How to look for your special Russian girl on mamba.ru

[TwoBitBandit]

In another thread, Jooky asked me this question:

About your ad on mamba could you tell us more about how you went about it?

Was your profile entirely in Russian?

How much information did you put in your profile?

Did you mention your plans of seeking a wife in your profile, or in your first message? Or did you simply state that you're looking for a serious relationship? Or...?

How long (or short) was your introduction message? What did you say in your introduction?

I ask all this because you attracted a good response rate, so you did something right!

My approach on mamba was seriously not much more than a "Hey let's meet" or "Let's get to know each other" message and the ladies could see what's on my profile which wasn't too much either! Basically it was an invitation to start a chat conversation while I was online. That worked for me, but the key was that I was right there right now. I don't think it's the right approach for someone planning a trip, so I while advise using Russian dating sites, I can't advise using my method.

I think for the guy out here that wants to use the Russian dating site approach, your methods would work better, so let us in on your secrets.  

Jooky, in exchange for letting me crash at your place in Tahoe a couple of years ago I’m going to start a new topic and answer your questions.

On my second-to-last trip to the FSU (over two years ago), I had met all the girls I sought to met and didn’t have an interest in a single one of them.  Having several days remaining in my trip, I decided to improvise a profile on mamba.ru (aka singles.ru and a few other portals) and see if I could scare up some dates.  Surprisingly, I was able to get at least one date a day for the rest of my trip on very short notice, although none of them was a good match because I didn’t filter them at all.

It planted an idea in my mind that I could do a subsequent trip meeting only girls from mamba if I did it right.  To test my plan, I spent some work creating a profile and wrote to about 100 girls in a particular Siberian city just to see what would develop and what kind of response rate I would get.  About 20% of the girls responded, and I spoke with several on the phone.  I didn’t have a serious intent, I just wanted to see if I could find some intelligent, attractive women and keep them interested.  In the end, I ended up with several girls that I would have liked to meet.  (I think I wasn’t as aloof as I wanted, because one of them sent me a long series of SMS message about a month after I abandoned the experiment and chewing me out for dropping the conversation cold turkey.)

This path worked out particularly well for me because I can understand Russian at an advanced level.  I can write in a way that, while perhaps containing some grammatical errors, is far more clear and understandable than machine translation.  I can also call Russian girls on the phone and chat with them in Russian, which is always helpful.

Emboldened with the success of my experiment, I decided to try it for real.  I did the following:

1.  I decided that I needed to clean up my act somewhat to be able to catch the girl I’m looking for.  I hired a personal trainer, and a combination of diet and exercise habits have allowed me to lose 25 pounds, going from 20% body fat to a nice lean 8.5% and gaining muscle mass.  My abs poked through now for the first time since high school.  I went from doing six pull-ups in a single set to doing thirty-one.  I’ve always had a problem smiling, mainly because I didn’t like my teeth.  So, I just paid to get it fixed, I should have done it a long time ago.  

2.   I hired a semi-professional photographer off craigslist and got some great photos of the new lean me.  (I tried getting some of my friends to help me, but I learned that my friends can’t shoot photos: it really does require some artistic talent.)  The pictures I got for my profile came out great.  I got shots in a variety of poses and outfits, including some in a suit and tie.  (Although Americans value informality and often consider ties overkill, Russians place a higher value on formality and successful Russian men often wear ties.)

3.  I really thought hard about the type of woman I wanted to attract.  I wrote about 1000 words on the topic.  I was fairly specific about the type of woman that I was looking for.  I don’t want to offer specific advice here, since everyone’s circumstances are different.

4.  I answered many of the “canned” questions on the mamba profile.  They’re questions like “where did you go to school?” and “where would you like to live” and “what’s your favorite city.”  I later figured out that there’s some sort of cumulative character limit for these questions, so my recommendation is that you skip the “generic” questions and focus on meaningful answers that you can spin to put a positive spin on yourself and expose your personality.

5.  I tried to foresee the questions Russian girls were most likely to ask me.  In my case, I decided they were, “Why are you 37 and still single?” “What’s wrong with American girls?” “Why do you like Russian girls?”  In retrospect I should have also translated my opening letter, but I didn’t do that this time.

6.  I turned my answers to 3-5 over to Anastassia Ash, who posts on this forum.  (She also has a web site:  http://www.regaltranslations.com/)  Anastassia gave me great feedback on my answers, and we went through a couple of editing cycles before she did the translation.

7.  Put all the photos and answers into my profile and turned it on.  Mamba.ru is a free site.

8.  I picked a city in Russia.  I wanted to target a city of at least a million to have the most “targets.”  I chose Nizhny Novgorod, primarily because it was a large city and because the university program there had a short-term program for foreigners who wanted to study Russian.  I decided it would give me something to do during the day when all the girls were at work.  This city also had a direct flight to Frankfurt on Lufthansa, making it easier to get to.  However, there are plenty of other interesting cities one could do this in.  Here’s a list of all the cities in Russia with a population greater than one million.  Obviously, one could also target Belarus or Ukraine: I’ll leave figuring that out as an exercise to the reader.
3   Novosibirsk   1,425,508
4   Nizhny Novgorod   1,311,252
5   Yekaterinburg   1,293,537
6   Samara   1,157,880
7   Omsk   1,134,016
8   Kazan   1,105,289
9   Chelyabinsk   1,077,174
10   Rostov-on-Don   1,068,267

9.  I wrote an introduction letter.  Mamba is a very “chatty” site, and if you write too long of a letter it will turn people off.  I recommend you keep it around 300 words or less.  In retrospect, mine was probably not pointed enough.  A few of the responses were obviously from women who didn’t bother to click through and read my profile.  If I had made my introduction letter more pointed I might have gotten their interest.

10.  I targeted girls from 24-31 and started writing.  I wrote to almost six hundred (no, that’s not a typo) girls, out of approximately five thousand profiles in the age range.  This was about 10% of the women listed on the site in that age range (approximately 5500).  I received responses from about 35% of them, although a large fraction of those weren’t serious.  (Many just wrote one-word or one-line responses back, and a few responded with profanity.)  I have a rule about writing to Russian girls: I don’t write with any girls whose Russian grammar is worse than mine.    I spent an enormous amount of time over six weeks writing letters in Russian.  I became absolutely sick of it.  I’d say I shared a mutual interest with about 10% of the women I’d written after a few letter exchanges.  At this point I'd call them on the phone and chat with them to see how sincere they were.

Some things I noticed or that helped:

1.  Some fraction of the profiles were old and the girls never logged in to see the letter I wrote them.  Once I figured that out, I stopped writing to girls whose last login was more than a month ago.  My response rate was quite a bit higher among women that had used their accounts in the previous week.

2.  I carved out different nights to write initial letters to girls of each age.  For instance, one night I would write all the 26-year-olds.  I’d do a search in mamba for “all 26-year-old girls in Nizhny Novgorod” and look at all 1000 profiles that resulted in.  Then I’d write the most interesting 10% of those.  The reason for this is that then I was sure I saw every available profile in the city.  Looking at all those profiles takes a long time, even if you are fast and have multiple browser windows open like I did.  I'd spend the next few days responding to the initial flood of responses before moving onto the next age.

3.  I wrote everything in Russian.  Like I said, I had an advantage here because I've been studying Russian for five years.  I don’t know what would happen if you tried to start writing ladies in English.  Some of them indicate that they speak English in their profile, but usually it means that they have a very rudimentary knowledge from school.  My experience that the sum of English ability for most of the girls that indicated they spoke English was saying “My name is Oksana!” and “I live in Nizhny Novgorod with my family and my cat.  His name is Dima.”

4.  Sometimes girls would hang up on me the first time I called and they didn't realize who I was right away: they figured it was a wrong number.  I started to send them SMS messages using www.ipipi.com before calling them so that they realized it was me that was about to call.

I spent one to four hours a night almost every night for six weeks doing all this.

At this point you could go visit-many or visit-one, depending on your preference.  I’m not trying to start that debate again here.  In my case, I decided to do visit-many and started lining up dates for my first week in Russia, figuring I would plan out the second week of my two-week trip while I was there.

This technique is definitely from the “graduate school” of chasing Russian girls, and I don’t recommend it to anyone for a first trip.

Good luck and don’t drink too much vodka while you’re there!  They serve it by the bottle instead of the shot glass, ya know!

[BillyB]

I heard people could exchange personal info on mamba.ru and singles.ru but in their terms and conditions people aren't allowed to pass out emails, phone numbers or addresses. I guess they prefer total control but how the hell are people going to meet without disclosing some personal info? Twobit, were you able to pass along phone numbers and email addresses when chatting online with the ladies? If so, did you get caught?

[Aloe]

I heard people could exchange personal info on mamba.ru and singles.ru but in their terms and conditions people aren't allowed to pass out emails, phone numbers or addresses. I guess they prefer total control but how the hell are people going to meet without disclosing some personal info? Twobit, were you able to pass along phone numbers and email addresses when chatting online with the ladies? If so, did you get caught?

thats first time i hear about that, when i was using that site i always gave my phone number and email without any problems, maybe they put that line in TOS to protect their ass in case anything happens, but i never saw them enforce it

[Jooky]

Hey Billy,

I had to look this up because it would be bizarre that this site wouldn't allow the exchange of contact information.

I think you misunderstood the terms and conditions. You're not allowed to 'publish' your direct contact information, in other words you can't post it in a public profile. The Help section explains it. This is exactly the same as on match.com and any other dating site as far as I know. It's done to prevent people from using their public profile for commercial purposes and because of liability issues.

That's all. You can definitely exchange phone numbers and email addresses through their message system.

[GQBlues]

You wouldn't want to be posting personal contact info on your profiles anyway. I've seen people actually give out their personal contact info in codes trying to circumvent site policies or trying to get away from having to pay a fee, only to realize there are indeed nutjobs out there that would take that info, copy their photos and post them on gay & escort sites and the likes...

TBB, both you and BillyB had sure given your respective methods a lot of time and careful considerations, pretty admirable.

[groovlstk]

You can also use these same Russian dating sites to mingle with expat women already here in the US.

If you've used US-based dating sites, you'll be shocked to find that plenty of RW are willing to meet you for coffee or a drink that very same day - so refreshing after having to do the "I'm normal. Really." dance that American women force guys to do before agreeing to hand out so much as a phone #.

[Misha]

9.  I wrote an introduction letter.  Mamba is a very “chatty” site, and if you write too long of a letter it will turn people off.  I recommend you keep it around 300 words or less. 

A lot of the women check their profiles at work. They can take a quick peek, but won't always have enough time to read a loooooong letter  :evil:

[Misha]

If you've used US-based dating sites, you'll be shocked to find that plenty of RW are willing to meet you for coffee or a drink that very same day - so refreshing after having to do the "I'm normal. Really." dance that American women force guys to do before agreeing to hand out so much as a phone #.

That was certainly my experience. If a woman was interested, you could arrange a date within minutes if you were in her city.

[Sculpto]

Great post TBB.

I have used the site extensively and only in English.  Before they added the English interface it was harder because I would have to translate everything.  Now its a bit easier to navigate though the ladies profiles are still partly in Russian.  I just keep the google translate window open.  Many of the ladies have a translater also.  There are men from everywhere already using the site.  Finding English speaking ladies has not been a problem at all.

I never wrote nearly the number of ladies TBB did, probably less than 100, but, I had an excellent response rate, higher than TBB.  But, as he pointed out, often the responses were one liners and went no further.

I did meet IRL one lady.  She initiated contact stating that she would be in SF area in 4 days.  At first I thought, travel scam!  But, she turned out to be real and we hung out a lot.  I have been helping one member who lives in DC navigate that site and he has posted a bit about his results.. he met a lady last week.. had a nice date.. sent her some flowers and he tells me he is taking her out again tomorrow night.  I will leave the rest for him to tell.

There is a certain amount of spam that occurs, but, there is a complaint button and they clearly respond very quickly, banning spammers almost immediately.  I have yet to encounter a scammer, though, I have encountered several ladies who were searching for a sponsor, even though my profile specifically said, not willing to be a sponsor.

The local searches do sometimes bring up people who are not in fact local, but, who are coming or wish to come.  Those are the instances where I cam across ladies looking for a sponsor.  But, the vibe is not at all like it is with the scammers.. they ask about it usually pretty quick and seem to be just as interested in having someone they can trust to arrive to as they are in having the visit itself.

Some profiles are nothing more than one photo and a couple of words.  I NEVER write to them.  I think if there are scammers or pic collectors or email harvesters, those would be the ones.  It doesn't take much to fill out a profile and it is a respect to do so.

I think it is a great site.  If men use it properly and don't act like jerks they can easily have success there.  I first found the site on the advice of my Nigerian friends from Donetsk who used it extensively to meet girls in Donetsk.

As far as exchanging contact info.. no problem at all.  Just do not publish it in your profile.

[MatryoshkaMan]

WOW 2BB, great post, very well outlined! Who needs agencies when we have 2BB's advice! I was super hooked on singles.ru for a few weeks---it was like a drug and I couldn't get enough of it! I was chatting with so many attractive women, I felt like a movie star.

[myrddin]

Just have to say this is one of the best posts I've seen. Kudos to TBB!

This technique is definitely from the “graduate school” of chasing Russian girls, and I don’t recommend it to anyone for a first trip.

At first I thought "why not for a first trip? this is great stuff!" 

Then I recalled that after my first trip I really felt like I had merely gone from freshman to sophomore level.  I did try to contact ladies online beforehand, but I wasn't ready and went about it haphazardly.  Later I tried a similar approach to yours and things changed.   (Aside: I wonder if anyone here has tried this type of approach on a US dating site.)

BTW, I learned awhile ago on any site (dating or networking) to pretty much not bother with profiles that haven't been logged on in the last 10 days or so.

[Sculpto]

i would add that in doing a bit of research for Dave.. I encountered several other R language sites that are NOT mamba network.  I even found one that I must have put a profile on 3 years ago because it logged me in.. I remember doing it but completely forgot about it.  Half a dozen intro letters in the last month.. wrote back and apologized.. crazy stuff

[janic]

TBB, with this thread you did an excellent job! Wow and thanks a lot!

2.   I hired a semi-professional photographer off craigslist and got some great photos of the new lean me.  [...] I got shots in a variety of poses and outfits, including some in a suit and tie.  (Although Americans value informality and often consider ties overkill, Russians place a higher value on formality and successful Russian men often wear ties.)

IMO the semi-pro was a good idea. I also asked a friend (who is a pro-photographer) to take my pictures. The question I've is about the type of pictures: Are they studio-shots or did you shootings in the public? - Personally I decided against studio-shots because I wanted my pictures to look natural. So we went out one afternoon and did a shooting in public places. Unfortunately he had not a lot of time then and it was only one afternoon. I think I will ask him to take some more pictures of me at other places.

About the tie: It is only on very rare occasions that I wear one and so I decided against a tie. I wanted the pictures to show me 'as I am'. But I had him take pictures of me in a Business-outfit. Just that I never used the ones where I actually  wear a jacket. At the moment I've two pictures on my mamba-profile: One with the Jacket hanging over my shoulder and the second one with me wearing chinos and a polo-shirt.

3.  I really thought hard about the type of woman I wanted to attract.  I wrote about 1000 words on the topic.  I was fairly specific about the type of woman that I was looking for.  I don’t want to offer specific advice here, since everyone’s circumstances are different.

Of course circumstances differ, but I'm nevertheless surprised about the extend of your outline. 1000 words are a lot and will be smth like 3 or 4 pages.
Could I ask you to elaborate a little about what you wrote? (In general words)

4.  [...] I later figured out that there’s some sort of cumulative character limit for these questions, [...]
Can you put the limitation into some form of numbers? Are we talking about 1KB or 5 or 10?

In the same context it would be interesting to me how long your blocks of 'About me' and 'About the person I'm looking for' were. Will you please give me some information on that?

7.  Put all the photos

How many pictures?

9.  I wrote an introduction letter [...] around 300 words [...] In retrospect, mine was probably not pointed enough.

THREEHUNDRED WORDS ?!?!? O_O
It surprises me that you got so many replies, because I wonder how many of the women have actually read all of it.

3.  I wrote everything in Russian.  [...] I don’t know what would happen if you tried to start writing ladies in English.

From my own experience - I tried English letters in the beginning of my venture - I can tell you that the response-rate is much lower. I quickly decided to write in Russian....

Some of them indicate that they speak English in their profile, but usually it means that they have a very rudimentary knowledge from school.

Yes, I agree. The entire language-indications are of limited use. On one side because many who state "English", "German" or "Spanish" on their profile have only an very limited knowledge of the language; some think it makes them smth special, if they speak some foreign language without in reality having a clue and the third group are the ones who only indicate "Russian" because they are ashamed of their limited knowledge of the foreign languages they know.

Thanks again for your post!

j.

[TwoBitBandit]

Are they studio-shots or did you shootings in the public?

I also decided against studio shots.  I had all mine taken at a local private university with beautiful landscaping.
 

Of course circumstances differ, but I'm nevertheless surprised about the extend of your outline. 1000 words are a lot and will be smth like 3 or 4 pages.
In the same context it would be interesting to me how long your blocks of 'About me' and 'About the person I'm looking for' were. Will you please give me some information on that?
THREEHUNDRED WORDS ?!?!? O_O

I went and pasted my profile and intro letter into word and counted them.  My profile was 522 words and my intro letter was 120.  So, my earlier estimate was off.
I put everything in the “about me” block and left the “about the person I’m looking for” blank.  I could have split it up, I suppose, but I wanted control of the flow.
I talked about: my city, my work, my hobbies, that I’m looking for a girl to bring to the US, the character of the girl I’m looking for and about the type of relationship I hope to have with my future wife.

How many pictures?

I attached three.

 

Can you put the limitation into some form of numbers? Are we talking about 1KB or 5 or 10?

I didn’t try to figure out what the hard limit was.
It seems like there’s enough space to give one-sentence answers to every question.  I ran into problems when I gave 2-3 sentence answers to each question.  My advice: put your answers in English in your profile and make sure you can save it.  Then, it’s likely that the Russian translation will also fit.

[rambler]

I like Mamba and have made a very good contact in London and another in Donetsk in just a few days. A meeting for next week was arranged quite easily, no outrageous demands either ! About 40 women have messaged me, mid twenties on up to early fifties, never married or divorced with kids. 

It seems to be much less formal than EM and if the girls are interested they are straight out up front about it. I think this has a lot to do with choice of relationship types available in the menus!! On EM they all seem to have look as if they are dying to get married and have 2.6 babies, well on Mamba that may well be true for some  but ....  not others. 

R

[Sculpto]

I would advise to not give your personal email address to anyone until you have enough chat to be sure they are for real.  If they are asking for your email addy in the first or second mail claiming it is easier for them they are in fact mining email addresses for spam or scam attempts.  That only happened once, maybe twice to me on that site.. but.. just a small rule to keep in mind to avoid any chance for a problem.

[janic]

I would advise to not give your personal email address to anyone until you have enough chat to be sure they are for real.  If they are asking for your email addy in the first or second mail claiming it is easier for them they are in fact mining email addresses for spam or scam attempts.  That only happened once, maybe twice to me on that site.. but.. just a small rule to keep in mind to avoid any chance for a problem.

I would offer two other solutions you can use either alone or in combination:

a) Set up an eMail-account just for the purpose of communicating with the ladies. It's an easy way to keep things apart. If you some day found a woman you are really interested in, you can give her your 'real' eMail-address.

b) http://www.spamgourmet.com offers disposable eMail-addresses for free. It's a quite sophisticated system and I already use it for several years for a lot of stuff I do on the net and never had any trouble with them. Even my mamba-account is based on a spamgourmet address....

How spamgourmet works

If you give your email address to everyone, you are bound to receive spam emails, and you won't know where they came from. Wouldn't it be convenient to give a different email address to every business or web site, while getting all your email as before? Wouldn't it be easiest to assume the address will be given to spammers, and have it work as a spam blocker by shutting off automatically unless you decide otherwise?

That's exactly what spamgourmet offers! There is nothing to install on your computer, and once you're set up, it's likely you won't ever have to come back here. This is what makes spamgourmet one of the most convenient and effective anti-spam tools available.

Protect yourself from spam in three easy steps:

1. [...] create a spamgourmet account. Enter your user name and the email address you want to be protected. [...]

2. Spamgourmet will forward to this address all the emails sent to your spamgourmet disposable addresses -- that way you don't have to tell anyone else what it is -- this is why it's called the protected address. Of course, this protected address must exist. That's why you have to confirm it. You'll receive an email asking you to confirm.

3. After you have confirmed your protected address, you can give out self-destructing disposable email addresses whenever you want. The disposable addresses are like:

someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com

where someword is a word you have never used before, x (optional) is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (up to 20, and the number 3 will be used if you leave it out), and user is your username.

For example, if your user name is "spamcowboy", and BigCorp wants you to give them your email address (on the web, on the phone, at a store - it doesn't matter), instead of giving them your protected address, give them this one:

frombigcorp.3.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
(and frombigcorp.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com will work the same way)

This disposable email address will be created here the first time BigCorp uses it (you don't have to do anything to create it), and you'll receive at most 3 messages, forwarded to your protected address. The rest will be indelicately consumed.

You can reload the addresses, so they can in fact live forever. And you can even send eMail using the spamgourmet-address....

Greets, j.

[TwoBitBandit]

I wanted to offer a couple of more ideas that I found helpful.

The first is (if you’re writing in Russian) to get hold of the Russian language package for Microsoft Word.  It caught a lot of my spelling and grammar errors.

The second: I always did my writing in MS Word, then pasted the result into the browser window.   Every time I wrote something, I’d leave it in that document.  It’s often the case that women ask the same questions, so every time that happened I’d just scroll up until I found the previous time I’d answered that question and use the same text in my response.

I always like to use a woman’s name when I write her.  However, I was always afraid that I’d insert Yulia’s name in my letter to Svetlana.  The way I solved this is to change the color of any woman’s name I wrote to red immediately after I typed it.  That way, if I reused that text I’d have a bright reminder to change that name before I cut/pasted it into my browser.

I have yet to encounter a scammer, though, I have encountered several ladies who were searching for a sponsor, even though my profile specifically said, not willing to be a sponsor.

I encountered one.  The very first time I used mamba I was on a trip where I completely ran out of women to meet.  So, I created a profile on mamba and started trolling for dates.  One of the girls who agreed to meet me was this very hot 28-year-old lawyer.  I met her.  She showed up dressed to the nines: she was hot.  I had a fun meeting with her, and she even spoke a bit of English which made it easier.  I actually decided she wasn’t a match for me, but I was proud of myself for scoring such a hot and intelligent girl on short notice.

Later, I was talking to the agency owner I had been working with, and was describing my date with her.  I went into great detail about this girl.  After a few minutes, the agency owner asked me, “Is her name Inna?”  I was surprised by the question, but she was right: the girl’s name was Inna.  I thought that surely we must still be talking about different girls: how in the world could this agency owner possibly know about a girl that I had met on a Russian language site?  The final proof was when we decided to compare phone numbers: each of us had Inna’s phone number saved in our respective phones.  Sure enough, they matched: we were talking about the same girl.

The story with Inna and her mother is that they had scammed many foreigners out of a lot of money.  Inna was already engaged to a westerner once, and Inna’s mother three times.  This agency owner claimed that they had scammed a quarter of a million dollars between them.  (I have no way to verify if it was true, but this owner was as honest as agency owners come.)

It looks like Inna is still available, although she’s changed the name on her profile to “Polina.”  Good luck guys, have at it!
http://love.mail.ru/zolotoamura/
http://www.rosebrides.com/brides/inna-20588.html

So, there are scammers on mamba.  It’s just that the percentage is very low.  As always, caveat emptor.

Some profiles are nothing more than one photo and a couple of words.  I NEVER write to them.  I think if there are scammers or pic collectors or email harvesters, those would be the ones.  It doesn't take much to fill out a profile and it is a respect to do so.

I’d say that Russians tend to use these profiles differently.  On western sites (e.g., match.com), people actually read all that stuff you write in your profile.  If you don’t fill it out, you’ll get almost zero responses.

Russians, for whatever reason, often don’t write much in their profile.

I met a number of sincere, intelligent, educated girls that didn’t write anything in their profile, or perhaps only wrote a few words like, “I’m an intelligent, beautiful girl,” or “I’m looking for a REAL man.”  However, these girls always filled out all the “checkbox” parts of the form completely.

The girls who only filled out their name, that they’re looking for a guy and attached a picture were all insincere if they also left the "canned checkbox" questions blank.  Sculpto, if that’s what you’re saying I agree with you.  I just recommend that you don’t overlook profiles that have no written text as long as they filed out most or all of the rest of the “canned” questions.