The Guy
you text her on hinge like it's linkedin and wonder why she doesn't respond (do this instead)
tldr: When she matches with you, she already hired you. Texting like you're still in the interview, trading logical info about her bio, kills the attraction. Send something absurd and flirty instead of a polished homework question, because standing out beats sounding safe.
You matched. That's the offer letter. She already hired you.
But you're still writing the cover letter. Still trying to prove you're worth the interview. Still opening your messages app like it's a portal to a second-round interview at McKinsey.
I did this too. Not long ago. I could cold approach a woman in broad daylight, say "hey, how's it going," and 70 to 80% of the time it went well. Then I'd get her on the app and my thumbs would betray me. I'd revert to applicant mode. Every text a mini performance review I was scared to fail.
The mindset shift that fixed it is the whole point of The Guy App. Stop applying. You got the job. Act like the CEO.
why does texting her like a coworker kill the match?
Here's what most of you are doing. You open Hinge. You scan her bio. You find a data point. Then you write the professional-services version of a first move.
"hey, saw you like sushi, what's your favorite spot in town?"
Logical. Polite. Information exchange. That's exactly how you'd make a new guy friend at work. Trade facts, find common ground, build rapport slowly.
It's death with women.
Because that text is homework. It hands her an assignment. She has to think of a restaurant, type it out, sound interesting about it. You made her do labor to reward you for noticing her bio. And referencing her bio is a trap in the first place, because the other 39 guys in her inbox today read the same three lines and wrote the same "so you love hiking?" opener.
You're not standing out. You're filing the same application everyone else filed. In a stack of 40. Every single day.
This is what I call texting like her dad or her HR rep. Correct. Safe. Completely without pulse. I wrote more about the dad-energy problem here, but the short version is: correct and attractive are not the same thing.
what should i send instead of a bio question?
Let me show you. I asked The Guy for three openers for a woman I'm nervous to text because she's, let's say, a ten out of ten. Here's what it gave me next to what you'd normally send.
YOU (interview mode): hey! saw you're into sushi, what's your go-to spot? always looking for new recommendations 🍣
The Guy: i need you to know upfront that i cry after and sometimes during, and there is nothing either of us can do about it
Sit with that for a second.
One of those texts she's read 200 times this month. The other one she's never received in her life.
Here were the other two the app gave me:
"i have a court date on thursday because of a woman who looks exactly like you, so either this is a coincidence or you changed your hair."
"i just got cleared by my doctor to start talking to women again, and you are already testing the limits of that permission."
I know what you're thinking. Because I thought it too. This is insane. It probably is. That's exactly why it works.
why does an absurd opener beat a normal one?
This is Signal Inversion Theory in one move. The polished, safe, high-effort text signals the opposite of what you intend. It says you're trying. It says you need this to go well. It says you rehearsed. Low value.
The absurd text signals the opposite of what it looks like. It looks reckless. It reads as: I have options, I have a life, I'm not auditioning, I find myself funny. You never say any of that. You just radiate it. Energy, not a résumé.
And there's a filter built into it. If she doesn't laugh, if she reacts to the crying line with a flat "ok," you just learned she's not fun to be around. You want that information immediately. Passing her boring-person test isn't a win. I've written about why failing her test on purpose beats passing it, and this is the same mechanism. You're not begging for approval. You're screening.
The other half of it is pure math. If she's attractive and lives in a big city she's getting 30, 40, maybe 50 matches a day. You cannot out-polite that pile. You cannot win by being the most professional applicant in a stack of 50 professional applicants. You go absurd or you go home.
why should a text scare me before i send it?
Here's my rule. If you're not a little scared to send it, it's probably not a good line.
That fear means it carries risk. Risk means it's not the safe, expected, forgettable thing. Playing it safe is the actual sabotage, not the flashy failures. Safe texts don't get rejected. They get nothing. Silence. Which feels better than rejection and is actually worse, because you learned nothing and moved nowhere.
I only started sending lines like this because my co-founder would physically steal my phone, run across the room, type it out, and hit send before I could stop him. That's how the app was born. The first couple times I was genuinely mad at him. Then I'd get a fun, flirty, unhinged response back. Then it happened again. And once you feel that response land, the mindset shifts on its own. You can't un-feel it.
This is what I call The Virgin Factor: the guy who texts like he has nothing to lose, like he genuinely can't tell how this goes, is more attractive than the guy running a smooth playbook. The nervous, ridiculous energy reads as real. The polish reads as sales.
how is a polished text like reopening a sale?
Every clean, careful, proofread message is you reopening a deal that already closed.
Think about the guys who set a date for Friday night, then text Friday morning: "hey! really looking forward to tonight, are we still on?"
That text just handed her the exit. It communicates: are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you don't want to cancel? It implies people cancel on you regularly, so you're checking. You reopened a sale that was already made. You gave her a reason to renegotiate.
Your polished opener does the same thing. She already matched. The deal closed the second she swiped. Then you send three careful sentences trying to re-earn what you already have, and now she's wondering if the match was a mistake. Don't reopen the job interview. You've been hired. Behave hired.
Every text you send should read like the first thing that popped into your head, typed once, sent, then you went back to your actual life. No draft folder. No proofread. No strategy. The best strategy really is no strategy, because the strategy is the tell. She can smell the effort.
what if i've already been ghosted?
The wild part I've watched with our customers, doctors, lawyers, guys with the career and the physique and the good friends, is that they'd reopen a dead chat with something absurd and it worked. A conversation that flatlined weeks ago springs back to life because they finally sent something with a pulse.
The problem was never their life. Their life is great. The gym connects. The career connects. The friends connect. Only the texting doesn't. And it's not because they're not good enough. It's because they're too good at applying and terrible at flirting. Flirting doesn't come naturally to most men over text, where you can overthink a single word for an hour. It comes naturally to women because it's baked into how they talk to their friends.
That gap is the whole game. Close it and everything else you already built finally counts.
Stop filing applications. You got the job the day she matched.
try The Guy at asktheguy.app. paste your conversation, get the version that actually works.
video transcript
You're texting women like you're applying for a job on LinkedIn, and it's absolutely killing you. Here's what you have to understand when you match with a woman on the dating apps. She's essentially already hired you, so you need to exit this interview mode where you're still trying to prove to her that you're worthy of the match, and ultimately, you're worthy of taking her out on dates, showing her a good time, and eventually, hopefully, moving into a relationship.
This is a huge mindset shift that you need to make, and trust me, guys, I am not lecturing you. I was in the same position not very long ago, and it was the mindset shift I needed to make in order to actually start having success with the text communication. Because I was the guy going out there, having what it takes to cold approach in broad daylight, saying, "Hello.
What's up? How's it going?" And I would say probably 70 to 80% of those interactions were positive, and yet still somehow I would fumble with the opening text. I was still in interview mode, and it wasn't until I started using The Guy app, which was, you know, a long developing process through me and my co-founder developing that.
It wasn't until I started implementing the lessons I'm going to talk about in this brief video that I actually saw probably, probably triple the response rates from text. So that's what you have to understand. You're in this applicant mode, still applying for the job. Act as if you're hired and you're the CEO.
Now- One thing I need to explain to you is that I think a lot of you guys are struggling with the text communication even though you've got a really good career, you're in shape, you have solid hobbies, you have fun friends, all that type of stuff. You're probably still struggling because I guarantee you if you open up your Hinge or, God forbid, your Tinder, that a lot of your conversations are probably logical information exchange.
Like, "Oh, hey, I saw on your bio that you like sushi. What's your favorite spot in town?" Now, listen, that is how you should be... Or that is how you will make guy friends, right? Like logical, information-based exchanges. But with women, you need to flirt with them, and that is what The Guy app is helping our customers do, and it's really just helping you get out of your own way.
What you need to understand when it comes to flirting, and I think a lot of this just does not come naturally to men, especially over text, where you can just overthink things so easily. However, with women, I do think it becomes very natural. It's very ingrained in their communication styles with the way they talk to their girlfriends.
So that is what The Guy app is helping you do. It's helping you flirt over text. Now, let me actually give you an example here because at the end of the day, you guys need to see this in action. So here's... I asked The Guy app, link in the bio, link in the description I should say, to give me three openers for a woman who is I'm very nervous to text because she's a ten out of ten, let's say.
Here are three openers it gave me, and then it's going to let me pick one ultimately. So it says, "I need you to know upfront that I cry after and sometimes during, and there is nothing either of us can do about it." Number two: "I have a court date on Thursday because of a woman who looks exactly like you, so either this is a coincidence or you changed your hair."
Number three: "I just got cleared by my doctor to start talking to women again, and you are already testing the limits of that permission." Now, I know what you're saying because I was saying the exact same thing not very long ago. You think this is insane. It probably is, but that's exactly why it's going to work.
Because every other guy who matches with her is going to be sending boring homework style openers that it's gonna take a ton of brain work on her end to engage with. Again, boring, logical information exchange. Guys, it's a dating app. It's not LinkedIn. You are there to have fun, so start having fun.
Throwing these types of grenades into the chat is start, is how you start having fun, and one, if she doesn't react well- Then, you know, you're q- filtering for sense of humor. So if she doesn't have... If she doesn't think this is funny, she's probably not gonna be that fun to chill with, so you don't wanna be hanging out with her necessarily anyway.
Number two, yes, it's insane, sure. Yes, it's absurd. Yes, it's ridiculous. That's the point, and also part of the point is that no other guy is going to be sending anything like this. So that's exactly why you should be sending it, because that's how you stand out in her inbox. And let's be real, guys, if she's very attractive, she's probably getting literally anywhere between 30 to maybe even 50 matches per day if she lives in a big city.
So you gotta go absurd or go home, quite frankly, if you ask me. And so yeah, like I said, the only way... Now, again, if we were to go back and it was me, this is exactly how my co-founder... This is how the app came to be. My co-founder would suggest ridiculous lines like this because I, despite having a really solid entrepreneurial career, being in good shape, having good friends, having fun hobbies, I was still regularly getting ghosted.
And we've seen with our customers, whether they're doctors or lawyers, they were still getting regularly ghosted even though they were also had everything I talked about and were very attractive. It wasn't until they made this mindset shift that they actually started getting results. Honestly, sometimes they would reopen the chat where they had already been ghosted with something ridiculous like this, and then they would actually have a conversation start.
But you have to understand is you should be scared to send it. If you're not scared to send it, it's probably not a good line, actually. And the only way I started sending these types of lines was when my co-founder literally would steal my phone, run away, type it out, and send it, and there was nothing I could do.
And the first couple times this happened, I was mad at him, sure. But then I also got, like, a super fun, flirty response back. And then over time, once you start getting results- That's how you can make the mindset shift. So what you have to know is that every polished text you send is essentially reopening the sale.
It's just like, you know, so many guys we've seen are... They'll set date plans with a girl, say like Friday night, and then they'll text like Friday morning like, "Hey, really looking forward to tonight. Are we still on?" That's the type of energy you're sending with your openers, because that type of text, the are we still on text, communicates like, "Hey, are you sure you wanna do this?
Are you sure you don't wanna cancel?" Um, and it kind of implies that this regularly happens to you. So don't reopen the sale. Don't reopen the job interview, because you've already been hired once you match. And what you'll understand over time is that when you send messages like this that are not polished...
You know, every text you send should be like it's the first thing that popped into your head, and you just typed it out, sent it, and then went about your day. What you'll start to understand with messages like this is that you're communicating that you have options, that you are confident, that you have a fun life, that you don't need to impress her, but you're not saying it.
And when you are just communicating this via like an energy-like way, that is what is going to be very attractive. That is what's gonna help you stand out on the apps, and that is what is going to help you finally start having success, the same way you have success in the gym, in your career, in your social life.
But the dating thing is the one thing that's not connecting. I guarantee you it's everything we are talking about on this channel. Now guys, if you're struggling with the text game, because trust me, no one was struggling more with the text game than I was at a certain point, check out The Guy. Link in the description.
You don't even need to sign up for an account. Just click the link. You can paste in any new match you have. You can get an analysis of any chat that's currently in progress, and you'll get lines sent to you that are gonna help you navigate the text game, get out of your own way, start being fun, start being flirty, and start actually going out on the dates with the women that you really want to go out with.
Trust me, it's life-changing. So yeah, that's all from me in this one, guys. Thanks for watching. I'll see you later. Peace out.