Stage 3 — Contact, Register, Sign (Weeks 3–5)Must
How not to look like spam
Creators with 10k followers get five collab DMs a day; four are spam. Yours must be the fifth.
What works
One specific reference — name a real reel; "your co-ord haul last week" beats "love your content". One idea per message. No link in the first message — Instagram folds it into Requests. Their language — Hinglish if they write Hinglish. Send when you are online to reply; creators answer within minutes or not at all.
Limits
20–30 personalised DMs a day is plenty. Stay well under Instagram's limits. No automation on outreach — no bots, no mass-DM tools, no follow/unfollow tricks.
Key takeaway: Personal, short, no link in the first message, sent when you can reply.
Next step: Five DMs. Then Lesson 12 for the full scripts.
- Learning outcome
- Your DMs get replies because they are personal, short and human.
- Action in product
- Send 5 personalised DMs using the cold-DM script with a real reference in each.
- Success metric
- Reply rate 15% or more over your first 20 DMs.
- Unlock / Reward
- Lesson 12 — The scripts.
- Format
- Guide.