What to answer after hey?

A single 'hey' with nothing else tells you very little. It can mean she liked your profile and wants to see whether you reply. It can mean she opened the app while bored and sent the cheapest possible message. It can also mean she was told by a friend to start conversations and is doing it on schedule. In all of those cases she has not yet committed any energy. Your job is to find out whether there is something easy to talk about.

Read what she wrote with your profile in front of you. If her hey comes with a time of day, a lot of people send it late at night or during a commute, which tells you she is probably scrolling, not planning. If there is a pause after a match, a hey after two weeks is a restart, and you can reference that lightly. The hey is a door, not an invitation to a full conversation, so your reply should open the door without walking through it for her.

The reply that works best here is the one that gives her a hook. That usually means a short greeting back, one concrete detail from your profile, and a question she can answer in a few words. The detail should be something she could plausibly want to comment on, like a place you mention or something in one photo. The question should be easy enough that she can answer it in a sentence while still doing something else.

You can tell a draft is working if it contains a hook and nothing else. If it has a joke, a story, and a question, it is doing too much. If it has only 'hey how are you', it is doing too little. Leave out compliments on her looks, long self descriptions, and any question that asks her to explain herself. Those make the first exchange feel like paperwork.

Timing matters more than most people expect. A reply within an hour or two during the day reads as relaxed. A reply that arrives at midnight after she sent her hey at six can read as either eager or like you almost forgot. Try to answer when you would answer a friend, and avoid sending a long burst of messages to make up for lag.

If she answers, match her pace and keep going while the energy is there. If she doesn't reply to your first answer, wait a day or two before anything else, and then one short message is enough, such as a light follow up on the detail you mentioned. If that also goes unanswered, let it go. A hey with no follow through is one of the most common dead ends, and sending a third message only makes the silence feel louder.