Professional travel-gear tester Eddy Azar analyzed over 1,000 attempts to get laid to discover what Tinder tactics are the best for converting swipes into convos, convos into digits, digits into dates, and dates into bed. In a post on Growthcasts titled, "Growth Hacking Tinder: Analyzing Data to get DATAss," Eddy explains that he and his wife Asha opened up their marriage a while ago, and they decided to both use the popular dating app to secure a maritally sanctioned fling.
Although it certainly wasn't their intent, what evolved was a data-driven analysis of how to talk to people on Tinder, and he and his wife are now accepting data from all around the world to optimize matching and boning. But let's go back to the beginning.
Right away, advances from men and women were pouring into Asha's phone, but Eddy sucked at Tinder, and not just because he was a dude. No one would even write him back, despite lowering his standards, having his wife ask women online to approve his profile picture and bio (they thought he was hot), and trying to sound smart and funny. Sure, Eddy lives in the culturally conservative city-state of Singapore, where a man in an open marriage presumably has less appeal than in a more liberal town, but he's a handsome professional travel gear reviewer. Statistically speaking, someone should want to bonk this man.
Frustrated her husband couldn't seal the deal, Asha finally grabbed Eddy's phone and got him two dates in 30 minutes. Realizing that the only difference was how she was writing these women (as him), Eddy decided to pay more attention to how he initiated contact. Eddy divided his opening strategies into eight categories and started tracking their relative effectiveness:
While there's nothing new under the sun here, at least he did the work of keeping notes on almost 1,100 swipes, 32 of which were "Superlikes."
He plotted all his advances by how far they got him from beginning a conversation (the biggest hurdle), to having a real conversation, to getting her number, to scheduling a date, to actually showing up for said date, to smooching, to boning, and finally to boning again.
It's important to note, however, that even after almost 1,100 swipes, Eddy had a 0.1% success rate (he's crowdsourcing future research to get better data, see below—you can help!).
Here's what he found:
1. Women who write you first are rare but are obviously the most valuable matches out there. If she writes you first, you have more than a 1 in 3 chance of scheduling a date and a 1 in 8 chance of actually going on one.
2. Talking about their picture will almost definitely get a response. Eddy lost a lot of women between their first response and any kind of longer conversation, but ultimately this was the route that led to sex. That being said, if you're only in this for conversation, try—
3. Asking your matches a random "interesting question." That was the surest way to have a long conversation with a match. However, none of these women gave out their number. Probably because you sound like a manipulative pick-up artist, but that's just a guess.
4. The only other techniques that made it past the conversation stage were name jokes, funny gifs, and asking about her bio. Name jokes and bio questions got Eddy to the "scheduling a date" stage, but he got canceled on.
As fascinating as all that is, this is still a small data set, which Eddy and Asha are trying to remedy by roping in their friends and coworkers to create a larger data-gathering process. You, too, can join this attempt to "growth-hack" Tinder. Is it kinda pickup-artisty? A little, but there's a difference between being a creep and being one of many lonely but decent people in the 21st century who find communicating via an impersonal meat market difficult. You can read Eddy's original post to learn more about his and Asha's story and other lessons they gleaned from this. You can also read this public Google Doc they made about how to join their project.
Author's Note: As someone who got a 5 in AP statistics (a long time ago), the sample size of ONE successful sex is really frustrating. Eddy, if you're reading this, get to work until your data is more significant. Asha, you'll probably have to help.