Your first 100 followers without paying for ads
A profile with eleven followers and three posts. You post, get four likes, and the easy conclusion is "the algorithm is not pushing me". You are right. It is not. That is not a punishment: it has nobody to push you to yet.
The first hundred are manual work
After a few hundred followers, Instagram starts showing your posts to people similar to the ones already following you. Before that, it has no such information. The first hundred you bring in by hand.
The good news is you already have those people somewhere: in your phone contacts, on WhatsApp, at your shop counter. They just do not know your profile exists.
Where they actually come from
In order of ease, and all of them cost nothing.
- People who already bought from you. An individual message, not a broadcast list: "I set up a profile, this week's work is there".
- Your WhatsApp status. It is already seen by people who know you, and it is the one channel where nobody has to find you.
- Your business neighbourhood. Shops on the same street, local groups, the market. Nearby followers buy nearby.
- People who serve your customer without competing. The cake maker and the party decorator share the same client.
What not to do
Do not buy followers, and do not join follow-for-follow groups. This is not a moral point: Instagram decides what to show you based on who interacts with you. A hundred fake accounts that never comment teach the algorithm your content interests nobody.
A profile with 80 real followers sells more than one with 3,000 bought, and the second is harder to fix later.
What needs to be ready before you invite anyone
Do not invite anyone to a profile with two posts. Have six to nine posts live, covering what you do, roughly what it costs, and proof that it works. Whoever arrives needs something to look at.
Once that is done, the invitation is a single sentence. And it works: people who already bought from you genuinely want to know when something new comes out.
Having six to nine posts live before inviting anyone is the kind of thing that stalls for weeks. ReadyMonth writes the whole month in one go, and then you invite.