Every Instagram strategy that worked for SaaS founders

Habit app built by a 14-year-old: He searches his niche on Instagram or TikTok, scrolls through the videos, clicks into the accounts and sends every creator the same opener: 'paid promo?'. Interested creators get a phone call, where he closes the deal. [source]

Wrestling AI app: His influencer playbook is volume: DM 100 people a day and open every message with 'paid promo'. [source]

Weight-cut app: To find influencers, he scrolls his TikTok For You page or Instagram Reels and DMs creators asking them to partner. [source]

Push-up alarm app: The team reached out to TikTok and Instagram creators who already post student-life or 'day in the life' videos, where an alarm app fits naturally, and pitched them on adding it to their morning routine. The first influencer video went live within seven days of launch. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): Instead of hiring expensive influencers, he found inexpensive UGC creators by messaging them through Instagram and TikTok DMs or on Fiverr, paying $50 to $100 per video. [source]

Two consumer apps (Nicole): Creators are matched to the content style: good talkers for talking-head videos, expressive faces for reaction videos. Inbound comes from application forms shared in UGC group chats, on Instagram, on Reddit and on sites like Sizzelle; for outbound, VAs reach out to micro-influencers. [source]

Stoppr: He used topyappers.com to scrape TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for influencers who had already worked with other apps, then fed their emails into an outreach tool. [source]

AI content repurposing app: With a small team, they scraped Instagram for creators in adjacent industries, used hashtags to build volume, then negotiated rates and paid based on CPMs to test whether creators were a viable channel. [source]

FollowBuddy (Ben): Ben noticed that many Instagram users were getting banned for using unfollower apps that broke Instagram's terms of service. He built FollowBuddy on Instagram's own data export, comparing follower and following lists, and grew it with zero ad spend on search traffic from YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. [source]

First app (Kian): He validated the problem by talking to other guitarists in Instagram comment sections and on Reddit. [source]

Vibe-coded app (Connor): For new ideas, Connor checks TikTok and Instagram to see whether people are talking about the problem and asking questions in the comments. [source]

Stoppr: To validate the niche, he checked that searches for terms like 'stop sugar' were rising on Google Trends, then looked for influencer content on the topic on TikTok and Instagram. [source]

Pep AI (peptide tracker): Step one of his process is watching TikTok and Instagram every day to find what people are genuinely obsessed with. If several people are posting about the same thing, it can become a tool. [source]

iOS apps (Will): He found ideas by scrolling TikTok and Instagram to see which topics people care about, then took app concepts that were already working and redesigned them. [source]

Remote-jobs website: He does mass research on the niche by scrolling Instagram, Reddit and TikTok, taking in both video and text and saving anything that grabs his attention. [source]

Gaming website (Maddox): Maddox ran three TikTok accounts posting three times a day, five days a week, and used Repurpose.io to send every video to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Snapchat automatically. His most popular video took about 30 minutes to make and got 2.1 million views on TikTok, but 3.2 million on Instagram. [source]

Two consumer apps (Nicole): TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts are her main distribution platforms. At peak, one of her apps got 40 to 50 million TikTok views in a month and around 200 million on Instagram. [source]

Four-app portfolio (Uray): After testing many things, organic short-form worked best for his app: funny short videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube that go viral by themselves. Its sales came from 200 million organic views across the three. [source]

First app (Kian): He posts three times a day and reposts every video across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. [source]

One-website media business: Content is repurposed across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and the blog, with email capture and ads on top. [source]

Three cloned apps: He runs automated faceless channels on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, using a tool that publishes daily UGC-style videos about the product to all three. [source]

Pep AI (peptide tracker): He partnered with micro-influencers on Instagram and TikTok. A single Instagram Story from one influencer brought in $1,000, and a dedicated post with 50,000 views drove about $4,000 in one day and over $10,000 in total. [source]

Habit app built by a 14-year-old: He pays a flat rate, for example $500 for one Reel or $1,200 for four, but only to creators who consistently get high views and can hit his target CPM without a minimum-view clause. [source]

Push-up alarm app: In the videos, the app appears early and naturally. Viewers comment asking what the app is called, and the creator replies with the name, often as a pinned comment on Instagram. [source]

Design-led app: The app took off after Instagram influencers shared it. One post passed 2 million views, and the app then went viral on Threads in Taiwan. [source]

Business run from a van: His marketing runs on viral, controversial Instagram posts and memes tied to current events. He says divisive posts get more comments and shares, which brings more visibility and more sales. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): Highly controversial, problem-solving organic short videos on TikTok and Instagram worked incredibly well for the app. [source]

Breathwork app: A polarizing hook, 'Do you want to know something that they don't want you to know?', brought in 8 million views. [source]

Four-app portfolio (Uray): What worked best for his app was funny short videos that go viral by themselves. [source]

Geosports: Two daily posts, one on X and one on Instagram, drive roughly 2,000 clicks a day. Its main channels are X and Instagram Stories, plus word-of-mouth sharing in group chats. [source]

Solo app (built in his mom's basement): His one-hour-a-day routine starts by warming up new TikTok and Instagram accounts, scrolling for 15 minutes a day on each for two days. He now runs three Instagram accounts and spaces videos three to four hours apart to avoid the algorithm's spam detection. [source]

First app (Kian): He posted three times a day from the start and put his face behind the brand immediately to build trust. [source]

App built on the VSC system: Every person the team brings on posts on TikTok and Instagram and tracks the results. Instagram, along with Lemon8, is tracked on the team's spreadsheets as a secondary channel to TikTok. [source]

Consumer app (Sarah): Sarah credits much of the app's growth to her personal brand: 1.2 million Instagram followers alongside 2.8 million on TikTok, with over 1 billion views combined. [source]

Late Checkout: His ACP funnel: build an audience on social platforms like Twitter or Instagram, turn it into a community where you own the emails and learn the pain points, then create a product they want. [source]

Free-tools founder: His advice for sharing your journey is to pick platforms by comfort, Twitter for text, TikTok for video and Instagram for images, and blend them to see what works. [source]

Online writing course (Dicky Bush): His writing goes out on several platforms at once: Typeshare publishes his tweets, long-form LinkedIn posts and Instagram carousels. [source]

StealthGPT (Joseph): To scale, they ran a UGC strategy on TikTok and Instagram to teach the market what StealthGPT is, using Buffer to manage marketing across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Google Ads came later. [source]

Two consumer apps (Nicole): Faceless UGC content drove her apps' views. She built a recruitment, onboarding and training course for UGC creators, with quizzes, and says over 50% of trained creators go viral within two weeks. She has scaled to over 200 active creators. [source]

Mobile app (Mal Baron): UGC videos are posted on TikTok and Instagram, alongside paid TikTok Spark ads and Meta ads. [source]

Breathwork app: They use X as an idea battleground, turn the posts that land into short-form scripts for Instagram and TikTok, and finally make the winners into longer YouTube videos. [source]

Mobile app (two founders): They used X as an 'idea battleground' and replicated the successful posts as short-form videos for TikTok and Instagram Reels, then made longer YouTube videos. [source]

Consumer app (Sarah): She tells people to comment 'download' on her Instagram posts. ManyChat then sends them a custom affirmation and a direct download link for the app. [source]

Breathwork app: The team uses ManyChat to automate its Instagram DMs. [source]

Event app (Brian): After getting four friends to use the app through his own X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook contacts, he searched Instagram hashtags like #wedding and #birthdayparty, listed 250 to 300 hosts and sent each a two- or three-sentence message. That got about 15 replies and 12 confirmed events in a single month. [source]

Wrestling AI app: When starting influencer outreach, he recommends botting your personal Instagram with followers and paying to verify it so creators take you seriously, then switching to a business account after a few deals. [source]