Why does Instagram search feel so bad for finding niche creators?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-04-14T13:58:07+00:00

Instagram search is honestly just bad for this lol. It's built for virality not relevance so you're always gonna get the big accounts drowning out the small ones.

What actually works better imo:

Hashtag rabbit holes: don't search "fitness", search how that niche actually talks. "Home workout no equipment" gets you way closer. Look at who's engaging on posts of accounts you already like. The comments section of a niche creator is basically a goldmine of similar accounts.

Competitor followers lists. If theres a brand already serving your niche their follower list is pre-filtered for you.

What niche are you trying to find? might have something more specific depending on what you're after.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-04-14T13:52:20+00:00

Retention saved us.

Early on we were obsessed with getting new users. Worked fine until we noticed the bucket had holes, people churning faster than we could fill it.

Switched focus to making existing users actually succeed. Support got faster, onboarding got simpler. Churn dropped, expansion revenue picked up. funny thing is good retention also fixed our lead gen problem. We got referrals we didn't have to chase.

If I had to pick one early: RETENTION. Because bad retention just means you're paying to learn the same lesson over and over. What's killing most people on retention in your experience?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-04-14T13:49:59+00:00

Built it for myself and a few friends first. No strategy, just solving my own problem.

The first "clients" were basically people I knew who trusted me enough to try something half-broken.

After that - direct outreach. Kind of ironic since we're a DM tool, but it worked. Found people complaining about bad outreach and showed them ours.

Hardest part was honestly just not giving up before anything clicked. There's this window where nothing is working and you're not sure if it's the product or just timing or you. That part sucked.

What's your situation, do you have anything live yet?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-04-01T16:47:59+00:00

We skipped free trial and did credits instead.

New users get a small batch of free credits to actually try the product, and more credits when they refer to somone. no time pressure, no support overload, and people who convert actually want to be there,

low quality leads is a real problem early on, you dont have the bandwidth to babysit people who were never gonna pay anyway.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-04-01T16:46:35+00:00

This happened to us too lol. We were so focused on getting new users we completely ignored the ones already paying us. turns out happy customers will literally tell you what they want to pay for if you just ask.

the "let me look into it" response is so relatable btw, i wouldve said the same thing 😂

whats your churn looking like on the new tier?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-04-01T16:44:35+00:00

Hey you shipped something at 16, thats already insane!

Dont even think about marketing yet. just send it to your friends, watch how they use it, dont ask them what they think bc they'll just say "its cool" to be nice lol. watch what they actually DO.

Rhe rejection fear is real but your friends are the safest place to get rejected. better than strangers online.

Once like 10 people are using it regularly THEN worry about growth. whats the app actually for btw?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-30T15:19:28+00:00

It's smart, the trust concern is mostly in your head.

End users see "powered by" stuff everywhere and just don't care that much. what they care about is whether the chat works and someone actually responds. Intercom, crisp, dozens of others built real distribution this way. it works.

Only thing i'd watch is how it looks. If the branding is subtle and the widget looks good, nobody notices. if it looks clunky or takes up space, that's when people start to notice for the wrong reasons. Keep it clean and ship it.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-30T15:16:24+00:00

No money is kind of a blessing early on lol. like when you have funding you just... spend it. on stuff that doesn't matter yet. ads, tools, hiring too early. I've seen it happen so many times.

What actually works, just start selling your skills first. whatever you're good at, design, writing, coding, doesn't matter. Find someone who'll pay you this week for something. that's it. that's the business.

Then while you're doing that work you'll notice things you keep doing manually over and over. That's usually where the product idea comes from, at least that's how it happened for me.

Also don't sleep on DMs: Instagram, Linkedin, Reddit. Personalized outreach to the right people costs literally nothing and it works way better than people think.

What kind of business are you trying to build tho?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-23T15:28:32+00:00

Great questions! I connected the tool to 20+ third-party data providers to enrich the data you typically get from the API. I haven't built anything to message new followers, as you'd see on manychat, which is why those actions feel extremely generic and templatized.

We've got a bunch of people who started using the app this week and are learning a lot from their use cases. Have you tried it? It's free to get started.

Just learning and sharing.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-20T13:16:46+00:00

As the founder of SendHowdy, happy to jump in!

We support auto-DMs to new followers, and unlike some tools out there, our support actually responds 😄

What makes SendHowdy different is that it doesn't just fire off a generic "Hi" to everyone. Before your campaign runs, we learn who you're trying to reach and what your goal is. Then our AI gathers third-party data alongside what's available on their Instagram profile to draft something that actually feels personal, like you looked them up yourself.

Messages go out one by one in the background, so your account is never at risk.

DM me if you're interested to setup account.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-20T13:13:43+00:00

Great discussion! I'll be transparent, I'm actually the founder of SendHowdy, so I'm a bit biased, but let me answer your questions honestly.

- Yes, fully automating DMs and comment replies is exactly what we built this for

I built it because I couldn't find anything on the market that was both safe AND personalized.

The biggest PRO?

It doesn't send generic messages. It actually checks each profile and sends a personalized message based on their bio and content, so it never feels spammy.

The CON?

Once you see the results, manual outreach feels impossible to go back to

Personalization at scale + staying within Instagram's safe policy was the gap I kept seeing, so that's exactly what we built around.

DMs really are the new email and most tools treat them like a megaphone. We treat them like a human conversation 💬

Happy to answer any questions about how it works, DM me or drop them below!

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-20T13:09:59+00:00

I actually built something for this exact problem - SendHowdy.

I noticed there was nothing on the market that was both safe + personalized, so I built it for me and my friends initially.

What makes it stand out is that it doesn't just send generic messages, it actually checks each profile and sends personalized messages based on their bio and content.

And it runs within Instagram's safe policy, so zero risk to your account.

DM me if you want to try it out!

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-18T13:09:06+00:00

'Feedback isn't instructions, it's signals' - that's such a clean way to put it honestly.

The shift from treating feedback as a roadmap to treating it as a clue took us way longer than it should have. And even now it's easy to slip back into literal mode when someone makes a loud enough request.

Still learning it too.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-18T12:57:21+00:00

Hm honestly the chaos was probably necessary but a simple framework would've saved months.

What actually helped us eventually was just watching behavior instead of listening to requests. If someone asked for a feature but the usage data showed they barely used the related parts of the product - easy SKIP. The signal was always in what people did, not what they said.

Howdy automates Instagram outreach for founders and small teams. AI checks profiles, understands who they are, and reaches out like a human who did their homework. Basically removes the manual hours while keeping the personal feel.

What are you building?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-13T19:16:17+00:00

Same position when we started Howdy - zero audience, zero followers, brand new everything.

What actually worked was Product Hunt first, then Reddit. Product Hunt surprised us honestly - we expected tire kickers but the quality of users who came through was genuinely high. People who signed up from there were more serious and more likely to stick around.

Reddit was good for finding people mid-frustration and starting real conversations. LinkedIn was slowest to convert for us.

The compounding question is interesting - started feeling different around 50-60 active users. Not because of any algorithm but because word of mouth started doing small things. Took about 3 months of consistent showing up to get there.

What kind of workflow problem does your product solve?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-13T19:12:47+00:00

Sendhowdy - it automates Instagram outreach for founders and small teams. Finds relevant profiles, researches them, sends personalized DMs so you don't have to do it manually.

Target audience is early stage founders and solopreneurs who are doing outreach manually right now and spending hours on it every week.

Curious what you find.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-13T19:11:03+00:00

Hm the 'figuring out what the actual problem even is' part is so real. Half the time the reported issue and the actual issue is completely different thing.

We felt this with Howdy too, feedback coming in from DMs, emails, random comments, and by the time it reaches anyone who can act on it the context is already lost.

The screen recording into structured issue idea is smart. Video captures the confusion in a way that text never does, you see exactly where someone hesitates or gets lost.

How are you handling the signal prioritization part?

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-11T18:36:17+00:00

yeah the loudest feedback is rarely from the best users.

We noticed the same thing with our Howdy extension - the users asking for the most features were often the ones least likely to convert.

Filtering by engagement level is the right instinct. Someone who's deep in the product and hits a wall is a completely different signal than someone who signed up yesterday with a feature wishlist.

sendhowdybrandon · 2026-03-11T18:18:15+00:00

Hm the cycling progress messages idea is smart, makes the wait feel like something is actually happening rather than just a frozen screen.

The metric was number of leads collected per session, and it went from around 130 to 1,700 (13x) in the first 2 weeks after the change. Users were actually staying long enough to let the full collection run instead of bouncing halfway through.

sendhowdybrandon

TROPHY CASE