How To Get 20 Dates In 30 Days

Written by Dominic Lee

I have consulted with a lot of companies and entrepreneurs on outsourcing - I thought I knew it all: call centers, virtual assitance, customer support, product manufacturing, website designs…

This guy Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hours Work Week totally kicked my butt - he outsourced online dating.

Here’s a few snippets of a recent interview on Tim about this experiment:

Donovan: I hear you outsourced your online dating. Such a crazy concept. Could you explain the general idea?

Tim: Online dating is largely a numbers game, so I hired virtual teams of people all over the world India, Philippines, Jamaica, Canada, and others to compete against each other and set dates for me on an online calendar. Each of them were assigned one of my accounts on either online dating sites like Match.com, or on social networking sites like Friendster, and there would be a $150 bonus to whichever team set the most good dates. Excluding the bonus, the entire experiment cost less than $200 dollars.

Did you just a cold turkey on the outsourcing, or did you work out a system first?

I worked out a one-page “rules and regulations” sheet with all of the goals and guidelines, being sure to include links to girls I found attractive, must-haves and must-not-haves, etc. I moved all of my online to the teams at once. The experiment was 4 weeks long, and I got more than 20 dates. It was unreal. The best part was that I compressed all of those into three days and had all of the dates within 1/2 mile of my house.

What is the best word of advice for guys looking to meet women online?

Rotate your profile photo, use direct subject lines for email, and focus on volume. I had once used clever, time-consuming subject lines that got nowhere, then one Filipino pulled in jaw-dropping results with “looking for a date?” as the subject. Test and tweak, test and tweak. In the end, look at the numbers.

How did outsourcing work for getting the types of women that you’re attracted to?

It worked extremely well. Perhaps a 70% hit rate, which is far better than what I was averaging with clubs, bars, parties, and the like. No comparison.

What sites did you use and which ones had the best results for you?

Match.com has the most profiles but also the most competition. It’s good for short emails with direct subject lines. The social networking sites consumed more time but ultimately resulted in more dates.

Did any problems arise while outsourcing your dating?

Only once. One of the outsourcers neglected to put a date in the calendar, and I happened to be in the spot where the girl and I were supposed to meet at the right time. She walked right up to me when I was writing on my laptop and started chatting like an old friend. I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I felt really badly about it, but the entire 4-week process was after all a social experiment. If I hadn’t had any problems, I would have felt like I hadn’t tried hard enough.

I’ll add, though, that every girl I had a second date with was told about the outsourcing. This was part of my litmus test. I needed a girl with the same odd sense-of-humor that I have, and if she couldn’t find the outsourcing at least a bit funny, we wouldn’t last anyway. The result? Most of the girls called me a jerk with a smile but found it pretty damn funny. Those are the keepers who will keep me sane when I take myself and the world too seriously.

Wow, there’s some outsourcing right there.