Compliance
Financial Advisers: An Instagram DM Is Not Yet a Client
Somebody just sent you their portfolio screenshot and asked what to do with it. Suitability is the whole job, and a keyword match has not done any of it.
5 min read
Writing
What we learned building this.
Notes on Instagram’s API, the replies a tool should refuse to send, and the parts of automation that are easy to get wrong. Written by the people who ship it.
Playbooks
AI-First Is the Wrong Order for an Instagram Inbox
The model here is trained on replies you wrote yourself, so it cannot come first. The order that works, and the narrow job that is worth spending a credit on.
5 min read
Playbooks
Retention on Instagram Starts With Being Right the First Time
Win-back sequences cannot exist where you are not allowed to start the conversation. What is left is the quality of the first answer, which was the bigger lever anyway.
5 min read
Playbooks
The One Caption Line That Decides Whether Anything Fires
We do not generate captions. But one line in yours is load-bearing for every automation you build, and most people write it as an afterthought.
6 min read
Playbooks
Freelancers: The Enquiry That Costs an Hour to Turn Down
A freelancer sells hours, so an unqualified enquiry is not neutral — it is unpaid time spent on work you were never going to take. That is what automation buys back.
5 min read
Lead generation
Segmentation Without Segments: What a Lead Record Knows
There is no segmentation feature here and no demographic data at all. Leads carry the post, the word and the time, and that provenance sorts people better than a guess.
5 min read
Playbooks
Selling Instagram Automation: What Agencies Can Charge For
We automate your DMs is a weak offer, because the software is not the deliverable and the client can buy it themselves. Here is what the billable work actually is.
5 min read
Playbooks
A Global Instagram Inbox Is a Rota Problem, Not a Setting
Across timezones the twenty-four hour window burns while you sleep. Templates cover that and takeover does not, which turns a settings question into a staffing one.
5 min read
Playbooks
Grocery DMs: Do Not Let a Template Say What Is In Stock
Stock is a fact about a shelf right now, and a template is a sentence written last month. For a grocery or fresh-food shop that gap is the whole design problem.
6 min read
Compliance
Car Dealership DMs: Never Automate a Price or a Promise
Three questions make up most of a dealership inbox, and an automation should refuse all three. The argument for why, and what is left once you accept it.
5 min read
Voice DNA
Before and After: What a Voice Profile Changes in Replies
Five real DMs, answered twice — once by a model with no reference and once with a profile built from your own replies. What shifts is register, not content.
5 min read
Lead generation
Why the Email Address Is Worth Asking For in the First Place
You do not own the Instagram relationship. You hold a permission that expires, on an account held on terms you did not write. That is the whole argument for email.
5 min read
Playbooks
Nonprofit Instagram DMs: Who Actually Owns the Inbox
The hard part is not writing templates. It is that the login lives on a former volunteer's phone and nobody is quite sure who reads the DMs on a Tuesday.
6 min read
Playbooks
The DM That Gets Answered: One Reply, Five Drafts
One ordinary automated reply, rewritten five times, with the text at every stage. The wording decisions are the whole job, so this is a line editing session.
5 min read
Compliance
Affiliate Links in Instagram DMs: Disclosure Comes First
We do not track affiliate links, clicks or commissions — none of it. What this post is really about is the disclosure that has to be inside the message itself.
5 min read
Playbooks
Instagram Notes: We Do Not Automate Them, and Why
Notes are a small status feature with no API behind them, so nothing about a Note can trigger anything. The one real connection to automation is worth knowing.
5 min read
Playbooks
The Stages a DM Conversation Moves Through, and Who Owns Each
Five stages, two clocks and one handover. What automation legitimately owns at each step of a real Instagram conversation, and the exact point where it should stop.
5 min read
Playbooks
Specs, Stock and Warranty: Only One Is Safe to Automate
A gadget account gets three question types under every launch post. Two of them look factual and are not, and one of them is a commitment your brand has to honour.
5 min read
Compliance
A Mental Health Coach Is Not a Therapist, and DMs Blur It
The inbox does not respect the line between coaching and clinical care, so the automation has to. What a non-clinical account must never send, and who reads the rest.
6 min read
Playbooks
Jewellery Brands: The Restock Message You Cannot Send
A studio making one-of-one pieces has an availability problem. A brand with repeatable stock has the opposite one, and it ends at the words "notify me when it is back".
6 min read
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