The Youngest Dating Coach, Working at the "Bad Boys Academy" | What Is He Thinking at 22? (Part 5)

He has been teaching guys how to pick up girls since he was 18.

Editor's note: On June 20 we launched the "QDaily Big Survey: College Students" series. Across dozens of articles we will look at what college students spend, whom they love, how they work, what confuses them, and how they treat the virtual world. A large part of the series is made up of the individual stories of the 50 students we interviewed. This is the fifth — a dating coach who has been teaching guys how to pick up girls since he was 18.

"Made close to a million yuan. A food buff who has traveled to dozens of countries. From a '985' university. A bona fide dating coach with Level 10 certificates in both piano and cello. Speaks three languages." That is how Niss introduces himself on Zhihu, where he has collected 32,740 upvotes and 12,196 thank-yous across 183 answers.

He has done everything on that list at the age of 20. He took a year off school to start a business, and he is still a sophomore in the math department at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu.

Talking to Niss, you keep losing track of who you are talking to. His voice is young and lively, with all the energy of a 20-year-old. Then he says that a company is a protective shell that can absorb responsibility, and that he now has to answer to his partners, and he no longer sounds 20 at all. He understands money better than his peers do, too. But what pleases him most is holding forth on society and human nature — and that urge to explain is still very much adolescent.

The summer after he finished high school, Niss became a dating coach at Bad Boys Academy, a website that teaches men online how to pursue women. You may wonder how an 18-year-old teaches people aged 18 to 26 how to date — where did he get the goods? His answer is simple: "Field experience." He had more than 10,000 students online, each paying 1,000 yuan in tuition. He no longer has time to answer everyone's questions after class. "My time is worth a lot more now than it was then," he says. Now he only occasionally runs a livestream and takes questions all at once.

Niss knows how to cultivate other people's trust, the reporter across the table included. He soon told me about his other skill: reselling secondhand luxury goods. In his experience the margin runs 20% to 40% of the original price — an item that sold for 10,000 yuan he would buy for 3,000 to 4,000 and sell for 6,000 to 7,000. In the end, he says, the business runs on the credibility he has built up over the years.

He is out of luxury goods now, because the competition got too fierce. He is busy running three sub-projects under the NiSS team, named after himself, and he plans to invest in a few seed-round internet projects.

For all the money he has made, Niss holds only two debit cards, and the one he carries never has more than 600 yuan in it; he withdraws 500 and tops it up again once that is gone. He is extremely careful with money: if he lost his ID card and his bank card together, he reasons, the damage would be serious.

When this summer ends, Niss goes back to campus. "I think I did something really cool with my year off. If I hadn't done it, I would definitely have regretted it," he says.

After the interview, when we told Niss his story might run as a Q&A, he was reluctant. Good or bad, he said, he wanted to hear someone's judgment of him as a person.

Q = QDaily

N = Niss

Q: How did you become a dating coach?

N: In high school I came across a website that taught men how to date. I read some of the posts and felt their approach was a lot like mine, so I wrote a few posts myself. The administrator thought I sounded reliable, and I became a VIP coach. It was a paid academy, not bad at all. I stayed three or four months, writing a post every few days when I had time. Later the top-ranked team there decided I was reliable and asked me to join them.

Q: What did your posts say?

N: For instance, I'd say that when a guy is with a girl, walking up and confessing that he likes her is useless — she still feels nothing. What he has to do is attract her, show his strengths, and it's those strengths that make a girl like him.

Take the cat-and-string theory of attraction. Say there's a kitten and you hand it a ball of yarn: it won't care much, it'll bat the thing around for a while and drop it. But dangle a string, and the kitten jumps, touches it, can't get hold of it — now it wants to explore you more. You've switched on its curiosity. That's a completely different thing.

Then there's push-pull. For instance, I'll tell a girl, "From your photos I thought you'd be cold and distant, but spending time with you, you're actually pretty cute." That's pushing you away first and then pulling you back. It makes you feel something, and you get curious.

There are many ways to create attraction — I keep a whole list — but they all come down to showing off a guy's strengths. For the methods you still have to take my course.

Q: How many students do you have?

N: With my previous team I taught more than 10,000. I teach both online and offline. The online course is 1,000 yuan and includes the full curriculum plus questions answered by a coach. The offline course is three days for 4,999 yuan and adds a makeover, coach Q&A, and everything in the online course. I thought that was a bit expensive for most people, so I later built my own course, the N9 Dating Model, at half the price.

Q: With more than 10,000 students, can you answer everyone's questions?

N: At first I worried there would be more questions than I could handle. It turned out that few people ask anything after a lesson — a class of 50 or 60 usually produces one or two questions. Most are too embarrassed to ask, and the course itself solves most of their problems anyway.

Q: What if people who take the course pass it on to others?

N: Think about it. Even a woman wouldn't want to admit she's learning how to chase men, and a man wants to admit it even less. Nobody shares this, not even the most popular posts, because nobody wants to say, "I took a class on dating." That part is rather funny.

Q: If nobody shares it, how do people hear about you?

N: Plenty of channels, Zhihu included. Back when I was with my old team we also had videos, and my posts were on the website, so I built up a lot of followers.

Q: Why is there no place that teaches girls how to chase guys?

N: Some people do teach girls how to chase guys, but it comes off as teaching them to be a scheming, fake-sweet "green tea bitch," and girls won't pay for that. Girls spend their money on skincare and clothes, because they care about how they look, while guys spend theirs on other things, games and so on. And in the course of a relationship a guy carries far higher costs than a girl does, so guys are more willing to pay for a class that improves their odds.

Q: What feedback do you get from people who have taken your course?

N: The feedback is good. If they win the girl over, they're very grateful. But a "good" result is hard to define — if a guy gets the girl by stealing her from someone else, does that count as good?

I don't really need to ask for feedback, because 1,000 yuan is not a casual sum. It's two people eating out at 100 yuan a head, five meals with a girl. If someone hands me that much and learns nothing, he'll be demanding a refund.

Q: How old are most of your students?

N: Mostly 18 to 26.

Q: At 18 you were teaching people older than you how to date. How did you pull that off?

N: Back then it was all field experience. Some people cram for a year in their final year of high school and do very well on the college entrance exam; others spend three years and still do badly. It's a question of how fast you learn. But people in this industry generally have less education — mostly students from second- and third-tier universities. The work doesn't ask for an academic background.

Q: Do you enjoy it?

N: I don't enjoy teaching people how to date. I find it pointless and dull. Teaching someone to date is worse than teaching him to be a better person. What's the use of teaching him to pick up girls if he still has no ambition and isn't happy?

Teaching dating has never been the core of my business, so I don't care much about it. Other coaches make their living this way, and money doesn't interest me much — but if it happens to be there, why not take it?

Q: Do you use the theories you came up with on your own girlfriend?

N: What we teach isn't harmful. It's a better way to show yourself off. It isn't a cheating device. It's like sitting an exam with no pencil, and I hand you a pencil. Using that pencil to answer the questions isn't wrong, is it?

Sitting the exam without the pencil would be stupid, right? Answering with a pencil is normal, because that really is the correct way to deal with a girl. A lot of people's methods are wrong — they like to answer with watercolor markers.

For instance, I'll teach a guy what makes it easier for a girl to accept him. Take how a guy looks: a girl feels that immediately. It isn't about being handsome or cool, it's about being clean, neat, not slovenly, and able to make her feel safe.

When a girl asks what we should eat, I teach them to say, "How about Japanese food?" instead of "Huh? Anything's fine." At that point she wonders why you said anything's fine. What's going on here?

If you aren't good-looking, tidy yourself up, don't dress in clashing colors, and learn to talk to a girl — honestly.

Q: Besides coaching, you also resold imported skincare products?

N: That was after I'd made a name as a dating coach and wanted to do something useful for people. A guy needs three things: one, clothes; two, hair products, clay or wax; three, skincare. Clothes are hard to break into, too many people are doing hair products, and trustworthy skincare is scarce. I'd been burned by bad skincare products myself, more than once.

I thought these guys needed cheap skincare that was still worth the money — snail cleanser brought in from Korea, Etude House volcanic clay, IOPE's toner, the one people call miracle water. Once I knew people wanted them, I hired staff, rented a warehouse, and sold men's skincare.

Q: How did the secondhand luxury goods start?

N: In the end the people buying skincare for me picked up some work on the side. They found some secondhand luxury shops, and our staff would fly over, bring the goods back, and resell them. The secondhand luxury market runs deep, and it pays well.

Q: What made you want to resell secondhand luxury goods?

N: Because I found that rich people don't only buy new, they buy secondhand too. Sometimes you pay the price of the real thing and get a fake, which isn't worth it — better to find a secondhand source you trust. A lot of people mix real and fake in what they buy.

Q: How many bank cards do you have? How many do you carry?

N: Two debit cards. One I leave alone. The other I carry, and it never holds more than 600 yuan. I rarely carry cash, 600 at most; I take out 500 at a time and top it up when that's gone. I always have my ID card on me, so if that card and my ID went missing together, I don't want to be out a hundred thousand yuan or more. Most of the time I use Alipay, occasionally a credit card.

Q: So many people do this kind of reselling. Why do you think you succeeded?

N: If I had no customers I wouldn't do it. I succeeded because of credibility — people judge what I'm doing now by what I did before. The core of it is that my credibility brings in female customers. Those women are mostly on my current WeChat account; they're real contacts of mine, not students from my courses.

Many people think making money is just selling something. In fact a lot of groundwork comes first.

The one difference between me and the usual WeChat sellers is that they add people and post ads in their Moments every day, while people add me. I never send an ad to anyone who isn't a potential customer. Customer information and the secondhand luxury goods they buy are 100% confidential. I won't let anyone know she bought something from me, and I won't let anyone know that a particular item came from me. That protects her face as far as possible.

In secondhand luxury, protecting a customer's privacy and her face matters most.

Q: You write on Zhihu a lot. How do people there talk about you?

N: After I posted about making a million yuan, plenty of people came after me. The ones who have never done anything themselves say things like, "Rich kid, blah blah — without your parents you'd be nothing."

But I'm not a rich kid at all. A real one wouldn't stoop to what I'm doing, would he? Most rich kids go into finance, property, or government jobs; they don't do internet businesses. A few do streetwear and sneaker labels.

I work hard. I'm selling; they're supplying. The genuinely rich are all on the supply side. You can tell at a glance that the people attacking me have never met a rich kid, and that it takes someone with no experience to talk that way, right?

Then some people say, "What you're doing is too small in scope; this could be much bigger." You can tell those people have actually done things, because I think so too — secondhand luxury could be a much bigger business, and I really have kept mine too small.

Q: Do your parents support your taking a year off to start a business?

N: I'm doing fairly well now, and my dad still doesn't support it. Nothing has changed.

Long ago, in my freshman year, I got excited the first time I made money — more than 10,000 yuan that month. I told my dad, "I made this much, I want to start a business." My dad said, "Here's what we'll do: I'll give you 20,000 and you go back to school and behave." I said no.

Every time I made more after that, he gave me the same answer. Once I was earning more than he was willing to double, his attitude settled into neither opposing nor supporting me.

He tells me, "You don't know how to run anything; everything you do is small-time." But I think everything starts small.

Q: What else have you done during this year off?

N: My focus now is offline events and an app. Niss's offline events are the flashy kind — trick umbrellas, water-spray paint backpacks, diving, archery. I went along to all the promotional events we ran in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai.

The app I'm building is a bit like Tinder, except it isn't for matching people to date, it's for trading insults. The iOS version launches soon. I'm also building an incubator for internet celebrities.

Q: Do you run several companies at once now?

N: What we did before didn't need a registered company, because we had no real need to hire anyone. But now that the incubator is up and running, we need a new office here in Chengdu, so we have to set up a company.

A company is a kind of protective shell. If you make a mess of something, the company carries a lot of the responsibility for you. What we did before was small enough not to need that shell. Now it isn't just my own business — it involves the people we're incubating, our partners, everyone.

It includes our Master, too. And if we want to raise money later, we'll have to be a company, so we set one up.

Q: Taking a year off means little time with your classmates. Have you tried to see more of them?

N: I really am rarely at school. I talk a lot with other CEOs and impressive people, but I don't like talking with students: they think too much and do too little. It's hard to reach them. Hanging out is fine, taking them out to eat is fine. But we can't really talk business, because you can tell at a glance who has practical experience and who doesn't.

Q: Any regrets about this year off?

N: No regrets. It was more than worth it. I think I did something really cool with this year, and if I hadn't done it, I'm sure I would have regretted it.

I know there are plenty of 23- and 24-year-olds far ahead of me. But I don't think there are many 20-year-olds at my level, so I think I've done all right.

Whether I drop out for good depends on how far this goes — whether I can pull off something big enough to make headlines.