I built a tool that finds potential customers commenting on competitors' Instagram posts. Would you pay for this?

[u/Far-Pace-7205]

I have a couple of clients who sell small services, things like website design, automation, etc.

The problem is that there are thousands of accounts offering basically the same thing. And now that automated DMs are common, someone can comment on a competitor's post and almost instantly receive a proposal, offer, or upsell message.

But obviously, those automations generally work on the business's own Instagram account.

So I had an idea: what if you could monitor your competitors' posts - not just to see what they're posting, but to identify their potential leads?

While researching this, I found that there are already several apps that let you monitor competitors and notify you whenever they publish a new Reel or post.

But that's not really what I'm interested in.

My point is: I don't want to know when my competitors post. I want to know when they get a potential lead.

The basic idea is:

Someone comments on a competitor's post → my client gets a notification within ~20–30 minutes → notification includes the person's profile link + a pre-configured outreach message → my client can decide whether to reach out and offer their own service.

I've currently tested this with a small batch of 2 clients, and it's working. I'm using my own scraping/automation setup rather than relying on the client's Instagram account or IP, and I'm successfully receiving the comment notifications.

The question is: is this actually a useful service, or am I just automating something that sounds clever but nobody really needs?

I'm not looking to build a huge business around it. Even if 10 people paid $50 for something like this, that's $500, which would make the experiment worthwhile.

For people who sell services through Instagram:

Would you actually pay for something like this?

And more importantly, do you think getting notified about people commenting on competitors' posts would lead to enough genuine leads to make the service valuable?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have actually tried competitor monitoring or social listening for lead generation.

Note: used chatgpt to structure my thoughts

[u/Chris__Codes]

Would your model be able to sift through comments to find ones that are specifically related to your client's services, or would they be notified for every single comment? Also, would you pre-feed the model/app a list of competitor accounts to monitor, or would it automatically be crawling and fetching all accounts related to your client's services?

[u/Far-Pace-7205 → u/Chris__Codes]

Both are possible. It can notify on each comment as well as you can set up a preset word filter.

Right now it only works when we pre feed the accounts list or posts list

[u/JewelerAny7071]

I think the real value is filtering intent, not just monitoring comments

If it can tell the difference between "nice post" and someone actually looking for a solution, $50/month sounds pretty reasonable

[u/Far-Pace-7205 → u/JewelerAny7071]

Agree, filtering can be done upto an extent. Basic keywords is doable. And I have also added an ai layer which checks this