Can I DM my waitlist when the cart opens?

No, and this is the most important sentence on the page. Instagram only permits a message inside 24 hours of that person's last message to you, and we do not ship broadcasts, so there is no way to message a list of people who commented three weeks ago. The waitlist has to live somewhere that can email them.

What happens when three hundred people comment the same word at once?

Each comment is handled as its own event, deduplicated on a key so a redelivery from Instagram does not produce a second reply, and paced by the rate budget check so nothing goes out in a burst the platform would refuse. Anything held or refused is recorded in Activity with the reason, so a quiet stretch is readable rather than mysterious.

Can I see who opened my DM or clicked the link?

No. There is no open tracking, no click tracking and no analytics product here, and any number that looked like one in the old build was not a measurement. What you get is a record of what was sent, what was refused and why, and a lead list you can export.

Does the automation work on older launch posts?

Comment replies live inside a seven-day window from the comment itself, so a post from last month will stop producing replies and the symptom is silence rather than an error. Check the blocked list in Activity for the window check before you assume something is broken.

Instagram Automation for Course Creators

A launch turns a normal comment section into three hundred people typing the same word, and it also creates the one job this tool genuinely cannot do for you. Both halves are worth knowing before the cart opens rather than during.

Launch week does something specific to a comment section. For six days it is ordinary, and then a Reel lands and three hundred people type LINK in an hour while you are on a call.

That is the case an automation is genuinely good at. It is also the week you find out which of the things you assumed this tool does, it does not.

The four questions, and the words people actually type

Course comment sections are remarkably consistent:

link / where / kaha se lu — the enrolment page.
price / fees / kitne ka hai — the number, and whether it is in INR.
recorded / live / access — the format, and how long they keep it.
open / still open / next batch — whether the cart is shut and what happens next.

Each becomes one rule. Keywords are any-of, so one match fires it, and matching ignores case and punctuation — LINK!! and link are the same string. What it will not do is guess: enrol is not a form of enrollment as far as the matcher is concerned, and "how do I join??" matches nothing unless you listed it.

Negative keywords matter more here than anywhere else. During a launch your own audience writes not now, next time, pehle wala le liya tha — and a rule without those cheerfully sends a checkout link to somebody who already bought.

What launch-day volume actually does

Nothing dramatic, and the reasons are worth knowing so a quiet stretch does not read as a breakage.

Every comment arrives as its own event and is written down before anything is decided about it. dedupe stops a redelivered comment — Instagram does redeliver — from producing a second reply to one person. cooldown handles the person who comments five times in two minutes. rate_budget paces sends so nothing goes out in a burst. quiet_hours holds replies until morning, and if most of your buyers are in one country and you are in another, the default is wrong for you and you should set it in theirs.

All of those are gate checks, all of them are recorded by name when they stop a send, and the blocked list on launch day should be full and boring.

The thing this cannot do

You cannot message the waitlist when the cart opens.

Instagram permits a direct message only inside 24 hours of that person's last message to you. Their message starts the clock; yours does not. Somebody who commented WAITLIST three weeks ago is unreachable in DMs, and we do not ship broadcasts, so there is no mechanism here that gets around it.

The practical consequence: the waitlist has to end up somewhere that can email them. The comment-to-DM rule is how you collect it — the DM asks for the email, or carries the link to a page that does — and Leads is where the record sits until you export it.

The leads list, showing captured people, what they asked about, and the CSV export. — Capture-to-Leads is on by default in the builder. Leaving it on is the difference between a launch you can follow up and one you cannot.

Leads leave as CSV. There are no one-click integrations to an email tool, so this is a manual export into whatever you already send from. Unglamorous, and better than a promise that would not hold.

Automation gets you the first reply in the first minute. Everything after the first day is your email list's job.

What is and is not measured

What you can see

Every reply that went out, with the comment it answered. Every reply that was refused, with the check that refused it. The lead list, with what each person asked about. Credits spent, by day.

What does not exist

Open rates. Click tracking. Conversion attribution. Revenue dashboards. Engagement scores. None of these are measured here and none of them were real in the old build either.

If you need attribution for a launch, it comes from your checkout and your email tool, where the events actually happen. How we decide what is publishable as a number explains why this page has so few of them.

What else is not here

We reply to people. We do not create posts — no caption generator, no content calendar, no scheduling or publishing, no hashtag tool, no follower growth feature. No flow-builder canvas, no broadcasts, no multi-step sequences, no funnel builder, no analytics product. No WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram.

A launch needs several of those. This is the piece that answers the comment section while you are teaching.

The build worth doing before your next launch

One rule, on one post, a week early. The price one, because it is the question you can answer without qualifying it and the one that arrives constantly whether or not you are launching.

Write the reply the way you type. Run Test on myself, which sends the real thing to your own account through the whole pipeline. Use the Try It panel to type a few comments you expect and see which keyword catches them. Then go live on that single post and read Activity two days later.

The comment automation build, field by field is the full version of that paragraph. The DM guide is where the 24-hour window is explained properly, and it is the one that decides how you plan a launch. Templated replies are free and unlimited; a credit is spent only when the AI writes something new — which during a launch week is a smaller number than people expect, because three hundred people asking link all get the same template. If you coach as well as sell a course, the coaching version of this page covers the long personal DM, which behaves nothing like a launch comment.

Launch day, answered.

For course creators: what a rule handles on launch day, and what it cannot