Why Inner Circle Replaces a Plain Hey Opener

Inner Circle says first messages of just "hey", "hi" or "hello" get a very low response rate. So under a campaign it calls #TryMoreThanHi, it replaces a bare greeting with a line more likely to get attention, and it tells your match that you did not write that line. You avoid the swap by sending more than a greeting, such as a comment on her pictures or on something she wrote about herself.

If your whole first message is a greeting, it never reaches her as you typed it. Inner Circle puts a pick-up line in its place, the kind of line that is meant to get a reaction.

Here is the part most men miss. The app also tells her you did not write it. So she is not reading a funny line from you. She is reading a line from Inner Circle, with a note saying it is not yours.

That is worse than it sounds. The swap does not make you look witty. It tells her the first words she got from you were not really from you, which is a strange way to start a conversation with a woman you wanted to meet.

A greeting gives her nothing to answer. She can say "hey" back, and then you are exactly where you started.

It also looks like every other message she gets. A woman with a busy inbox sees a stack of greetings from men she knows nothing about. None of them tells her anything, so none of them stands out, and she answers the one that gave her a reason to.

a dating coach's first messages share a few traits, and a greeting has none of them. They are light and short. They are about the two of you as a man and a woman, not small talk like asking how her day was. And they are personal to her, about something on her page or something she chose to do.

a dating coach's method is simple. Before you write anything, scroll through her page and look for something unusual you can comment on, or better, tease her about.

It might be a photo that tells a story, like a woman at the wheel of a boat or covered in clay at a pottery class. It might be a line she wrote, a strong opinion about pizza or a claim that she never loses at board games. Anything she put there on purpose is fair game, because she chose to show it.

His rule of thumb is that commenting on what she wrote usually works better than commenting on a photo. It reads as more genuine and less about her looks. There are exceptions, but it is a good default.

Keep it short. If you can say it in ten words, do not use thirty.

A few examples of the shape, not lines to copy word for word.

She wrote that she makes the best carbonara in the city. "That is a bold claim. I will need proof, or at least the recipe."

Her second photo has her grinning at the top of a climbing wall. "You look far too pleased with yourself up there. Deserved, though."

She says she is always the first on the dance floor. "Good to know. I will make sure I am the second."

Each one is about her, takes her a few seconds to answer, and has a little play in it. None of them could be sent to any other woman on the app, which is the whole point.

You do not have to invent something original every time. a dating coach keeps first messages that work for certain kinds of women and reuses them.

The difference is that his stock lines still point at something she did. A line about travel can go to every woman whose photos are full of airports and beaches, and it still reads as personal, because it is about her choices. A greeting is about nobody.

Adding an emoji, a second "hey" or an exclamation mark misses the point. The feature exists because a bare greeting does not work, and a slightly longer greeting does not work either.

Treat the swap as a free lesson. If Inner Circle had to rewrite your opener, the opener was the problem. Spend thirty seconds on her page, find one thing worth mentioning, and write a sentence about it. That sentence is yours, she can answer it, and it gives the conversation somewhere to go.