worth a read, BTW), it’ll show you just how skewed the online sexual marketplace is.

Why do this? It’s a lesson that if you don’t stand out and be different, you’re just going to get lost among literally hundreds of other dudes doing the exact same thing.

Most Guys Either Don’t Message, or Send Lame Messages

Look at the first message many guys send. “Hey”, “Hi cutie”, something really bland, something way too sexually aggressive and uncalibrated. When the girl does reply, it often devolves into boring rapport-building messages. Again, more evidence that you need to stand out across your messaging.

When does this messaging model work best?

This type of messaging is particularly effective with guys who are in the bottom 80% range for male SMV (for the rest of this post, I’ll just refer to us as “Lower SMV Guys” – don’t get offended or triggered by this, I’m sure you’re a beautiful person). Plenty of data, research, and experience has shown that it is harder for Lower SMV Guys to get women to invest or even reply to their first message, especially women equal to or above their own SMV. This style also works well on a subset of girls I often attract, those who tend to be more professional, intense about career or education, and/or are a bit more shy or introverted (but still DTF under the right circumstances).

The Abbreviated Model

See the breakdown of the framework for my model below. I’ll go through each step in detail in this post.

Creative Opener

One of the two biggest things that Indian PE has taught me is that, for Lower SMV Guys, your first message has to stand out. So, how do you come up with an opener like this? You look at her photos and profile. (When I started working with Indian PE, he would lead the interactions. Both of these example screenshots are full credit to him.)

Abstraction: The Key to Opening Success

But, rather than looking for and sending the boring typical messages, you need to abstract one level. Otherwise, you’re just another boring guy. And as we discovered looking at women’s accounts, being another boring guy out of hundreds = death.

But what do I mean by abstraction? Basically, you want to notice something about her that other guys wouldn’t typically notice or comment on. Or, you want to comment on something other guys would notice, but take it to a slightly more abstract level than those guys normally would. In the following two screenshots, credit to Indian PE, who started out coaching me by running interactions so I could observe and learn from him.

Example: Photo Opener

In this screenshot, you can see abstraction at work with commenting on her photos. She had really curly hair. The typical, boring opener with low probability of a reply would be, “I love your curly hair” or something like that. Notice how this opener offers a compliment — but in a non-boring way.

Example: Profile Opener

In the above, note how in her profile she says “Former college athlete” and then implores you to “guess what sport”. Imagine her inbox — it has to be full of messages like “I bet you played soccer” and “What sport did you play?”. By abstracting a level (“Why did you retire?”), the conversation becomes much more interesting and so the message stands out.

Investment Building

Unfortunately, with online dating, women hold an extremely disproportionate amount of the power. Due to this, Lower SMV Guys need more investment than the “Top 20%” to be able to successfully get dates. Thus, if you’re a Low SMV Guy, getting women to invest is going to be crucial to your success. The amount of investment you’ll need to successfully set a date will vary, largely depending on the gap in your SMV level – and, to be very specific, the gap in her perceived self SMV versus her perceived SMV of you.

To elaborate on this: a 6 may consider herself an 8 for various reasons (maybe she shows her body in a lot of pictures and so she gets lots of attention). Or, she may increase your SMV because you are “her type.” Or, she may decrease your SMV because something about you appears to be “not her type.”

Your ultimate goal of Investment Building is to get her to bite on the concept of a date. Once she does, you’re ready to move the interaction forward. That’s why, in my messaging, I start trying to bait her by talking about the “romantic date” very early into the interaction.

Signs of Investment

Let’s first take a quick look at some signals that can tell you approximately how invested she is in this interaction.

Signs of Positive Investment (IOIs)

She messages you first
She replies quickly
She gives replies that are longer than yours
She gives very detailed replies
She double texts (or more)
She easily cedes the frame
She very quickly bites on the concept of a date

Signs of Negative Investment (IODs)

She replies infrequently or with large time gaps between replies
She generally only replies after you’ve double texted (or more)
She gives very short replies
She throws lots of shit tests at you
She’s always fighting you for control of the frame
She totally ignores any date baiting that you do, or worse, disqualifies you regarding a possible date

Key Principles of Investment Building

Overall, your messaging strategy here should be to keep things light, interesting, and somewhat intriguing. The key is properly balancing being “fun” and even “funny” with also “keeping it real” at times. If you go too far down the “fun”/”funny” path, you come across as the prototypical dancing monkey. But if you go too far down the “keeping it real” conversations, you’ll quickly become boring and her attention will turn to one of the other 500 guys pursuing her. Beyond this, here are a few specific concepts to keep in mind.

“Confident and Playful” rather than “Cocky and Funny”

If you’ve studied this stuff for a while, you’ve heard of “cocky funny”. In general, you have to keep in mind that sarcasm and cockiness can be really hard to decipher over text messages. But, this stuff is even riskier as a Low SMV Guy, where it can quickly turn a woman off and kill a conversation. Instead, a far better mentality to strive for is “confident and playful.”

Non-Sexual

In this model, you build investment before you go sexual. Investment building should be fun and funny, and on occasion even lightly sexual in the form of roleplays, but this is not the time to escalate or go explicit in any way.

Investment Mirroring

In general, you should strive to roughly mirror her investment. That doesn’t mean that your messages need to be exactly the same length as hers every time. But in general, if you see that your messages are noticeably longer than hers over an extended period of time (maybe 3-4 message exchanges), you’re doing it wrong. In the most ideal scenario, you’d be at a point where her typical message is longer than yours.

Baiting the Date

This is probably the single most important part of Investment Building, and the other major key learning I’ve gotten from Indian PE. From very early into the conversation, you want to be seeding the date. I am always thinking about ways to tie in the idea of a “romantic date” during my Investment Building messaging. Your goal is to bait her into prodding, and ideally practically begging, for more details about this mysterious date. This date baiting is, in actuality, testing to find out when she’s invested enough to start moving the interaction forward. Once she’s hooked on the idea of a date, that’s your cue to move the interaction forward.

See the first screenshot below where I’m talking about our “romantic date” almost immediately. She is clearly into this, but she also keeps messaging me some comfort-building texts for a while. Eventually, I bounce her to text, and after a few messages, I revive the romantic date topic. Notice that this time, she latches on, asking when the date is going to be. That’s my cue to soft close, so I decide to get her on the phone for a call (see the Soft Closing section).

Low Investment Gaming

Some percentage of girls are going to give you little to no investment, no matter what you do. Often, you’ll find this with higher SMV girls. Younger girls are also more privy to this. Unfortunately, I’ve found that the rate at which I can get girls like this to truly invest is pretty low — at most, maybe 5-10%. Still, when you’ve done your best and a girl won’t invest and/or comply, there are a handful of techniques that are most useful to employ.

Note that I do not use these techniques often — they are almost solely in my arsenal for dealing with low investment and/or low compliance situations. Don’t abuse or overuse these techniques in online game, or else you’ll come off as unconfident/douchey/gamey.

Disqualification

Disqualification is a pretty standard game technique, so I’m not going to talk a lot about it here. I generally only disqualify when a girl isn’t investing or compliant. The one exception where I’ve used some disqualification is in countries where girls have a high ASD and/or there is a reputation for Americans coming for sex tourism.

Triggering

No need for me to say much here, there’s an elaborate and fantastic article written by Ciel Chen on this topic.

Takeaways

A takeaway is optimal for low compliance situations. Not only can they sometimes reassert the frame, but a well-placed takeaway can also help you get a woman to voice an objection or concern she has. Some examples of good takeaways:

“If you are into that”
“If you are too nervous, I’d totally understand”

Extreme Sexual Polarization

The final one here is by far the highest risk, but also the highest reward. If you’re getting nowhere with a girl, you can go extremely sexual. For example, “Too bad — you seemed like you’d have a nice pussy to eat.” While this goes against the advice I’ve written about with Sexual Compliance Ladders, because it is going to be highly sexual out of nowhere, it doesn’t really matter because the girl isn’t giving you anything to work with. This is basically your last ditch effort to heavily emotionally spike the girl and see if it changes the way she responds to you.

Sexual Compliance Ladders

I’ve written about this topic at length, so I am not going to add much here but instead tell you to read my other post. Unlike some models that have you weave sexualization into the prior step, I’ve separated them out. The reason is that, for Lower SMV Guys, we need to have more investment from a girl before she’ll comply with sexualization. This intuitively makes sense: a girl will be much more sexually compliant with you, with much less work needed, if your SMV is a 9 than if it’s a 6.

How far do I need to escalate, or pull her up the ladder?

The answer is, well, that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. You need to feel out and calibrate based on the girl. I’ve successfully closed girls with literally no sexualization at all prior to the date, I’ve closed with very heavy sexualization, and everything in between.

Keep in mind that the more Sexual Compliance you have up front, the more likely you are to fully close on your date (and, of course, avoid or minimize LMR). However, climbing way up the ladder can certainly be risky.

That said, if you’re new to this, or if you don’t have much abundance in your life, I’d probably encourage you to focus on going less far up the ladder. The more abundance and experience you have, the more you can push the envelope.

Some things to be thinking about:

Is she agreeing to the date at your place? If so, odds are that she has accepted in some way that it’s “on.”
Is she pushing for a date in public? If so, you may want to consider having more sexual compliance.
What kind of vibes are you getting from her (her photos, her profile, her messages)? Does she come across as conservative, for example? If so, you may want to build more compliance.

All this, of course, assumes you are going for Alex’s first date close approach. If you’re into, say, a two date model, then the Sexual Compliance Ladder step is going to be much less important.

Handling Non-Compliance

Be deliberate in working your way up the ladder. Don’t jump multiple rungs up — and send something really intense and uncalibrated out of nowhere. If you jump way up the ladder, you’re probably going to blow yourself out and kill the conversation. Your goal with this deliberate process of working the way up the ladder is that, if you get non-compliance, you can easily take a few steps back and refocus on Investment Building. Takeaways can work very well with non-compliance, too, especially when you get a “yellow light” (as defined in my earlier post).

Closing and Confirming

Once you’ve built a satisfactory amount of Investment (she has agreed to, and is even excited about, the concept of a date) and demonstrated Compliance, you’re ready to soft close. This process is outlined in-depth in the PWF product, so I’d encourage you to go there to understand all the mechanics and best practices. But just to keep this guide comprehensive, I’ll include a few notes about these steps.

Soft Closing

If you’re to this point, she’s already invested in the concept of a date. Now, you want to solidify what that date will be. You can sometimes even weave a little more compliance testing and qualification into this.

Keep in mind, that you want to properly soft close before you hard close. This is a mistake I see repeated time and again in the Mastermind with newbies, and something I only learned myself after skipping soft closing multiple times, and having Alex beat into my head how I screwed up high potential leads.

Soft Close – Getting her to further invest into the concept of the date in her mind.

Hard Close – Nailing down the specifics of date, time, location (logistics).

Examples of soft closing:

“Do you like wine?”
“Hopefully you like homemade pasta” (as I’ve mentioned before, the home cooked meal first date has been my go-to lately)

The Value of Phone Calls

I like to use phone calls as part of my Soft Closing routine – the more I’ve done this, the more I’ve come to appreciate it. A huge shoutout to my friend Abe that really got me bought into this. Note that I have intentionally placed this in the Soft Closing step, rather than in Investment Building. The reason is that I prefer to have built up some compliance before trying to get her on the phone. If you try to set up a call without enough investment and compliance, you risk setting yourself backward if she doesn’t comply with having or taking the call.

The overall goal of the call is two-fold: First, to solidify you in her mind as not a catfish, sane/’normal’/not a serial killer, and congruent with your photos/bio/messaging — in other words, to build comfort. Second, to soft and possibly even hard close the date. If she’s comfortable and attracted to you on the phone, her likelihood to agree to the date — and perhaps more importantly, not flake after agreeing — is higher, probably significantly so.

Phone Call Do’s and Don’ts

Do tease her lightly and make her laugh from time-to-time
Do spend a brief amount of time on some comfort-building topics (profession, family, origin, hobbies are all good topics)
Do keep the call brief, say 10-20 minutes
Do sit or lie down somewhere where you can be relaxed, like a couch or bed
Do focus a lot on speaking slowly and having good tonality
Do be the one to end the call first
Do not talk too much — always lead the conversation but try to let her do most of the talking (and definitely do not cut her off or interrupt her)
Do not avoid or ignore her questions — this can quickly raise giant red flags for her — but do manage her line of questions so that you continue to lead the interaction
Do not focus too much on attraction building tactics; if you’re at this point, she’s already attracted, and things like push-pull/negs/etc. can easily backfire at this stage
Do not sexualize here much, if at all, unless you really escalated far sexually in your texts and thus need to do so to remain congruent; an at least decently sexual frame should already be established from the Sexual Compliance Ladders steps you’ve taken
Do not end the call immediately after soft or hard closing — come back to comfort-building topics for 2-3 minutes and then be the first to end the call (I’ll often use, “So what are you up to between now and then?” as a good bridge)

Hard Closing

At this point, she should be really invested in the date. She’s bought into the “romantic date” in concept during Investment Building, at least some sexual subtext has been set in Sexual Compliance Ladders, and she’s also bought into some ideas about what you’ll be doing on the date during Soft Closing. If you’ve gotten this far, it’s now just about setting up the details and logistics. If you’ve properly handled soft closing, she will likely already have a sense that you’re going to suggest a date straight to your place.

The one mistake that guys will make during Hard Closing is to throw out specific dates and times (“How about Tuesday or Thursday at 8 PM?”). I think this stems from a lot of other products’ / “gurus'” recommendations that you need to constantly “lead the interaction”, etc. Actually, you’re doing yourself a disservice, because if she doesn’t agree, it creates negative compliance.

A much more optimal way is the tried and true “What’s your schedule like?”

Confirming

Depending on how far away the date is, your procedure for confirming will be different. Just a few rules here:

Confirm the night before and the morning of the date
If the date is set more than a few days out, don’t let too much time (no more than 2-3 days) go between messaging her