Show IH: CatchIt.io - Grow you Instagram account organically by being social without the use of bots

Hi IH,

today I'm launching CatchIt.io. It's an Instagram growth hacking tool without the use of bots. It helps you grow your reputation on other people's accounts by always showing up and leaving valuable comments to their community and thereby increasing you social reputation in you sector.

# How does it work

Essentially, it's based on the ideas of How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie Summary. I tried to implement a repeatable process that would allow me to be genuinely interested in other people without being late to the party. Therefore, people who share the same interests as me could take notice of me.

For that, I'm exploiting the basic principle of any social media platform which uses a voting system to rank the comments of their post (see IH). The thing is, most people can provide valuable information to a celebrities accounts (like @csallen), if only they had enough time to come up with a post that is worthy of ranking high. By being early, it allows community members to see your posts from the get go if you are able to come up with something that is valuable to the original post.

On IG that is often something that is funny, relevant to that specific account, or simply a praise on what they like in that post. This will often lead to a like by the original poster and will rank your comment on the top automatically, besides the likes of their followers. High ranking comments will than be displayed in the home feed of all followers of that particular account. This allows you to have a huge reach without paying for costly ads. This won't work if you are late and you are basically repeating what other people have said before and coming up with something unique that is still valuable is difficult after 10-20 different comments have already been posted. Hence, it's essential to being early.

The problem now is, that nobody really wants to refresh their IG accounts constantly, although some may do with infinite time, but if you run a business and need to develop one feature after the other, you can not afford to constantly sit behind your phone and do that. There are alternative like bots which could post a generic comment, but they almost never encourage real engagement because they are way to impersonal, you probably know them: "Nice", "Amazing shot", "I like it, follow @xyz if you like rainbows". Therefore, the only solution is to do it yourself or you hire someone else who dedicates their time (for a lot of money) to doing community outreach and basic networking. What if you didn't have to constantly check your account and still be the first on every single post and have the opportunity to create a comment that provides value and could possibly be the highest ranking? Here CatchIt.io comes into play.

Catchit.io will monitor all accounts of which you have an interest in and want that audience to become yours. As soon as any of the accounts makes an update, CatchIt will send an SMS to your phone number to notify you that you should take action immediately. Then you have to be creative and know the innards on how that community of followers acts and be a prime example of them. But, this only works if you are genuine about it. By being fake, you almost always have a difficult time with coming up with something that's valuable. Therefore I recommend doing it only on accounts where you honestly have an interest in their content.

# Why I've built it

Catchit came out of of need to grow my own social media account for Nimonikku, my first SaaS idea with no audience whatsoever. After a friend told me that I should try posting on IG, I noticed that it's very hard to grow if the IG algorithm doesn't push your content on other people's explore pages. But, I didn't want to use bots to grow it, because there is no value in an account with 30k followers, 100-200 likes per post and zero comments. For the type of content that I post on IG, comments are more rare because of it's bluntness but the engagement via likes is still high and is currently hovering around 15-20% which I think is quite good. To be fair, CatchIt isn't the only tool that I use to grow my account. But I'll save that for another time.

To be completely transparent, Catchit is definitely not a tool that will make your account grow from 0 to 1000 in the blink of an eye. It falls in the category of "Do things that don't scale" (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) and is a long term growth strategy for small businesses by doing basic networking in the community you want to sell your products to at some point (maybe similar to @webapppro and @thomasm1964 do here on IH, always contributing in the comments, there accounts are fairly known and their trust level is certainly higher than others). In the future, I thought of expanding to Twitter, Reddit and maybe IH (in case there is someone who wants to watch @csallen and @channingallen because their posts almost always have that kind of virality to them, let me know).

Anyways, what do you guys think?