So, a bit of a confession.

I work in IT. I manage huge projects for a living, usually for commercial teams selling things. I have spent 30 years looking at pipelines, funnels, conversion rates and the particular silence of a client who has decided not to renew. When I started on the app I had no idea what I was doing, and by the second month I'd noticed that I was making the same mistakes I'd have fired a junior salesperson for: no qualification, no stage gates, no record of who said what, and a tendency to book expensive meetings with people who had shown no intention of buying.

My goal was modest. One woman, maybe two, I could see on a semi-regular basis. I don't have room for a full relationship – I've always ended up prioritising work, which hasn't been great for the several lovely women I've dated seriously – and I've no interest in a string of one-night stands or the paid alternative. Something in between, with someone I liked, that neither of us had to pretend was more than it was.

I realised that I needed a way to manage my schedule while understanding who I was meeting. Basically… I needed a CRM.

In my head it's the Board. There are women I've met, escalated with or agreed to, and who still confirm dates. Women I've had coffee with and have a dinner booked. Women I like and am messaging, before a coffee's been scheduled. And a column of women I'm no longer meeting or chatting with – which is where these stories come from.

Each person has an entry, and the entry has the things the app tells you about her, the things she's told me, and the things we've done. The third column is the only one that matters. The first two are what this entry is about.

The stats

Every profile on the app has a small box of numbers that most men scroll past. I scrolled past it for a month. Here's what it says, and what it means.

Join date. Tenure. Two years on the app is a different person from two months, in ways that cut both directions.

Last login. If it's today, she's active. If it's three weeks ago and she's warm on LINE, she's consolidated onto LINE – good sign. If it's three weeks ago and she's silent on LINE, she's gone.

Inbound. The number of men who've opened a conversation with her. Not messages – conversations. Two hundred is normal. Seven hundred means she's been there a while, or she's very pretty, or both.

Outbound. The number of men she's opened conversations with. This is the one to look at first. Zero is the norm for a woman who gets plenty of inbound. Twenty is a woman who's seen someone she liked. Eight hundred and fifty-nine is a business.

Reply rate. Of the men who wrote to her, the share she wrote back to. This is the whole thing. Four percent, eight percent: she's filtering hard, and if you're in it, that means something. Thirty percent: she's open. Eighty-five percent: she needs the volume, and you're volume.

Board posts. The app has a message board where people advertise availability. Women who post on it are running a funnel. Zero is what you want.

Reports. The app lets users report each other, by category: unpleasant, late, cancelled, photo doesn't match, operator, and so on. One or two I discount – some men file one when they don't get what they wanted. Two cancellations is a pattern. "Operator" is a stop.

None of these tell you whether she's nice, or whether she'll like you. They do give an indication of what she may be on the app for, which is the question that determines whether the nice matters.

The archetypes

After enough rows, the stats sort themselves into people.

The quiet-selective. Low reply rate, zero outbound, zero board, long tenure, clean. She's answered a dozen men in a year and you're one of them. This is the profile every man on the app is looking for and almost none of them can read. She is also, reliably, nervous for the first ten minutes of the coffee and lovely for the next twenty.

The volume player. High reply rate, high outbound, board posts, a few reports. She's not scamming anyone – she turns up and she's pleasant – but you're a customer, and you'll be treated with exactly the warmth a good business treats its customers. Aya.

The dinner farmer. Low-ish stats, warm thread, accepts your terms at once, then asks to double the dinner rate straight after coffee and lets everything else recede politely into "later." Noa. The signature is the conjunction: raise the middle, defer the end.

The fast-mover. Profile says 積極的. "Either is fine" before you've met. Converts quickly, may not stick. Fun, and a different bet.

The one who negotiates upward before meeting. Two did it before we'd met – one to be judged at coffee, one with a great coffee and dinner behind her. Two more did it straight after coffee, on the dinner rate. All four are gone. I draw no conclusions. I note a pattern with a mild expression.

The tests

The stats get her onto the Board. The tests decide where she sits.

The repair test. Everyone declines a date eventually. What matters is whether she declines with something – "not the 7th, but the 9th?" – or declines with nothing. A soft no plus a specific alternative is a repair; it's what someone does when they want to keep the thread. A bare 難しいです is a data point. Twice is a decision.

The framing. Before the first dinner I send a message along the lines of: I'd love this to grow into more over time, but for tonight I'm fine with just dinner – entirely up to you. It's a proposal and a probe at once. "Either is fine" is yes. "Dinner for now, and slowly" is yes-not-yet. Silence on that message while she answers everything else is a no delivered the way people on the app deliver them.

The day-before confirmation. Cheapest cancellation test there is. Ask on the 8th, not the 9th.

The coffee. Thirty minutes. Whatever the stats say, whatever the thread says, this is where you find out if she's the woman from the messages – and, less comfortably, whether you're the man from yours.

People are on the app for different reasons, and the whole game is finding someone whose reasons line up with yours. Most of that is fluency. The ecosystem has a vocabulary – kaoawase, kenzen, otona, "either is fine," mada chotto hayai kana – and the question is whether you can say clearly what you're looking for and read what's actually being offered back. The vast majority of men and women on there want the same thing: to find what they came for, safely, conveniently, and without wasting a month on someone who came for something else. Noa was lovely. She just wasn't what I was looking for, and I wasn't what she was. The Board is how I keep track of that. Meeting someone whose goals don't match yours isn't a moral failing on anyone's part; it's just a bad use of two people's evenings.