ReachGram

Problem

Agencies that run large Instagram pages sell to local businesses by direct message, because cold email reply rates have collapsed below one percent while a personalized DM to a local business still gets answered. Doing it by hand falls apart at about 200 DMs a week and burns an operator ten hours a week in spreadsheets and copy-paste. Doing it with an automation tool gets the page banned in two to three weeks, so agencies keep buying burner accounts. A 300,000-follower page is not something you rebuild.

“Meta bans pages that automate sends — losing a 300K follower page would be catastrophic.”

Discovery

The founding insight, from the investor deck written alongside the build: you can't automate the send, but you can automate everything around it. Discovery, personalization, queue management, reply tracking, follow-ups and pipeline analytics are all the work surrounding the DM. The send itself stays human, which is exactly why pages don't get banned.

• Who buys. Sub-five-person digital marketing agencies trying to add three to ten local clients a month, with one to three operators or interns on outreach while the owner sells. They already feel like they're going through the motions, and they replace a spreadsheet, a DM-template document and several abandoned automation tools.
• What they're afraid of. The first question on the landing page's FAQ is "Will my Instagram page get banned?" The product's whole architecture is the answer: it never touches the Instagram API and never controls the browser. The DM lives in the operator's clipboard.
• Where prospects come from. Three verified categories, local businesses from Google Maps enriched with Instagram data, licensed realtors in Canada and the US, and creators by niche.
• What the funnel measured. Production Tier-1 discovery hit rate was 0.9%, one prospect in 109, against the 28% to 75% the data source can deliver, because two code paths building the same scraper input had drifted apart. A single null field dropped about 55% of every Google Maps batch. Mailer-daemon bounces were being counted as replies, inflating the number operators cared about most.

Decisions

1. Automate everything except the send. Discovery, scoring, drafting, follow-ups, reply detection and meeting booking are automated. The Instagram send button is always pressed by a person, on a phone paired to the workspace by code. Human-in-the-loop sending is the moat, not a limitation.
2. Show the cost before every click. Scrapes are priced per run; the operator sees the dollar amount before firing, and deduplication guarantees they never pay twice for the same prospect.
3. Drafts reference real posts, not templates. Claude writes each DM from the prospect's actual recent content, in the operator's tone, with a reply and a follow-up drafted the same way.
4. A campaign pauses itself before it can do damage. Email outreach runs behind a circuit breaker: any spam complaint pauses instantly; a bounce rate above 8% pauses once the sample reaches 20 sends, because one bounce in three isn't a trend.
5. Silent failures become loud contracts. Absent and null are treated identically everywhere, the two scraper input builders are pinned together by a drift guard, and regression tests assert the exact field names the actor returns. The discovery library alone carries 242 test cases.
6. Price by prospects, not seats. Solo at $149, Growth at $499 and Agency at $1,499 a month in Canadian dollars, each with a monthly prospect allowance and per-prospect overage, plus a $500 pilot to get an agency's first campaign running.
7. Ship in deployable slices. Sixty tickets across ten phases, each phase ending in something usable, from discovery in week one to send queue in week four.
8. Marketing content is drafted by an agent, published by a person. A custom Claude Code subagent writes to the CMS as drafts only.

Outcome

Live at reachgram.app with a paying customer, a demo video on the landing page, a per-operator funnel in analytics, a safety dashboard showing pacing and circuit-breaker state, and ten scheduled worker jobs behind the pipeline.