The arguments have all been made elsewhere. What belongs to software and what stays yours is a whole post. Why a coaching sale cannot happen inside a template is another one. This page assumes you have read them, or that you will, and does the boring thing instead: the order you actually build in.
It takes about a week if you do it properly, and most of that week is not spent in the product.
Step zero, which is not in the product at all
Open a notes app. Write down every message you have answered in the last fortnight, from memory, and put a tick next to the ones where you typed roughly the same thing.
That list is the entire specification. Everything below is transcription. Coaches who skip this step end up building an automation for the messages they imagine receiving, which are almost never the messages that arrive.
You are looking for the ones where the answer is identical regardless of who asked: do you take online clients, what are the timings, is it one-on-one or group, how long is the programme, where can I see what you actually teach, is there a waitlist.
The build takes an afternoon. Knowing what to build takes the fortnight of noticing that comes first.
The build sheet
- Connect the account. A professional Instagram account, connected through the official Graph API. Nothing works before this and the connection can go stale later, which is why it is also on the weekly list further down.
- Write the refusal list first. Before a single reply. Negative keywords are the words that mean do not answer this, route it to me:
refund,discount,EMI,guarantee,injury,depressed,my situation, plus your own. Anything money-adjacent, anything that arrived as a disclosure, anything asking whether your programme will work for this specific person. - Pick one post. Your best-performing reel or carousel — the one that already brings enquiries. Not the whole account. One post, so that when something is wrong you know exactly where it came from.
- Choose a trigger word your audience will actually type. It has to be in the caption: "comment PLAN and I'll send the details". Matching folds case and punctuation, so
Plan?is fine. It matches whole words, soplanwill not fire onplanning. Avoid words that show up in ordinary praise — a trigger ofhelpwill reply to everyone saying your video helped them. - Write the public reply short. A few words under the comment. "Sent you a DM." It is a receipt, visible to everyone, and it is not the place for your pitch.
- Write the private reply as yourself. Acknowledge, answer the literal question, name the next step and who it is with. Do not sell. Read it out loud; if you would not say it to somebody at a wedding, rewrite it.
- Test on myself. The button runs the real pipeline — trigger match, all ten checks, the reply, the send — and delivers it to your own account. Read it on your phone as a stranger.
- Go live on that one post. Then stop building.
The Advanced settings a coach should actually change
Two of them, and they both matter more for a coach than for a shop.
First-time senders only. Restricts the automation to people who have not messaged you before. On a coaching account that is close to a definition of the right audience: existing clients and long-running conversations should reach you directly, not a template.
Quiet hours. A coaching reply arriving at 3:40am is not impressive, it is a tell. It also means somebody who wrote in the middle of the night — often the most serious enquiry you will get that week — is met by software instead of by you in the morning.
Week one is a reading week
The build is not finished when it goes live. It is finished when you have read what it did.
Once a week, open Activity and read the replies that were not sent, each with the check that stopped it: takeover, window, dedupe, cooldown, quiet hours, credits, content safety. This is the screen that tells you whether your negative keyword list is doing its job or whether your trigger is too broad.
Then open Leads. Every captured person is there with the post they came from and what they asked. Export the CSV and take it wherever your enquiries actually live, because there is no CRM sync and no calendar here.
What goes on the recurring list
The costs, and the things that do not exist
Templated replies are free and unlimited. A credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply, one credit per reply. Free tier is 100 credits with no card and packs start at ₹499. A coach who builds only the automations described above will likely never spend a credit, which is the correct outcome and not a trick.
It cannot message anybody who has not messaged you first. There is no discovery-call booking, no calendar, no payment link, no CRM sync, no WhatsApp, no broadcast and no nurture sequence. It does not write, schedule or publish content, and there is no analytics product or follower-growth feature. Leads leave as a CSV.
Two clocks, both the platform's: seven days to reply to a comment, counted from that comment, and twenty-four hours inside a DM thread, restarted only when they write again.
Takeover is the safety net under all of it. The moment you reply by hand, automation stands down in that thread. Build assuming you will beat it to every conversation you care about, because you should.
If your coaching touches the body or health specifically, the fitness version goes considerably further into what must be refused before you go live.