Ishort.pro
Grow on instagram with data, not guesswork
Hey IH 👋
I'm building IShort — an Instagram Reels analytics tool — and I could use this community's brain on the part I'm stuck on.
The problem I had. I make Reels myself, and Instagram gives you almost no useful data. It only shows analytics for your own account, and even that is shallow. There's no way to study what's actually working for other creators in your niche. Every third-party tool I tried wanted an Instagram login, a business account, or $50+/month.
What I built. IShort is a Chrome extension. You point it at any public Instagram profile — yours or a competitor's — and it instantly shows best posting times, top hashtags, viral outliers, a performance score, and it can even transcribe the script behind a winning Reel so you can see the hook that made it blow up. No Instagram login, no business account, and it runs locally in your browser. There's a free tier, plus paid plans ($10 and $30/mo) for heavy/agency use.
Where I am. ~[400] users, 4.7★ on the Chrome Web Store... and [0] paying customers. 😅
Where I'm stuck (the real reason I'm posting). My paid plans are gated on volume — free gives you 500 reels/month. But I've realized a typical solo creator analyzing their own account never comes close to 500, so they never hit a reason to upgrade. The people who'd actually hit the cap are agencies and social-media managers juggling many accounts — but that's not who I've been marketing to.
So the questions I'm chewing on, and would love your take:
1. When you've had a "generous free tier → nobody upgrades" problem, what actually moved the needle — a time-boxed trial of the paid features, or gating a specific high-value feature instead of volume?
2. For a desktop browser extension, where did your first paying users actually come from? (I suspect Meta ads are a trap here because the tool is desktop-only.)
3. Does the "works on any account, no login" angle land for you, or does it sound too good / sketchy?
Happy to share anything about the build, the numbers, or the SEO grind (DR 0, ~85 content pages, still clawing up the rankings). Ask me anything — brutal feedback very welcome.
Link if you want to poke at it: https://ishort.pro
Thanks 🙏
5 Comments
400 users with zero paid is a much more useful signal than it looks. The volume cap sounds like the clearest mismatch — if the free tier covers the normal solo creator use case, there’s no real reason to upgrade. I’d be more interested in what happens when you put the highest-value feature behind the paywall rather than simply reducing the allowance.
In my previous version I gave a limitation on reel analysis up to 500 reels and restrictions on CSV download later i added transcribe feature as a free trial in free plan users can transcribe only 10 reels .but what i saw was few people use the transcribe feature and they never hit the limit of 10. what ever traffic i generated is organic. but i have 15-20 active users but they analyse reels no transcription used.
what do you think i should work on product side or marketing side.
I feel like marketing side can give me much more data i think i have not reached to the right audience.
I think this is worth continuing outside the thread. What’s the best email to reach you on?
on my new feature : ishort(.)pro/genzceo you can find me using it
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.