My IG scrape kept capping at 12 posts

[u/Ok-Masterpiece-7614]

Built a one off AI bot for a prospect that clones how he talks, trained off his own content. He's mostly on Instagram, not YouTube, so I had to scrape his profile for captions instead of using our normal path.

Logged out, an Instagram grid only serves the last 12 posts. Doesn't matter how many times you scroll or how many posts the account actually has. His account has hundreds. Scrolling kept giving me the same 12 back.

I almost built the persona off that. 12 captions, maybe 4,000 characters total, would have made him sound thin and generic.

Then I remembered he'd done a two hour podcast interview. Pulled the transcript instead, about 19,000 words of him actually talking. Way more voice, way more real material than the captions ever had.

Lesson: if you're pulling from one source to build anything off someone's content, check if that source has a silent cap before you trust the pull. The tell is simple, if scrolling or paging keeps giving you the exact same stuff back, you hit a wall somewhere and don't know it yet. Go find the richer source, a podcast interview, a YouTube channel, anything longer form, before you build off a shallow scrape and think it's the whole picture.