Stop using passport photos and one-liners in your dating profile — Coffee Meets Bagel’s CEOs give 3 tips to stand out

A photo tells a thousand words, and having more than two photos ups your chances of getting a solid match, the CEOs said.

Juay said that photos give people important information that helps them make a smart decision about whether to swipe right, so CMB users have to upload at least two pictures.

The first order of business is to ensure that all pictures are of yourself, or risk getting barred from the app.

“Users who put out images that are not human — that means it could be anime photos, part of a scenery, or a backdrop — they get hidden and banned,” Juay said.

And for the two pictures, Juay and Yang have strict dos and don’ts.

Juay said ensuring that your photos don’t show a side view of your face, or obscure your face, is the “lowest hanging fruit.”

“Then, of course, if you want to stand out, it cannot be just a passport photo of yourself, where you don’t look attractive at all,” she said. “If you like to cook, if you like to do gardening, you like to do rock climbing or kayaking, show yourself in the photo doing the activity.”

Juay added that users should not have other people in the photos they have on their dating app profiles.

Yang recommended keeping the photos more conservative for serious dating apps like CMB.

“Some of those selfies that I see on the other apps, where they’re taking a picture in the mirror, almost half naked, that’s probably not appropriate for the community that we have,” he said.

Supplementing photos with some fun facts about yourself is also important, the execs said.

“Even if you go from just zero to one prompt, there’s a very big difference in connection rates,” Yang said.

Daters with longer prompt answers that contain more than one sentence get 54% more likes, and daters with at least one prompt filled out are twice as likely to find a match, CMB’s press representative told Business Insider.

“The more you fill out your profile, the more people who read your profile can understand about your personal interests, your traits, and your aspirations. It’s more telling about yourself,” Juay said.

The key is for the prompts to be substantial.

“If you say, ‘I am a Virgo,’ and you stop at that, it doesn’t say anything,” Juay said. “You have to actually extend it out a little bit with at least one more sentence, like ‘I’m a Virgo who likes to do something.'”

The executives’ last bit of advice for dating app profiles was to be judicious with dealbreakers.

The app allows users to set several dealbreakers, such as gender, age range, height, ethnicity, religion, relationship goals, and proximity.

“Examples of dealbreakers would be, say, religion,” Juay said. “If you’re a Christian, and you only want to date a fellow Christian, that is fair.”

“Or relationship goals, some people especially filter out for marriage because they have marriage in mind. Or people are very clear about family goals, like whether they want children,” she added.

Other filters, like height or education, should be applied thoughtfully, Juay said.

“I’ve seen so many happy couples where there’s a mismatch in height expectations, but they have been happily married because height really doesn’t matter,” she said.

Education or job titles, too, should not make or break the match. The bulk of CMB’s users, she said, are between 25 and 32 years old, a stage in life when education and jobs are transient.

“You can always go for a higher degree or you get promoted along the way, but not at age 28 years old, where everybody’s probably still really early in their career,” she said.

She said, “I know of users who are very strict; they have a really, really long list of filters, which is not helping them.”