Scrolling for ideas is always late
Manual scrolling is slow and reactive. By the time you notice a trend, it is already cooling, and you end up copying what worked last month instead of catching what works this week.
It spots the reel pulling far more views than that account normally gets, while it is still rising.
Scrolling by hand, you find it after it peaks, when everyone else is already posting it.
How the agent works
Five parts, running on their own every week.
What lands in your Slack every week
- OutlierA competitor's reel is pulling several times that account's usual views.
- Why it workedThe hook, the format and the topic, broken down in plain English.
- Hooks for youA batch of fresh hooks written in your voice, ready to film.
- Ideas to filmThe five to seven ideas worth your week, ranked.
- Already usedAnything you marked used or not relevant never comes back.
Sample report, for illustration.
What you need
- ApifyScrapes Instagram. The free tier covers a small niche.
- AirtableStores competitors, reels, reports and the memory. Free works.
- n8nRuns the whole thing on a schedule. Cloud or self-hosted.
- An AI modelClaude or OpenAI, for the analysis and the hooks.
- SlackWhere the report lands. Discord or email work too.
Set it up in five steps
- Pick your accounts. 10 to 15 accounts in your niche that post often. Add your own handle.
- Connect the scraper. An Apify key, and one run to pull their latest reels into Airtable.
- Build the memory. Tables for competitors, reels, outliers, reports and what was already served.
- Write the brain. The prompt that says what an outlier is for you and how to write your hooks.
- Schedule it. One n8n workflow, weekly, posting the report to Slack.
Or let Claude Code build it with you
Paste this into Claude Code. It walks you through every step above and builds the pieces with you.
Help me build an Instagram Research Agent for my niche, step by step. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer.
1. Ask for my Instagram handle and 10 to 15 competitor accounts that post often in my niche.
2. Help me create an Apify account and API token, and test the Instagram reel scraper on one account.
3. Design an Airtable base with tables: Competitors, My Reels, Outliers, Reports, and Served History (a memory of every idea already sent, so nothing repeats for 28 days).
4. Write the analysis prompt: an outlier is a reel with far more views than that account's median. For each outlier, explain the hook, format and topic, then write 20 hooks and 5 to 7 filmable ideas in my voice.
5. Build an n8n workflow that runs weekly: scrape competitors and my reels, store them, find outliers, skip anything in Served History, run the analysis, save the report, and post it to Slack.
6. Test it end to end with one run and show me the report.
Never hardcode API keys in the workflow. Use n8n credentials.- 1M+ organic views for a client
- 7 days to set up
- 0 hours of scrolling
Two ways to run with this
Build it yourself with the steps and the prompt above. Or have me build it for you and have it running inside seven days.
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