Hey BHW, new here and asking for some help!
I run a brand selling into university societies, so it’s a pretty niche but highly engaged audience.
Up until now I’ve been doing Instagram outreach manually and it’s worked well:
- ~5% reply rate
- ~2% conversion rate
- ~£2.5k revenue per converted lead
The issue is consistency. When things get busy, outreach drops off completely - so I’m trying to systemise/scale it.
Current plan (high level):
- Clean + prioritised data
- Multiple aged IG accounts (I have ~40 but will start with just a few)
- 30-40 DMs/day/account to avoid bans
- Basic sequence:
- Day 1: Follow account and like a few photos
- Day 2: short curiosity hook DM
- Day 6: social proof follow-up DM
- Day 9: Comment to say I DMed them
- Day 13: soft close
- Target: ~3k DMs/month
I’m looking to test tools like https://www.colddms.com/ / https://www.usewave.co/ / https://igdm.me/ but running into a few concerns:
Questions:
- Deliverability: How are people making sure DMs don’t land in hidden requests? Is warming accounts (follow → like → DM) still necessary, and if so how are you doing this at scale when most tools don’t support it properly? (not a feature in ColdDMs or Wave)
- Account health: With multiple accounts, what are realistic safe limits now? Is 20–30 DMs/day still conservative enough in 2026? Assume separate browsers with proxies is all thats needed here?
- Scaling signal: Right now I’m thinking: → double down once reply rate stays >5% with no bans Does that sound like the right trigger? These tools are expensive at $100 per account per month
- Unique Messages: Again, these tools don't seem to support custom messages. I want to connect Claude Haiku to write slightly differentiated messages each time to help account health.
- Vibecoding: I'm also playing around with making my own solution here with claude code/cowork that would really fit my exact needs. Anyone else tried the same?
Not selling anything here - just trying to build a system that doesn’t fall apart when I’m busy! (Disclaimer - did use ChatGPT to help me format my braindump nicely)
Would appreciate any insights from people running IG outreach at scale, especially in niche B2B.
TLDR: What should I use for automating my cold instagram outreach
