Your first outreach workflow: Find → DM → Follow up

Send exactly one message the first time. Follow one account, DM them, check History, and record what happened in Relationships.

Applies to Ins Autopilot 3.22 and later · Updated 2026-10-17

What this helps you do

The fastest way to understand Ins Autopilot is to run the whole path once, with one person, from start to finish. Finding an account, messaging it, reading what happened, and recording the result are four separate steps in the product, and seeing them in order once makes the rest of the tool obvious.

Do it with a single contact. Bulk is a tool for later, after you have seen what one reply looks like.

Before you start

• You are signed in to Instagram in the same browser and the extension footer shows your account ID.
• You know which single person you want to reach, or you have one audience source in mind for the Follow step.
• Free plan: outreach runs on the Outreach Trial — 5 unique confirmed contacts, at most 3 new contacts per UTC day, for 7 days from your first confirmed delivery.

Step by step

1. Find one account with Follow — open the Follow tab, choose an audience source, keep the daily limit small, and press Start. You are looking for one good contact, not a list.
2. Select the one person you want to talk to — open the Recent log and pick a single successful follow. One contact, chosen on purpose.
3. Open Direct Message — move to Direct Message in the Outreach tab and address it to the handle you just followed.
4. Write and review the message — say something specific to that person, then read it once more before sending. Nothing leaves your browser until you press the button.
5. Send it — press Send DM. The attempt ends as sent, blocked, failed, skipped or unknown.
6. Check History — History shows the attempt and its status. A confirmed send is the only outcome that uses one of your Trial contacts.
7. Record the outcome in Relationships — open the contact in Relationships and set where the conversation stands. This is the record you will actually work from later.
8. Add a follow-up on Pro — if nobody replies, a follow-up sequence can carry up to three steps, meaning the initial message plus two follow-ups, and it stops on its own as soon as a reply is detected.

Reading the result

• sent means Instagram confirmed the delivery. On the free plan that uses one of your five Trial contacts.
• blocked means nothing was sent, usually because the contact is already used, the daily cap is reached, or the signed-in account changed.
• failed means the send did not go out and can be retried safely.
• unknown means the delivery could not be verified. Look at the Instagram thread before you do anything else, because this result is never retried automatically.
• If the person replies, the reply is read from the thread and any running sequence stops before its next step.

Limits and what this does not do

• Send one message the first time. A single careful send teaches you more than a queue of fifty.
• Free accounts cannot send DMs outside the Trial: the daily DM allowance on Free is 0. The Trial is the exception, capped at 5 unique confirmed contacts.
• Following someone does not mean they follow back or reply. There is no trigger in the product that messages people for you, and no message is ever sent to a new follower automatically.
• Automation carries account risk that depends on your account's state and on platform limits. This workflow does not remove that risk, and nothing here guarantees an outcome.

Troubleshooting

I followed someone but cannot find them in Outreach.

Direct Message takes a handle you type or select; it does not auto-fill from the Follow log. Copy the handle from the Recent log or from the contact in Relationships.

The send was blocked.

Read the reason shown next to the attempt. The usual causes are an already-used Trial contact, the daily new-contact cap, or the signed-in Instagram account changing since the task was prepared.

Nothing seemed to happen after I pressed Send DM.

Check History rather than the thread. The attempt and its status are recorded there even when Instagram shows nothing.

Should I use Bulk for the first run instead?

No. Bulk exists for the point where you already know your message works and you want to work through several people in one pass. For the first run, one contact tells you more.