IG Journey - Partnered with local influencer, mostly white hat

Started an experiment with a vegan friend at the start of this year to see if we could grow an IG account in the vegan niche. He's a unique guy with a lot of personality that I would describe as what an "influencer" was before the internet existed. He has no social media presence by choice and our idea was to see how fast we could grow a real account organically with some conservative automation sprinkled in. I'm guiding the whole thing and he's creating the content. Here's a recap of how its gone so far:

Feb 1 - April 30
- 0-600 followers
- 6-8% engagement
- Posted original content 4-6 times per week
- No videos, stories, live, or any automation

May 1 - May 7
- 600-700 followers
- 8-9% engagement
- Increased posting schedule to daily, all original content
- 2 of the posts per week going forward will be original videos
- Added 0-2 story posts per day
- Added 1-2 live videos per week
- No automation

May 7 - May 13 (today)
- 700-1000 followers
- 8-12% engagement
- Posting schedule same as last week and will be same going forward (daily, min 2 videos/week, 1-2 stories/day, 1-2 live videos/week)
- Turned on Jarvee at the start of the week with very conservative settings. (ramping up to 500 likes/day and 100 follow/unfollow per day)
- Getting about 5% follow back on my likes and 10-15% on follow/unfollow. Not great but its only been a few days and I hope to double those numbers in a couple months


Monetization:
- I had some t-shirts printed in March and they've been up for sale since the start of April.
- Mailed out free shirts to 4 of our followers that I picked out based on size of their following (5-15k) and how engaged they were with my account. Hope was they'd wear the shirt and tag my account which would lead to more sales. My cost per shirt is $6 and $2.50 to mail to influencer, so lets say $9 all-in.
- The shirts mailed to influencers resulted in 6 sales, of which I net about $15 profit per sale depending on promo codes used (I net $20 if no promo)
- The past 4 weeks I've also got an additional 5 sales that I'm not sure where they discovered us.
- To be honest I'm a little shocked how many sales we've had so far considering we have a mere 1000 followers and the website gets like 20-50 visits per day.
- Not sure what direction I want to take things as the account grows, but happy to get the revenue from the shirts in the meantime. Hopefully the last few weeks wasn't a fluke.


Going forward:
- I'm not sure how much I can dial up the automation without risking getting on Instagrams radar. I'm running Jarvee on a PC I setup in my friend's house so its all on the same residential IP he's always posting from through his phone. I'm thinking in a few weeks bump it to about 2,000 likes/day, 300 follow/unfollow per day.
- Plan on continuing to send 1-2 free shirts/week to any of my engaged followers that have more than 10k followers.
- Started reaching out to accounts in my niche that have 20-30k followers to see if they want free shirts. My logic is accounts that size don't get tons of free offers and they'll be more likely to post picture of shirt.


I'll try to update every few weeks or if I make any major strategy changes. Also welcome any feedback. Thanks!

NIce idea and a fine engagement compared to the number of followers you got
best of luck on your journey

Build a network around the account btw,
imo i would build a couple of other accounts related to the Vegan niche
DIY Recpies, etc

and get them to post and boost up your main acc.

UPDATE

As of today this account has 2800 followers with about 10-12% engagement. Maxed out Jarvee at ~1000 likes and ~500 F/U per day (running on residential IP so zero issues so far). My buddy has slowed down to posting about twice a week and a story every other day. Last few weeks we've averaged about 50 new followers a day.

Big takeaway so far is that fulfillment is a PAIN IN THE ASS. I've concluded that the extra margins are not worth the headaches and am moving everything to a print-on-demand service that dropships (probably Teelaunch).

Going forward only firm plans are to keep growing the account and build out the store. I seem to only be getting 0-3 sales per influencer I mail a free shirt to so very curious to see how that changes once I offer a lot more designs/colors. I also want to eventually start growing some supporting accounts to drive traffic over but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Ironically it looks like I'm going to pick up a couple new consulting clients that I wouldn't have met were it not for this endeavor, so from that perspective I suppose it was a huge success.

Looks like you are on the right path. Good Luck.