Making $6,000 Monthly Automating Outreach on Instagram
How this influencer built an automation tool business while juggling 2 successful Youtube channels
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
My name is Ritesh Verma, and I am a 24 year old entrepreneur, creator, and software engineer.
I am from Maryland and I build AI/web agents for individuals, small businesses, and enterprises.
I have over 100,000 subscribers on Youtube across two channels and I have been featured on Business Insider for my work in agentic development.
I am actively growing a web-agent called InstaDM, that does mass instagram outreach.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
I was able to get clients to sell my AI/web agents to through Instagram outreach - sending 150 direct messages a day.
This was a very manual process so I decided there has to be a way to automate instagram outreach at scale. I cannot keep spending hours a day finding leads, and then mass messaging them. All the "auotmated outreach" solutions out there were not really automated.
So I used my background in agentic development to build my own Instagram outreach tool - InstaDM.
The first version wasn’t great. Messaging would sometimes fail, and our analytics were off. I had built the mass Instagram messaging script to avoid detection, which worked, but the overall software; installation, operation, and maintenance, was pretty rough.
I spent about $1,000 since it was built by myself and some buddies that I paid. I was able to make the money back very quickly due to the success of the tool.
What are some of your initial marketing strategies?
I got my first initial customers through my Youtube channel.
I made a Youtube video on the tool and then also sent that video across various discords, Reddits, and dm's to agency owners with personal brands. In other words, I leveraged social media heavily.
After the first 5-6 customers, I was able to double the users through word of mouth. The users loved it so much it started creating this word-of-mouth spread that helped increase our user base substantially. This also gave us the confidence that our product is fire.
Another interesting thing was that our website was ranking pretty high on Google even though we did not invest too much in SEO.
It may be all the backlinks being created by others sharing the tool in other communities. It's pretty cool.
How are you attracting customers now?
I am focused on using Reddit heavily as well as content marketing.
I started an Instagram for InstaDM to start posting reels on the tool in action. I have also partnered with agency Youtubers who are using the tool and showing it off to their followers.
One of the most notable acquisition methods has been word of mouth. Users are loving the tool and telling all their friends about it which is helping sales a lot.
How does your business make money?
We currently run monthly subscriptions.
We charge a range of $70-$160 depending on if you are on a monthly plan or have subscribed to a yearly plan from which you get 2 months free.
We also have begun a done-for-you service for agencies doing $10k+ a month where we handle the entire Instagram outreach process which involves optimizing IG accounts, A/B testing, mass messaging, appointment setting, etc.
For that we charge upwards of $2,000/mo.
As of right now, the business is earning $6,000 MRR across InstaDM and two other white-labeled version we have of the software.
I spend about 5 hours a week on this. It has been pretty autopilot for the last couple of months. I am looking to up hours to 10 a week so I can grow it faster.
These hours will be invested into content marketing. The current hours are spent with any customer questions, optimizing our website's SEO, and meetings with agency owners and discussing if the product is fit for them.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your business?
You can find me here:
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