I Signed Up for Hinge Ready to Pay to Win
I personally just signed up for Hinge again knowing that dating apps are straight up pay to win, and I might as well not even use them unless I'm going to pay to win and watch how effective they are. I spent $200 in the first 24 hours of signing up for Hinge. I bought Hinge X for three months for $99. Then I bought 50 roses for another $99. And I literally got a date within 24 hours with a beautiful woman who is going to meet me, supposedly, for tennis on Monday morning. Thus, I can tell you, I guarantee you, if I had just liked her profile, or even just been using Hinge X, she doesn't notice me. What you're going to learn here is the dynamics of how dating apps really work on the other side, plus what I've heard from talking to men who've got a lot of money and have gotten tons of dates from online dating apps — they're conscious that it is pay to win.
How Women Actually Use Dating Apps
First, here's what you don't understand about how pay to win it is. If you're a guy, you imagine women are using these dating apps the same way you are. But I've talked to a lot of women in person, because I am out there actually talking to real people, not just sitting in here making videos. And what I notice is that women don't generally put the effort into these apps that men do. You might imagine that if you were a woman and you had a thousand likes, you might actually go through all of them and try to match with as many of them as possible. Now, there certainly are women who take that approach. But from me talking to real women, it seems most women are so overwhelmed by these apps that they're very inconsistent about using them. They often don't even understand exactly how the app works. You literally have to do anything to get their attention, because often they're not using filters correctly — they're seeing dudes who live like an hour away and then wasting time messaging them. They're messaging some of the guys who are just the top, top tier guys with looks and superficial show-off profiles, and then those guys aren't paying attention to them. But many of the women are open to going out with more of a regular guy — they're just not seeing him.
Why Roses Blast You to the Top
So on Hinge, all you have to do is send a rose and you're going to blast toward the very top of a woman's inbox. And sure, some women might be toxic about roses. But Hinge itself tells you roses are twice as likely to lead to a date. What they're not telling you is that roses are probably much more likely than that to actually get you a match. Because what I've noticed is that most women I've talked to in real life are overwhelmed by dating apps. They get on the app, they're very inconsistent about even using it in the first place, and when they do get on, they'll maybe look at five or ten different guys' profiles. Those will be the guys who sent them roses or premium likes, or they'll just go through the feed. You've got to get around that by using pay-to-win mechanics.
If you're not willing to spend money on dating apps, most of the time you're better off not using them — unless you can make some top five or ten percent profile. For example, I have a family member whose job title sounds really impressive, and he puts his $70,000 car in his photos. He struggles on dating apps too, just to get noticed. But then when he does get noticed, it makes things a little easier for him. I know another guy who uses dating apps like crazy and gets dates with women 30 years younger than him all the time. He's the one who turned me on to this. He told me he spends $20 or $30 a day boosting his profile. Now, he does that on Tinder, and I don't recommend boosting on Hinge. I've tried boosting on Hinge, and all I've gotten are likes from women I don't find attractive at all so far. I think roses on Hinge are a much better use of your money, because roses trigger this big pop-up and notification. Some of the most attractive women may get several roses a day, and those might be the only messages they even look at.
Only Send Roses to Women Who Are Active
Another thing that's important with Hinge: I only send roses to women who are active. I go through, I sort, and I pick "active today." Hinge wants you to waste time on other profiles, because they constantly turn that setting off automatically. And while technically you may get a higher match rate by just liking tons of profiles, what I want is matches from the women I'm very interested in. If I'm not interested in a woman to the point where I'll effectively pay $2 to have a very high chance she notices me, then I don't need to be looking at her profile at all.
Flaky Attention and Invisible Profiles
What I've noticed in talking to women in real life about dating is that they're often very flaky about using the dating apps at all. For example, I started dating a woman recently. She was on the dating apps, and then when she started dating me, as far as I know, she just stopped using them. That seems to be very normal behavior with women. Even with me — I've got two dates lined up right now and I'm still sending a bunch of roses out on Hinge, so maybe I'm going harder than usual. But often what happens is a woman will be very interested in paying attention to dating apps, and then her attention goes elsewhere, whether it's friends, family, or guys she's already talking to and meeting up with. So you'll have all these profiles of women who are essentially not paying any attention to any of their likes. They're not going through the feed or doing anything. They're sitting there inactive, where you liking their profile makes no difference. You have maybe a one percent chance of ever even being seen. Even with Hinge X, there are lots of guys who have Hinge X, and their priority likes are going above yours. And how many women are actually taking the time to go through 20, 30, 40, 50, 100-plus likes? Not a lot.
What I've noticed talking to women in person is that women are often making very bad decisions on the guys they're picking from dating apps. To me, that indicates they're struggling and frustrated with using the apps. Unless she's a woman who's as tech-savvy as I am and figures out how to use all the apps and everything, she's generally not thinking about how the app works technically. She's just looking at photos — and I'm not meaning to put anyone down with this. I'm saying this is kind of a normal dating app experience. Whereas men, we think women are using the apps like us. They're not. They're going on the apps annoyed that they're even on there. They're not enjoying it. They're trying to get off there as soon as possible. Some will message a few guys at a time. Others, as soon as they find one guy to message, will stop messaging anyone else. I've talked to a woman who went out with nine different guys from dating apps — and all these guys were losers, according to her at least. My thought was: how did you pick all these guys out of everyone on the dating apps? Well, most of the time, unless a woman uses a very strict set of filters that somehow filters you out, a lot of women aren't even going through the feed at all. They're just going through their likes. Others are going through the feed without even knowing how to use it. You've got to break out of that invisibility.
The Algorithm Buries Ordinary Guys
There are so many guys on dating apps, and honestly, the algorithm on Hinge is terrible. All Hinge is trying to do is show women profiles they're likely to match with. So Hinge tends to show women all these profiles of chads — superficial, tall guys, the guys with the highest match rates. That's who women see when they look through their feed. They're not seeing ordinary guys at all. But that doesn't mean they're not willing to go out with an ordinary guy, especially if you put some substance in your profile, like I've shared before with my own profile. I literally look at it like this: when I'm on Hinge, if I want a woman to see me, realistically I need to just pay a couple of dollars. And even that doesn't guarantee she'll see me. Sending a woman a rose doesn't mean she'll definitely even look at my profile. But it does mean that if she goes to look at her likes, I'll be above all those other guys who haven't sent roses. That gives me an exponentially higher chance of being seen. And in order to be matched with, I must be seen.
The problem on most dating apps is that there are so many men that women are simply never going to see your profile in the first place — which means you've got to pay to win, which is a pretty exploitative and awful business model. It's the reason so many people are frustrated with dating. But as a guy, it's important to be honest as a consequence. From my view, unless you're making one of these top one percent dating profiles that hits absolutely everything — professional pictures, all your text perfectly lined up, which is not going to be most of you — then it's either pay to win or don't waste your time. Just having the unpaid version of the app is, most of the time, wasting your time. Are there exceptions? Yes, absolutely there are exceptions. But what I can tell you is that as soon as I warmed up to the idea that this is pay to win and I'm going to spend the money, I very easily and consistently got dates by sending roses.
And all these other dudes — I'm taking up space. My rose means women are seeing me instead of another guy. If a woman actually matches with me and starts talking to me, then almost every other guy ends up invisible, unless she's going through and talking to a whole bunch of guys. Most of the women I know don't have a whole lot of bandwidth to sit there and talk to 10, 20, 30 different guys on dating apps. Absolutely, some do. And honestly, I'd struggle to do that myself — if I had 50 women who all liked me and matched with me, I'd have a hard time talking to all of them too. You've got to realize how scarce a woman's attention is on a dating app. You have to break through all the noise, which is very easy to do with a rose on Hinge. Or you can try boosting your profile as well — if you'd like it to be super easy, boosting your profile kind of puts it on easy mode. What you do not want to do is waste your time on these apps.
Your Time Is Worth More Than Free Swiping
Your time is valuable, and most of you can make more money. For me, I'd much rather just spend $20 a day or whatever to boost my profile all day than sit there and go through woman after woman after woman — like her profile, feel something, get excited, and then get rejected. Not it, not it. No interest, no attention. So I think it's important that men, at this point, just realize dating apps are pay to win.
I'm not saying that if you spend $200, you'll get an instant date. I'm saying that I spent $200 and I also spent about three hours looking through profiles with search criteria — putting in a narrow radius around my house, up to nine miles — and then finding a specific comment. I saw this woman who played tennis and said so on her profile. So I sent her a rose and said, "Let's play tennis." And then she matched me back. I guarantee you, if I hadn't spent this $200, I would not have a date with this woman right now. And as annoying as that is, lots of things in life are as simple as spending money and you will get ahead.
Come In and Talk to Me
If you'd like this to be a two-way relationship where I know you and you know me — and that's how I operate now, since probably 90-plus percent of the videos I watch are from people I know, people I've met, and people in my community — then I've got you covered. I have what I believe is the best dating coaching program anywhere in the world. When you join the Jerry Banfield Family, you can ask me all the questions you want. You can post your dating profile. You can post your exact situation. The hardest thing to do is start a new community, and this one is growing. Come in and talk to me. If your dating matters to you, it's worth it.
And if you don't think it's worth it to spend some money to get a date, then sure as hell don't use a dating app. Be out there in person approaching women — you can do that for free in a natural environment. I hope this post has helped you see that you should either prepare to spend the money on a dating app, or not use them, or somehow try to beat the odds. But don't just waste your time on dating apps acting like a regular guy. For more of what I've learned out here actually dating, check out my Dating playlist.