We automated Instagram collab invites and accidentally created a new revenue stream

Quick context: We run a software company and one of our clients a large Instagram page gets 50-100 collab invites every single day. For anyone  unfamiliar, a collab invite is when someone tags you as a collaborator on their post, and you have to manually review and accept each one. At that volume it was eating hours of their day.

So we built a system that handles the whole thing automatically.

Here's how it works from the sender's perspective:  

  1. Someone sends a collab invite to the page

  2. They instantly get a DM back saying "hey, there's a small fee to get your collab accepted"

  3. The DM has a payment button, right now it's set to $1

  4. If they pay, their collab gets accepted automatically. If they don't, nothing happens.

No human involved at any step.

We originally built this just to save our client time. The payment gate was an afterthought. a way to filter out the hundreds of spam collabs from people mass-blasting every page they can find. 

But then people actually started paying. Every day. The Stripe screenshot is just one day's activity, wall of green. At 30-50 payments a day that's $900-1500/month from something that used to just be an unpaid chore.

The $1 is intentionally low. If you're serious about getting on a page with a real audience, a dollar is nothing. But if you're spamming 500 accounts, you're not paying 500 times. It's a natural spam filter that happens to make money.

Not going to get into the full technical breakdown but it's a combination of DM automation and a browser extension working together. We looked everywhere and  couldn't find a single tool that handles the acceptance side of collabs, everything out there is built for sending them, not receiving.

Curious what people think:

- Would you pay $1 to get your collab accepted on a large page? 

- Creators/managers is collab volume a real problem for you or just a big account thing?

- What would you set the fee at? We've been going back and forth on whether $1 is too low.

https://preview.redd.it/mszhk8kwc1qg1.png?width=568&format=png&auto=webp&s=bb6ce381d5e0d64512634108793c6b81c784cad9

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