Tutorial · 5 min read
The Personal Brand Build Sheet: Five Templates, One Post
Why a personal account cannot survive a register change, and what a stiff template costs somebody whose face is the business, is argued properly here. Assume it. This page is the build, in order, for one person with no team.
It is small on purpose. A personal brand needs fewer automations than a business does, not more, and the temptation to build a fifth and sixth is the thing that ruins accounts like yours.
Before the product: go and copy forty of your own replies
Open your DMs and paste forty replies you actually sent into a notes file. Not captions. Replies — the short, lowercase, unpolished ones.
This does two jobs. It is the raw material for every template below, because you are going to write them by editing sentences you have already said rather than by composing new ones. And it is the honest source for Voice DNA, which is built from replies the account owner actually wrote, not from your best captions. Feed it captions and you get an account that sounds like it is advertising to its own followers.
You are not writing templates. You are choosing which of your existing sentences you are willing to say again.
The build sheet
- Connect the account. Professional account, official Graph API. Nothing runs before this and the connection can go stale later, so it goes on the monthly list at the bottom.
- Write the never list before anything else. Negative keywords are the words that mean do not reply, this is mine. Start with your own first name,
you said,remember me,disappointed,thank you so much,helped me, plus whatever your niche brings. Anything addressed to you personally, any compliment, any criticism, anyone you might actually know. - Write the five templates. Not eight. Named below.
- Pick one post. The one that already brings questions. Not the account.
- Put the trigger word in the caption yourself. "Comment TEMPLATE and I'll send it." A word somebody types on purpose beats a word you are hoping to catch. Matching folds case and punctuation, so
Template!is fine; it matches whole words, sotemplatewill not fire ontemplates— list both. - Keep the public reply to a receipt. "Sent it." Four words under the comment, visible to everyone, and never the pitch.
- Test on myself. Runs the real pipeline — trigger match, the ten checks, the reply, the send — to your own account.
- Sit in the review queue for a fortnight. Then go live on that one post.
The five templates
They are the same five on almost every personal account, because they are the questions with fixed answers.
Where the thing is. The link, the newsletter, the free resource, the doc you mentioned. Highest volume, lowest risk, most boring — build it first.
What it costs and where to buy. If the price is public, put the number in. Sending "DM me for details" to somebody who just did that reads as a tactic.
Whether the recording exists. For anyone who runs sessions, workshops or lives. Perpetual, identical, and the one people ask at 1am.
Event logistics. Which city, what date, is it online, is it recorded. This one carries an expiry — see the quarterly item below.
How to work with you. One line about what you offer and a link to the page that explains it. Not a pitch. A signpost.
Read all five out loud before they go live. If you would not say it to somebody at a wedding, rewrite it. And never write "we" unless there is genuinely a team.
The two settings to change, and one to leave alone
Quiet hours: on. A reply from your account at 3:40am is not impressive, it is a tell. Your followers know roughly when you are awake.
First-time senders only: usually on. People who have messaged you before are, by definition, the people you have a relationship with. They should reach you, not a template.
Specific posts: leave it narrow. One post to start. Widening it later is a decision you make after reading a week of Activity, not a thing you set optimistically on day one.
Stay in the review queue longer than a business would
Most accounts move past reviewing replies quickly. Do not. What you are checking is not whether the reply is correct — it is whether it sounds like you, and no system can make that judgement for you.
The recurring list
Weekly: read Activity — the replies that were not sent and the check that stopped each one. Takeover, window, dedupe, cooldown, quiet hours, credits, content safety. Then clear Leads and export the CSV, because there is no sync anywhere.
Monthly: confirm the connection is still live. Nothing pages you when it goes stale.
Quarterly: hunt for expired sentences. A date, a price, a city, "currently taking clients", a link that now redirects. The reel keeps getting found long after the fact inside it stopped being true.
Whenever your offer changes: change the template before you announce it. The gap between the announcement and the edit is when the automation quotes your old price with total confidence.
What it costs and what it will not do
Templated replies are free and unlimited, and an account built from five templates will mostly never spend anything. 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.
It cannot message anybody who has not messaged you first. No scheduling, no publishing, no captions, no hashtags, no analytics, no follower-growth feature. No calendar, no payment link, no CRM sync, no WhatsApp, no broadcasts, no sequences. Leads leave as a CSV.
Seven days to reply to a comment, counted from that comment. Twenty-four hours inside a DM thread, restarted only when they write again.
Takeover: reply by hand and the automation stands down in that thread permanently. On a personal account you will beat it to every conversation you care about, which is the correct arrangement.
If somebody else is going to run your inbox, read how the voice profile is actually built before you hand it over. And if the word "scale" is what brought you here, that premise is worth taking apart before you build anything.
