Earlier this year, I received a request from a friend to look into his profile. He had just upgraded to premium and was frustrated that he felt like he was now getting less likes than he had prior to upgrading. Concerned we might have a serious bug, I dug into his account to see what was going on.
I pulled up a report of the swipe history on his account and found that as soon as he upgraded to premium, he started receiving more than double the daily views he had been receiving prior to upgrading. Good, no bugs.
What I found next was an all too common problem, especially in male profiles. His profile was performing in the bottom 2% of all accounts on Mutual. Nobody was liking him despite significantly more views on his profile after paying for premium. Unfortunately 2 x 0 is still 0.
Why!? You can point to women being too picky and only wanting men that can arm-wrestle Chris Hemsworth. You can blame us for not building an app that cracked the illusive secrets to online dating. You can even blame God for not blessing you to be taller, richer, or more successful. Instead of placing blame, we want to help you improve your chances and your perspective by focusing on what you can control.
Your Circle of Influence
I’m a big fan of Steven Covey, and one of his simplest yet most effective teachings is regarding your “Circle of Concern” vs your “Circle of Influence”.
“Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.
Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts on their Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in their environment, and the circumstances over which they have no control.”
-7 Habits of Highly Effective People
What Covey is trying to teach is that if you want to be successful, focus your energy on what you can actually control. We can worry all day about the national debt or nuclear war, but it’s unlikely we can actually do much about those things.
So what actually is within your circle of influence that you can actually control on Mutual? Actually a lot. You can control how often you use the app. You can control how intentional you are with how you use the app. You can even invest in yourself and upgrade to premium and become a power user.
I want to focus on something even more important: You can control what your profile photos look like.
In her book “Executive Presence,” Sylvia Ann Hewlett analyzes what actually matters in the cutthroat business leader environment. In studies she found that less than 5% of business leaders considered appearance to be the core characteristic contributing to their success.
However the qualitative data showed that appearance was typically the filter through which all our other positive attributes were evaluated. In other words, get your appearance wrong and no one will even bother to assess the other good things about you.
I’d like to make the argument that dating and success in business aren’t all that different in this aspect. If you get your photos wrong, especially that critical first photo, you likely won’t get the chance to showcase the rest of your profile to your potential suitor. Our data backs this up. Of the people who view your first photo, around ½ of them take the time to look at your second photo. Only ⅕ of them make it to your last photo before swiping. Lead with your very best photo!
In the real world, if you knew that you’d be having a series of 2 minute speed-dates with a room full of the girls of your dreams. What would you do? I’ll tell you what I would do. I’d go get a haircut. I’d find or even buy an outfit that made me look my best. I’d be 100% on my hygiene game. I’d probably even text my sister or a cute girl that had pity on me and get some advice on if I was presentable enough or not.
On Mutual we’ve created the most incredible network for single members of The Church on the planet. People trust our platform. We are showing your profile to hundreds or even thousands of amazing people each week. The sad reality is that far too many people don’t take setting their profile up seriously.
I’ve done my share of profile approvals on Mutual for many years now and the amount of people who upload the first selfie on their phone, or worse yet, take a couple quick selfies while setting up their profile is frankly disappointing. (Yes we know that you JUST took that picture. You are wearing the same outfit that you just verified your account with in the dark of your bedroom at 1am.)
If you don’t take yourself seriously, why do you expect anyone else to?
We’re here to help
Our team cares deeply about your success. We want you to have an amazing experience on our app. We want you to meet wonderful people, and when you are ready, hopefully, meet your spouse. (And yes, after you meet that spouse, we want you to tell everyone you met them on Mutual. 😉)
We recognize that we have an immense circle of influence on your dating success, and we recognize that we owe it to you, our community members, to provide a better environment for your success.
We have dozens of potential updates and features that we are researching and working on that I believe will make Mutual a much better place today and in the upcoming months and years. I hope you may have noticed some of the updates we released just this summer. You can see a review our most recent updates here.
What are popular profiles doing right that you aren’t?
I’ve done enough preaching. Do your photo selections actually matter? Yes they do.
Using the Apple AI features, I ran an analysis on the leading photo of the top 1000 most liked and least liked Male profiles under the age of 40. This analysis used the following “quality” indicators and had no gauge of the level of attractiveness of the profiles examined.1
Face Capture Quality
Apple provides AI to developers called “Face Capture Quality”. The model works by providing a holistic measure that considers scene lighting, blur, occlusion, expression, pose, focus, and more. In simple terms, this score helps us know how good of an image this is. Dark, blurry photos, where you aren’t looking towards the camera will have scores closer to 0. Well-lit photos, with your face visible, will have scores closer to 1.
Here is an example of the model at work in Apple’s docs.
In our experiments, we found a strong correlation between popular profiles and higher face capture quality scores.
Popular profiles had 1.5x photos with a capture score higher than 0.6 (In our internal testing, we found that our very best photos usually fell between a 0.5 and a 0.6). A whopping 57% of all leading photos on popular photos achieved what we consider an excellent quality score of 0.5 or higher.
We found strong results on the opposite end of the spectrum as well. Unpopular profiles had significantly more profiles with low face capture quality scores. Nearly 1/3rd of all unpopular profiles had a score under 0.4, compared to just over 1/5th of popular profiles. We warn you about your capture quality when it is below 0.35. Our statistics show despite the warning, less than 30% of those who receive it take the time to upload a better photo.
Selfies/Zoomed In Photos
Believe it or not, capture quality wasn’t the strongest signal our team found when running this photo analysis experiment. An even stronger offender has been at work sabotaging the profiles of our members: Selfies.
You can hold whatever opinion you want about selfies, but our statistics signal that selfies as your leading image have a strong correlation with getting less likes.
In our data we defined a selfie as an image in which the face consumed more than 55% of the width of the screen. We found that unpopular profiles were almost 3x as likely to use a selfie as their leading image in comparison to the popular profiles. In addition to this we found that the average size of the face in the selfies was 8.5% larger in the unpopular profiles. In total 21% of the unpopular profiles in the experiment led with selfies.
Effort Matters
Returning to the story that we started with. After discovering that my friend’s profile was underperforming, I pulled open his profile and took a look at his photos. His first photo was making a cringy duck face, and that same photo was repeated multiple times in his profile. My guess is the majority of ladies just didn’t dig the photo.
Effort matters. Invest in yourself and take some time to craft the best profile you possibly can. That may mean you need to experiment regularly with which photo you lead with. You’ll likely make some mistakes, but that’s okay. Here is a quick list of a few things we recommend you do to maximize your success.
- Use photos that are crisp, well lit, and have you in them
- Use full body shots instead of selfies
- Smile in your pictures
- Avoid group photos.
- Use a diverse range of body poses and shots that showcase your positive traits
- Flex your faith. This app is for members of the church, it’s the reason people are here.
- Update and experiment with your profile regularly.
- Don’t lead with your goofy picture
- Ask friends to review your profile
Ultimately, you are a child of God, with divine potential and an eternal destiny. A single picture of you will never adequately capture the beauty and uniqueness that is born into each of you.
That photo can be the gateway to someone getting to know more about you. That photo, if you do find success on our app, will be the very first impression your future spouse will have of you.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw my wife. I remember exactly what she was wearing as she came down a staircase. I remember the way she did her hair that day. I remember her smile. She took my breath away and that set me down a path that I would follow in courting her that would lead to us getting married in the temple.
How will your wife remember you?
- Apple doesn’t have any public models on attractiveness. We do use content moderation models from another 3rd party AI partner to keep Mutual 100% pornography-free, and to make sure that profiles aren’t overly sexual or suggestive, but that’s a topic for another article another day. ↩︎
Michael Patterson
Michael is Chief Technology Officer for Mutual. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Computer Science in 2016. As a Senior in college, he was a member of the original development team that launched Mutual. Michael loves to run, read, practice martial arts, and spend time with his wife and 3 kids in Utah Valley.
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