My business is in my bio, don't want to link it here. Pays about the same as my previous job at Microsoft did, but with a lot less involvement — I haven't touched the main code in about a year now. I probably spend about two or three hours a week on customer support, that's it, really. No marketing spend, all word-of-mouth and Google.
The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5/month Stripe plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends, posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It worked, then it didn't work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable.
About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they loved it, money wasn't an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be worth doing it properly.
It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (<$100 a phone). Each phone pays for itself in less than a month, server costs are less than $200 a month.
Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of running it, and it's been almost five years I think.
I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my competitors did — instead, I don't emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that let me survive this long.
Real devices yes! I tried to use emulators a couple of times, but the first few attempts failed due to Instagram detecting it (missing cameras, etc.), and later attempts failed when I realized it's not going to save me a lot if I went the emulator route, because they need quite a lot of resources too, and you can't just run 10 emulators on a regular computer unless you optimise them extremely well and know what you're doing (custom Android build as a minimum). So it actually turned out to be easier with real devices. Plus, there's been some IP/VPN/Proxy emergencies, where it was super handy to pop in a 3G/4G sim card into the phone, and have it work 100% like a real person's phone. The cost is considerably higher (~ 15-50 GB per phone a month), but I am still looking into doing that, as it would allow the "phone agents" to become completely independent from location.
Buffer: I haven't done much in terms of "battling" with competition, simply because my users will tell me what they want, and that's an easier crowd to serve than trying to follow a competitor who may be running down the wrong path without knowing yet. If a bunch of users ask me for the same feature multiple times, then I look into what it takes to make it happen, or I'll explain why I can't offer that, and that's what's been driving it from day one.
Thanks for your note about the typo, I am actually always a bit ashamed of my landing pages, because they feel the least fun to make (to me at least), when they drive most of the conversion of course.
I've wanted to automate posts to Instagram / find a way to post without using the phone (I spent a 8 months doing daily photography posts, then life happened). Turns out their API TOS is pretty strict, and requires posts to come from a phone.
A low-cost social media posting service is intriguing.
Interesting, I hadn't seen yet they offered Instagram posting. Usually, this would throw me into panic and worry, but I run another site (barely working anymore), which offered Twitter analytics. When Twitter launched their free and super extensive analytics platform, with super interesting data not available on any of the APIs, I thought I was done. It didn't do anything (I am not kidding) to my sign-up rates, and when people asked for certain features, I often just pointed them to Twitter's analytics instead. Still stayed with me because of one or two odd features I had, that Twitter didn't offer.
Main issues with the emulator are: camera needs to be simulated for some features, and they are actually quite resource-intense. Buying (or cloud-renting) a machine that runs between 5 or 10 emulators is actually severely expensive. And I'd need lots of them.
Great idea :) My only question is how the authentication works there...? User has to be logged in on the worker phone's app in order to do something on Instagram. I mean, I don't think anyone shares his Instagram password with an 3rd party software. Or you provide the services which can be done from another(your) Instagram account - which is then signed in on all worker phones?
> I mean, I don't think anyone shares his Instagram password with an 3rd party software
You'd be surprised.
They already share the passwords with their marketing agencies, where interns basically type them in on their personal phones (in sometimes quite large companies!). My service lets all of those people use the Instagram account, but only their admin knows/sees the password. If we can keep it as secure as their own internal processes, then this is a fair-enough trade off for many companies.
Thanks! The great/sad thing about it is that there are hundreds of thousands of such ideas out there, but they'll only come to you when you actually follow up on a need someone has and try to fix it. I know this will be over soon (I've been saying this two weeks after it started, and it's been five years), so I am this mega-weirdo now listening extra hard on any conversations people working in 'actual' jobs have. I am the guy who stares at you all like a real creeper in the coffee shop, when you and a friend argue over why a tool your company makes you use, sucks. Always looking out for what could be next, if this one goes down.
I am not touching their private APIs, and I am not automating posting by letting people spam-fill an account — every single post going out over my system has to be planned by a real person, and the only thing I am helping them with, is to avoid sharing their Instagram password between 3 people in 3 different offices on partly private and partly corporate phones, just so that they can all post to the same account.
That said, they threatened to sue me because my first product name had the word "gram" in it.
The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5/month Stripe plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends, posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It worked, then it didn't work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable.
About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they loved it, money wasn't an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be worth doing it properly.
It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (<$100 a phone). Each phone pays for itself in less than a month, server costs are less than $200 a month.
Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of running it, and it's been almost five years I think.
I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my competitors did — instead, I don't emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that let me survive this long.