Our TikTok DM bot has a follow-gate built in, most people never flip it on

Hi Indie Hackers, we added auto-replies for TikTok comments and DMs a while back on Mavibot.

The setup: someone comments a keyword under your post, they get a DM automatically. Nothing fancy there, that part's just doing its job. The actual growth trick is what happens next: before the bot hands over the lead magnet or whatever useful thing you promised, it checks if the person is actually subscribed to you. If they're not, they don't get it. So if they want the thing, they have to follow first.

We wrote a couple of articles explaining this, feeling very proud of ourselves. Turns out most people setting up TikTok automation completely miss this part, they treat the whole thing as a fancy auto-reply and never turn on the subscription check, so they're basically giving away the lead magnet to everyone for free and wondering why their follower count isn't moving.

Some patterns we keep seeing, in increasing order of "how did you miss this":

• Setting up the DM auto-reply but skipping the subscription check entirely, so subscribers and randoms get treated the same

• Assuming the automation itself is the growth feature, when it's really just the delivery mechanism for the thing that gates on following

• Never testing different keywords or lead magnets, so even the people who do set up the check see it plateau

Here's Mavibot if you want to poke around:

https://mavibot.ai/

At this point I genuinely don't know if it's a docs problem on our end or just how features work, people find the auto-reply button, get excited about the speed, and never notice the follow-gate sitting right next to it. Anyone else building growth tools run into this "found the shiny part, missed the actual lever" thing?

— Gadaev Sam