First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Generally, we’re doing ok. It’s been going on for so long now that it’s like our new reality. I remember watching a movie a few months ago, made before the covid era, finding myself thinking, “Why aren’t those people wearing masks?” and quickly realizing, “Ah.. right”.
On a personal level, as for everyone, it’s not been easy. You’re a bit stuck in a stay-at-home routine; you’re always worried about catching or spreading something; you’re keeping this cold distance in social interactions. All this, put together with the division amongst populations, isn’t very encouraging and will probably have bad repercussions in the long run.
But let’s stay positive — it’s going to end someday. Right..?
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
We were a small team of freelancers from various backgrounds (marketing, design, and development) with a common experience in product building. We founded Suparise in 2018 and have been expanding our team ever since.
A few years back, we were often looking for ways to grow an Instagram account quickly, safely, and without spending a lot of money. Over time, we found a few apps that were either bad, complicated, costly, or ended up dying. All the alternative methods we tried, such as fake or free Instagram followers, were terrible and harmful. (In the early days, those complementary growth methods were fine; but you must focus on real and organic Instagram followers only).
So we decided to build an automation software ourselves. After some time, we decided to release it as a service once it got fully tested and operative with all the essential features (auto-like, auto-follow, auto-unfollow, basic AI, username targeting, and hashtag targeting). As the bot was turnkey and very easy-to-use, we thought it’d be best to orient it towards beginners, small businesses, and creatives — people who don’t have big resources and don’t want to get a college degree in Instagram bots to be able to automate their profile and grow their Instagram audience organically.
How does your company innovate?
Our innovation is about finding ways to be still able to automate Instagram organically, safely, and efficiently over time when other companies don’t succeed in doing so.
Our activity isn’t groundbreaking or game-changing, as social media automation has been around for a long time now. We often see articles, threads, and social posts asking questions such as: “Is Instagram automation dead in 2022?”. There have been many discontinued bots in the past few years, and there’s an ongoing belief that it’s dead. But it’s not. Some companies & softwares did indeed die, but Instagram bots won’t be dead anytime soon if companies like ours keep researching and coming up with solutions.
We constantly have to challenge, test, readapt & improve our software and algorithms to provide, as best as possible, the best Instagram automation bot for the general public.
User feedback helps us decide and prioritize what feature to add. In 2021, we added new features that were requested by our clients, such as: view Instagram stories automatically, automate multiple Instagram profiles from the same computer, Instagram automation via proxy, target real people in specific areas of the world with Instagram location targeting, …
Now, it’s always tempting to add many settings and features. But you can quickly drift away from your main goals, and, most of all, this can get overwhelming for beginners or even intermediate users. We try our best to keep the software simple and efficient — because that’s what our clients want and why they love our service.
Behind the scenes, we’re also improving our artificial intelligence algorithms and exploring other automation areas to expand our array of services (a Suparise TikTok automation bot we’re working on, for instance, but it’s too early to tell!).
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Suparise is lucky to be one of the businesses that mostly operate online. About half of our history happened during the pandemic, actually, so we don’t have a strong frame of reference that lets us realize if it’s worse, better or the same. All we know is that the pandemic hasn’t put us in jeopardy, as we’ve only been growing since 2020.
Now, the day-to-day has been affected. We’ve been doing a lot fewer internal or external meetings, less networking, and attending fewer conferences, so: there used to be various types of communications in the real world, and now it’s almost fully virtual.
Thoughts to all the businesses that had to close for many months or had a big downturn in revenue and frequentation. It must have been — and must still be — very difficult, especially if their government isn’t there to help them compensate for losses. It would be somewhat indecent of us to be complaining.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We’ve been doing team updates more regularly. Everybody’s at home in environments that can get distracting, so we’re all subject to the temptation of postponing stuff and thinking, ‘Nah, that’s not that urgent. So it’s been a motivation booster for us to discuss the daily & weekly tasks often, see what everybody’s doing, speak with colleagues about work, or else.
We’re using Figma for everything design-related (app, website, social posts, emailing, ..) GitHub for development, Hubspot for CRM, Notion for writing, Monday for project management, Slack for quick communications, and Spotify or Youtube to keep things groovy.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Our competitors are varied, both direct and indirect: other Instagram bots, Instagram growth services, Instagram influencer marketing agencies, SMM Panels that provide fake followers (don’t use them! they’re terrible), engagement groups to get free followers; as an exchange of services, etc… All of those announce the same promise: get more Instagram followers quickly — for free, for cheap, or for a higher price.
In my opinion, staying in the game is all about 4 things: quality product, quality experience, quality support, and being visible in search results to reach new audiences every day. That’s all we’ll be focusing on. We’re also considering some plan tweaking, such as expanding the free trial of our Instagram bot, and adding other plans, such as a free plan, so that some of our automation features can be accessible to anyone.
Your final thoughts
1 – to every reader who made it here: thanks for reading!
2 – to everyone out there: wishing you all good luck and courage to keep making it through this weird and rather depressing period.
3 – I don’t know if we’re supposed to do self-promotion here but to anyone who’s having a hard time growing their Instagram account or to anyone reluctant to spend a bunch of money on ads: have a look at Suparise!
It will help you be more visible on Instagram, raise brand awareness, get more organic targeted followers, get more real visits to your website and get new leads. We have a 7-day free trial — that can be extended upon request if you haven’t had enough time. If you have any questions about how it works, please contact our team.
Suparise is available on Windows, macOS & Linux.
- Website: https://suparise.com/